The Vegetable; or, From President to Postman

BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
THE VEGETABLE
By F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
“ Any man who doesn’t want to get on in the world, to make a million dollars, and maybe even park his toothbrush in White House, hasn’t got as much to him as a good dog has—he’s nothing more or less than a vegetable. ”
— From a Current Magazine.
NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1923
Copyright, 1923, by CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS —— Printed in the United States of America —— Published April, 1923
TO KATHERINE TIGHE and EDMUND WILSON, Jr. WHO DELETED MANY ABSURDITIES FROM MY FIRST TWO NOVELS I RECOMMEND THE ABSURDITIES SET DOWN HERE


THE VEGETABLE
This is the “living” room of Jerry Frost’s house. It is evening. The room (and, by implication, the house) is small and stuffy—it’s an awful bother to raise these old-fashioned windows; some of them stick, and besides it’s extravagant to let in much cold air, here in the middle of March. I can’t say much for the furniture, either. Some of it’s instalment stuff, imitation leather with the grain painted on as an after-effect, and some of it’s dingily, depressingly old. That bookcase held “Ben Hur” when it was a best-seller, and it’s now trying to digest “A Library of the World’s Best Literature” and the “Wit and Humor of the United States in Six Volumes.” That couch would be dangerous to sit upon without a map showing the location of all craters, hillocks, and thistle-patches. And three dead but shamefully unburied clocks stare eyelessly before them from their perches around the walls.