Thank You For the Light

The New Yorker has posthumously un-rejected a brand new F. Scott Fitzgerald short story (gasp! exhale!) and we are all filled with a sense of wonder. Let’s quickly list all the things that suggest it was supposed to run in 1936 and not 2012, okay?

1. “Mrs. Hanson”
2. “a pretty…woman of forty”
3. “who sold corsets and girdles, travelling out of Chicago”
4. “her transfer to the Iowa-Kansas-Missouri district was a promotion, for her firm was more strongly entrenched west of the Ohio.”
5. “had often been offered a drink or a cigarette in the buyer’s office”
6. “she had no close relatives to write to in the evenings”
7. “more than one moving picture a week hurt her eyes”
8. “a man told me that nobody who was in the war would ever object to anyone smoking.”
9. “it’s all rubber and canvas, of course”
10. “If I could just get three puffs I could sell old-fashioned whalebone.”
11. “an old man was on the point of extinguishing a last oil lamp.”
12. “Mrs. Hanson knelt down and prayed.”