May Day

On the night of the May Day riots of 1919, F. Scott Fitzgerald crosses the velvet ropes of a Fifth Avenue ball with the raw streets below. Gordon Sterrett, a spent veteran turned starving artist, begs a favor from his glittering Yale friend Philip Dean—and tumbles into a night of drink, bad bargains, and irrevocable choice. Upstairs, Edith Bradin and the Gamma Psi crowd twirl beneath chandeliers at Delmonico’s; outside, two luckless doughboys drift toward a mob and a fatal mistake. Between champagne and truncheons, between borrowed silk and threadbare pride, Fitzgerald lays bare the exhausted heart of the early Jazz Age: class cruelty, postwar disillusion, the price of beauty, and the ache of being left out.

Gid Newell’s supple narration draws every line of contrast—the brittle charm of society banter, the sour bravado of the streets, and Gordon’s mounting desperation—so you feel the throb of the drums and the cold of the dawn in the same breath. As dazzling as it is devastating, May Day is a bracing urban tragedy and a time-capsule of New York at the tipping point.

Perfect for listeners who love literary fiction with bite, American classics, and city-set dramas that move with cinematic urgency.