# Short Fiction — Character guide

> Key figures in Short Fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

- [Basil Duke Lee](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/basil_duke_lee.md): Basil moves through prep-school corridors where money is the unspoken currency and his mother's sacrifice is announced to him by a headmaster shuffling papers. He wants New York, a matinee, a seat in the party — and disc
- [Luella Hemple](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/luella_hemple.md): With a sick baby, an invalid husband, and a kitchen she has never learned to use, Luella confronts the agencies and doctors who once seemed to exist for her convenience. Her frantic call — 'I'm Mrs. Charles Hemple!' — la
- [Roger Halsey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/roger_halsey.md): At dinner Roger points out the best athletes and greatest wheat men as proof that this is a man's country, oblivious to the shiver his guest hides. He is generous, likable, and entirely at home — which is precisely what 
- [Anson Hunter](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/anson_hunter.md): Anson sits across from Edna and Cary and lets them talk until they convict themselves, his silence doing more damage than any accusation. He invokes his father's money, his uncle's marriage, the rings on Edna's fingers —
- [Dexter Green](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/dexter_green.md): Dexter starts as a boy on the links and ends as a man with laundries and a house in the city, all of it aimed at a single golden girl. His ambition is disciplined, almost cold, yet it keeps collapsing into the same impos
- [Benjamin Button](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/benjamin_button.md): Benjamin arrives as a bearded infant in dotted socks and pink pants, and his father calls him Methuselah. As he grows younger, he becomes his father's companion, then a young man at a dance where a beautiful woman stops 
- [Perry Parkhurst](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/perry_parkhurst.md): Perry Parkhurst moves through a world of political machines and social expectations, where a single misstep can unravel carefully constructed futures. His story hinges on the tension between who he appears to be and who 
- [Jacob Booth](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/jacob_booth.md): Jacob Booth arrives in the city with the raw materials of a self—ambition, sensitivity, and a hunger to be remade—and finds himself caught between the person he was and the person the city demands. His relationship with 
- [Merlin Grainger](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/merlin_grainger.md): Merlin Grainger spends his days among first editions and forgotten authors, a human catalogue of other people's stories, until a woman of startling vitality walks into his shop and upends his quiet certainties. His obses
- [Ardita Farnam](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/ardita_farnam.md): Ardita Farnam has built a legend around herself: men gather, she never apologizes, and courage means overriding the gray mist of ordinary life. Her philosophy of faith in her own resilience is tested when she meets a man
- [John T. Unger](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/john_t_unger.md): John T. Unger comes from a family whose white house and officer's portrait once meant something, but who now picks up odd jobs and avoids parties where he might be mistaken for the help. When a casual invitation pulls hi
- [Horace Tarbox](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/horace_tarbox.md): Horace Tarbox has spent his youth as a prodigy, performing intellectual feats for applause, until love introduces him to a kind of knowledge his books never covered. His devotion to Marcia—and his willingness to become a
- [Jim Powell](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/jim_powell.md): Jim Powell belongs to the white house on the green corner only in memory; the house is sold, and the crowd that should have been his has grown into a tight little set that treats him as a running mate of poor whites. He 
- [Edith Bradin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/edith_bradin.md): Edith Bradin travels in the bright, crowded world of the hotel lobby, the party, the elevator going up to any floor, and she is the kind of girl men notice and women watch. She carries a family grievance — the soldier wh
- [Dolly Harlan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/dolly_harlan.md): Dolly Harlan is the golden boy of his class — handsome, athletic, engaged to the magnetic Vienna, and admired by everyone except the people who find him dull. He wants a year free of football, and he tells himself that r
- [Samuel Meredith](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/samuel_meredith.md): Samuel Meredith moves through a world of luncheons, chaise-longues, and family names that carry weight, and he treats the reputations of his relatives as his own property to defend. He corners Edna over a scandal, refuse
- [Gordon Sterrett](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/gordon_sterrett.md): Gordon Sterrett is the kind of young man whose gifts are real but whose life is already sliding — money gone, work stalled, and the wrong kind of help always within reach. He is tangled with Jewel, with his old crowd, an
- [Curtis Carlyle](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/curtis_carlyle.md): Curtis Carlyle leads a band and holds a crowd, and he is the sort of man whose ease in public suggests a life he does not discuss. He is addressed as "Dear Mr. Curtis Carlyle" in a letter that hints at a past he has left
- [Sally Carrol Happer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/sally_carroll_happer.md): Sally Carrol arrives in the Northwest as Harry Bellamy's fiancée, expecting the same easy flirtation she commanded at home, and instead meets a crowd that treats her engagement like a quarantine. She likes Roger Patton a
- [Bernice](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/bernice.md): Bernice arrives in town as the plain, moral cousin whose gravity makes Marjorie's set yawn, then quietly absorbs her cousin's coaching and begins cutting in on dances that once belonged to Marjorie alone. She delivers Os
- [Harry Bellamy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/harry_bellamy.md): Harry brings Sally Carrol home to a dinner of Princeton tackles and Yale hockey captains, demanding she admire a man's country and its greatest financiers. He is generous, oblivious, and utterly certain that his world is
- [Hubert Blair](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/hubert_blair.md): Hubert Blair is the kind of son who kisses his mother, sets his cap at an angle, and takes the alley shortcut without a second thought. When anonymous notes signed S. D. begin arriving, his father asks careful questions 
- [Jenny Prince](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/jenny_prince.md): Jenny Prince belongs to the world of gentle starlight and dew-drenched slippers, the girl who stands on a man's shoes and asks him only to remember. She is the counterweight to ambition, intrigue, and the clumsiness of a
- [Rags Martin-Jones](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/rags_martin_jones.md): Rags Martin-Jones moves through the evening as the object of a young man's whole romantic imagination, and she lets him believe it a little longer than she should. When the boat swings against the companionway and a man'
- [George O'Kelly](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/george_o_kelly.md): George O'Kelly has become the practical one: married, three children, alert-eyed, and faintly superior behind a waiter's manner. When his brother Carrol and two broke soldiers need whiskey, George names his price and sta
- [Judy Jones](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/judy_jones.md): Judy Jones arrives at Dexter's raft in a spray of water and a smirk that refuses to be grotesque, announcing she lives on the Island and that a man is waiting there who calls her his ideal. She is capricious, luminous, a
- [Philip Dean](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/philip_dean.md): Philip Dean moves through the story's social world with the assurance of inherited position, the kind of man whose friendship flatters and whose standards quietly judge. He represents the polished surface the protagonist
- [Ellen Baker](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/ellen_baker.md): Ellen Baker returns home flushed with cold and surrounded by admiring boys, yet she laughs without really listening, waiting for a message that never comes. Her exquisite carnation coloring and her cool refusal to be pos
- [Bryan Dalyrimple](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/bryan_dalyrimple.md): Bryan Dalyrimple sits in Mr. Fraser's study, face burning, as the old boss recounts watching him since the Fourth of July speech and through his months at Theron Macy's. He is young, flattered, and hungry, a man whose re
- [Paula Legendre](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/paula_legendre.md): Paula Legendre sits wordless during the long talk between Anson and Mrs. Legendre, her unhappiness and her mother's cool bargaining leaving Anson with moral superiority but no advantage. She is the great love Anson never
- [Imogene Bissel](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/imogene_bissel.md): Imogene belongs to the glittering social set whose marriages, scandals, and reputations Anson Hunter treats as his personal jurisdiction. She becomes entangled with Anson's circle at the moment his control over his siste
- [Julie Marvis](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/julie_marvis.md): Julie drifts through the Piper household as a shy, watchful child whose small hand keeps creeping back into her dress pocket for comfort. Her mother Evylyn, restless and half-absent, tries and fails to teach her independ
- [Marcia Meadow](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/marcia_meadow.md): Marcia runs the household economy while Horace lives among abstract ideas, and she trades him gymnasium sessions for her grudging doses of Pepys. Her pride in his mind is fierce and unembarrassed, even as she teases him 
- [Kismine](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/kismine.md): Raised in a hidden valley with only her brother Percy for company, Kismine has never had a boy in love with her and finds the novelty delicious. She protests that she is not sophisticated, listing her poetry and her plai
- [Peter Himmel](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/peter_himmel.md): Peter has already tasted local notoriety and found it fading, and he sits in Mr. Fraser's office burning with the hope of being chosen. Fraser has watched him since a Fourth of July speech, waiting to see whether Peter w
- [Roger Button](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/roger_button.md): Roger Button wants nothing more than to be a normal father to a normal heir, but his newborn son arrives looking like a seventy-year-old man and calling him 'father' with grotesque courtesy. He chops the beard with hospi
- [Charley Moore](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/charley_moore.md): Charley Moore moves through the same prosperous set as Anson Hunter, a man with a seat on the Exchange and twenty-five thousand a year who once swore he'd never marry. Now, as his friends disappear behind domestic doors 
- [Clark Darrow](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/clark_darrow.md): Clark Darrow moves among the promising young men of his city, the kind watched by old political hands like Mr. Fraser, who measures youth by steadiness rather than brilliance. He belongs to the generation being groomed f
- [Jeffrey Curtain](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/jeffrey_curtain.md): Jeffrey Curtain lies suspended between life and death for eleven years, tended by a wife whose devotion has outlived her love for the man himself. Roxanne feeds tramps and buys cheap steak while keeping her heart sealed 
- [Riply Buckner](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/riply_buckner.md): Riply Buckner moves through the carnival evening with Elwood Leaming and Basil, eager to seem a man of the world and nervous beneath the swagger. He laughs more from nerves than derision, seeks Elwood's approval, and tea
- [Warren McIntyre](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/warren_mcintyre.md): Warren McIntyre pursues a woman who has agreed to meet him but cannot return what he offers, and he wears her down at luncheon by returning again and again to his one true weapon: his own feeling. When he confronts her a
- [George Tompkins](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/george_tompkins.md): George Tompkins enters the marriage of Roger and Gretchen as a well-heeled alternative, taking her riding, skiing, and to the theatre while Roger chases a quarter-million dollars in advertising accounts. His photograph a
- [John Andros](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/john_andros.md): John Andros moves through the world as a man who has gotten what he wanted, until a moonlit evening and a stranger's confession make him realize how much he still wants what he cannot have. The woman in the rowboat is ma
- [Evelyn Beebe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/evelyn_beebe.md): Evelyn Beebe is the kind of woman a family builds its reputation around, and Anson Hunter treats her as property to be managed when rumors of her affair with Cary Sloane begin to circulate. Cornered in her own living roo
- [Rudolph Miller](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/rudolph_miller.md): Rudolph Miller lives under the shadow of Carl Miller, a failed man whose fury erupts when his son spills a glass of water on the morning of his first communion. The beating that follows, and Rudolph's hysterical laughter
- [Dolly Karger](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/dolly_karger.md): Dolly Karger is the golden boy of his class, beautiful and easy, until Vienna takes him up and begins editing him for a more sophisticated world. On a wicker bench one summer night he and Vienna announce their engagement
- [Wessel Caxter](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/wessel_caxter.md): An old sailor who becomes a reader and storyteller.
- [Katherine Davis](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/katherine_davis.md): A young woman who is the object of a man's affection.
- [Billy Markey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/billy_markey.md): A young man from a wealthy family, known for his wild behavior.
- [Betty Medill](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/betty_medill.md): A beautiful young woman who is the prize in a romantic competition.
- [Marcia Tarbox](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/marcia_tarbox.md): A vivacious young woman who marries a brilliant but naive man.
- [Ede Karr](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/ede_karr.md): A young girl who is the daughter of a wealthy family.
- [Gus Rose](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/gus_rose.md): A young man from a poor background, involved in a crime.
- [Vienna Thorne](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/vienna_thorne.md): A beautiful and sophisticated woman from a wealthy family.
- [Joe Gorman](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/joe_gorman.md): A friend and accomplice of the protagonist.
- [George Key](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/george_key.md): A young man who becomes involved in a scandal.
- [Jack Devlin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/jack_devlin.md): A charming and mysterious man who enters a woman's life.
- [Braddock Washington](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/braddock_washington.md): A fabulously wealthy and eccentric man living in isolation.
- [Olive Masters](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/olive_masters.md): A young woman who works as a secretary and attracts attention.
- [Margaret Donovan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/margaret_donovan.md): A young woman who is a friend of the main character.
- [Harold Piper](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/harold_piper.md): A young man whose wife is the center of social attention.
- [Margaret Torrence](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/margaret_torrence.md): A friend and confidante of the main female character.
- [Jim Mather](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/jim_mather.md): A young man from a wealthy family, involved in social circles.
- [Carl Miller](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/carl_miller.md): A young man who is a friend of the protagonist.
- [Percy Washington](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/percy_washington.md): A young man from the immensely wealthy Washington family.
- [Father Schwartz](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/father_schwartz.md): A priest who struggles with his faith and worldly temptations.
- [Joe Jelke](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/joe_jelke.md): A young man from a wealthy family, known for his partying.
- [Freddy Gedney](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/freddy_gedney.md): A young man who is a friend and rival of the protagonist.
- [Kitty Carr](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/kitty_carr.md): A beautiful and flirtatious young woman.
- [Henry Bradin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/henry_bradin.md): The brother of Edith Bradin, a young man with a secret.
- [Gilly Hood](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/gilly_hood.md): A young man from a wealthy family, known for his charm.
- [Jonquil Cary](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/jonquil_cary.md): A beautiful and gentle young woman who is the object of affection.
- [Elwood Leaming](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/elwood_leaming.md): A young man who is a friend of the protagonist.
- [Charles Hemple](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/charles_hemple.md): A young man who marries Luella Hemple.
- [Nancy Lamar](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/nancy_lamar.md): A beautiful and wild young woman from a prominent family.
- [Bill Kampf](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/bill_kampf.md): A young man who is a friend of the protagonist.
- [Roscoe Button](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/roscoe_button.md): The son of Benjamin Button, who ages normally.
- [Helen Avery](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_16_se/characters/helen_avery.md): A young woman who is a friend of the main character.

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