The Ice Palace

"The Ice Palace" is a modernist short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published in The Saturday Evening Post, 22 May 1920. It is one of eight short stories originally published in Fitzgerald's first collection, Flappers and Philosophers (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), and is also included in the collection Babylon Revisited and Other Stories (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1960). The story is about Sally Carrol Happer, a young southern woman from the fictional city of Tarleton, Georgia, who is bored with her unchanging environment. Her local friends are dismayed to learn she is engaged to Harry Bellamy, a man from an unspecified Northern town. She brushes off their concerns, alluding to her need for something more in her life, a need to see "things happen on a big scale." Sally Carrol travels to the North during the winter to visit Harry's home town and meet his family. The winter weather underscores her growing disillusion with the decision to move north, until her moment of epiphany in the town's local "Ice Palace". In the end, Sally Carrol returns home. Fitzgerald later wrote another short story, "The Jelly-Bean", which was published in the collection Tales of the Jazz Age. A sequel to The Ice Palace, it returned to Tarleton with several references to many of the characters in the earlier work.