The Vegetable: Or, From President To Postman

An oddity in F. Scott Fitzgerald's career, his play 'The Vegetable' was a satirical attack on the presidency of Warren Harding. An ordinary, incompetent man, taunted for his lack of ambition by his family, realises his dream of ruling the United States of America. One biographer described it as "inspired by the pervasive stupidity, gross cronyism and rampant corruption [of the] administration of the philistine president". With appalling timing, the play was first staged just after Harding's sudden death, when the mood of national mourning meant that few were ready for a savage indictment of the dead president. It closed after one week. Bootleggers, political machinations, romance and a man on the run combine in this bizarre story from the side of of Fitzgerald which wrote 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz'. Out of print for decades, The Vegetable is a strange and significant work by one of the Twentieth Century's greatest writers.