Next year, the last sprint toward "in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...."

Eighty years after they were written, the last complete unpublished stories by The Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald will be released next spring.

The collection, due to be published in April 2017 by Simon & Schuster imprint Scribner, is mainly drawn from stories written in the mid and late 1930s. It ranges from work that Fitzgerald was unable to sell because its “subject matter or style departed from what editors expected of [the author] in the 1930s”, Scribner said, to writing that he submitted to magazines, and which was accepted for publication but never printed.

Scribner promised the collection featured “Fitzgerald writing about controversial topics, depicting young men and women who actually spoke and thought more as young men and women did, without censorship”.

The US publisher added: “Rather than permit changes and sanitising by his contemporary editors, Fitzgerald preferred to let his work remain unpublished, even at a time when he was in great need of money and review attention.”

The title story of the collection, I’d Die for You, draws from the time Fitzgerald spent in the mountains of North Carolina, mired in alcoholism, his wife Zelda in a sanatorium nearby. Novelist Thomas Wolfe would write to his brother Fred in 1936: “There is a poor, desperate, unhappy man staying at the Grove Park Inn. He is a man of great talent but he is throwing it away on drink and worry over his misfortunes … His name, I forgot to say, is Scott Fitzgerald, and a New York paper has just published a miserable interview with him – it was a lousy trick, a rotten … piece of journalism, going to see a man in that condition, gaining his confidence, and then betraying him. I myself have suffered at the hands of these rats, and I know what they can do.”