The Sacred and the Profane

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1937 short story “Thank You For the Light” follows a Chicago-based corset-saleswoman as she scours the streets for matches to light her cigarette. A widow with “no close relatives to write to in the evenings,” smoking “meant a lot to her sometimes. She worked very hard and it had some ability to rest and relax her psychologically.” Thus, it had “come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.” The hallowed moment of her daily after-work smoke had become an increasingly controversial act: The narrator lets on that the general consensus after the First World War was that smoking in public was poor manners–at least among those who didn’t fight in it.