Instant Resources for The Ice Palace by F. Scott Fitzgerald!

Whether you're looking for a short story to pair with the novel you're teaching, or you need a 2- to 3-day sub plan to use with the stories in your textbooks, Prestwick House Instant Short Story Packs go beyond basic comprehension to help students learn how to analyze literature. 

Each downloadable pack addresses key skills through 5-10 standards-based analysis questions by guiding students through a series of scaffolding graphic organizers and in-class activities. 

This Instant Short Story Pack for The Ice Palace by F. Scott Fitzgerald includes:

• Scaffolding graphic organizers and in-class activities
• Standards-based objectives
• Introduction and pre-reading notes
• Complete short story text
• Rigorous analysis questions
• Detailed teacher's answer guide

About The Ice Palace

“The Ice Palace” was published only a month or so after The Great Gatsby, the novel that thrust F. Scott Fitzgerald into the national spotlight, was released. Like many of Fitzgerald’s stories, “The Ice Palace” explores the differences between the North and the South. It is somewhat autobiographical: The two main characters are a southern woman and a northern man who are engaged to be married. Fitzgerald, raised in the northeast part of the country, wrote this story while he was engaged to Zelda Sayre, who was from Alabama. They had been married about a month when the story was published.

The plot is simple, almost clichéd. The ending is predictable. The point in reading the story, then, must lie in something other than simply watching Sally Carrol and Harry Bellamy’s romance and engagement play out. As you read the story, examine all of the contrasts Fitzgerald sets up for his readers: South and North, sluggishness and energy, warmth and cold, light and dark.

What happens to Sally Carrol inside the ice palace is clearly more emotional than physical. What she experiences in the cold darkness is called an epiphany, and if you can understand what it is she realizes while she is alone and frightened, you will have solved the puzzle of this parable.

“The Ice Palace” is more than just a “boy meets girl” story. It’s more than just a “South versus North” story. It explores some aspect of human nature and comes close enough to some truth that it helped launch Fitzgerald’s career as a leading American author.