"Winter Dreams" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald first published in Metropolitan magazine in December 1922 and collected in All the Sad Young Men in 1926.

[7] Her imperious father, stockbroker Charles Garfield King, or someone else purportedly humiliated the impressionable young writer and bluntly told him that "poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls.

"[11] Dexter Green is a middle-class young man born in rural Minnesota who aspires to be part of the "old money" elite of the American Midwest.

To earn money, Dexter works part-time as a teenage caddie at a golf club in Black Bear Lake, Minnesota, where he meets the 11-year-old Judy Jones.

In the evening on Black Bear Lake, Dexter swims to a raft where he encounters Judy piloting a motor boat.

Frequently anthologized, critics praise Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" as among his finest works for evoking "the loss of youthful illusions.

"[2][3] In the Fitzgerald canon, scholars categorize "Winter Dreams" as part of the so-called "Gatsby-cluster" as the author expanded upon its themes in his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.

[13] Randell argues that the story chronicles a young man's alienation with modernity due to a "lack of communal meaning" and his self-conscious descent into despair and melancholy.