According to Fitzgerald’s editor Arnold Gingrich, the stories were largely dismissed as having been “done to pay the grocer.” They were, of course, but that’s beside the point. In the stories, Pat Hobby is a hack screenwriter, a relic of Hollywood’s silent era, a drunk. The Pat Hobby stories began appearing in January 1940 and continued for 17 months, through May 1941 - uninterrupted by Fitzgerald’s death the previous December. The second work is less well known, a series of stories Fitzgerald was writing for Esquire magazine at the same time he was working on The Last Tycoon. The book was unfinished at the time of Fitzgerald’s death, but in 1941 it was assembled for publication by Edmund Wilson, and then edited and reissued in 1993 by his biographer Matthew Bruccoli, who called it “the most promising - and the most disappointing - fragment in American fiction.” The first is The Last Tycoon, the story of studio chief Monroe Stahr, who is captivated by mystery woman Kathleen Moore, loved by Hollywood princess Cecelia Brady, and haunted by his dead wife, movie star Minna Davis. My favorites, though, are his imperfect novels, the ones where his poetry and humanity show through the prose: Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, short stories like “The Freshest Boy” or “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” and the Crack-Up essays.įitzgerald moved to Hollywood in 1937, and there he wrote two works that in many ways show the full range of what made him so much more than a product of his time. The hardness and grace of his style in Gatsby are astonishing, and there’s no question that it’s his most perfect novel, by far. The Great Gatsby has never been my favorite, although I don’t despise it. I’ve loved Fitzgerald since I was a teenager, and over the years I’ve read nearly everything he published. He was not forgotten so much as he was willfully put out of mind. By the time he died in 1940, at age 44, most of his works were out of print. The world he’d helped create - The Jazz Age - had ended. WHEN THE 1920S WERE OVER, Scott Fitzgerald cracked up.
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