Abstract
Many critics have noted Fitzgerald’s insistent attempts, particularly early in his career, to manage his image. A quick glance through any of his volumes of business correspondence will offer numerous examples of these efforts.45 He was particularly concerned with production issues, making suggestions to his publishers about everything from layouts and fonts to bindings and the use of blurbs on dust jackets. He worried about the timing and manner of publication, including forms of serialization, the use of book clubs, and the size of his volumes. Finally, he suggested marketing tactics that would maximize the sale of his books, and he even wrote some of his own ad copy.46 Beyond issues of production and distribution, Fitzgerald, especially early on in his career, appeared regularly in interviews, publicity blurbs, and personality sketches in major papers and magazines around the country. He also wrote numerous pieces about himself that were circulated, formally and informally, through the press.
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Notes
Edmund Wilson, ed., The Crack-Up (New York: New Directions, 1945), 71.
Arnold Gingrich, “Three Characters in Search of a Magazine That Is Unhampered by the Old Taboos,” Esquire, February 1934.
For information about Esquire’s circulation, see Arnold Gingrich, Nothing but People: The Early Days at Esquire, a Personal History, 1928–1958 (New York: Crown Publishers, 1971), 140.
For scholarly analyses of these numbers, see Hugh Merrill, Esky: The Early Years at Esquire (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 51, 54, 58–60
Tom Pendergast, Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer Culture, 1900–1950 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 220–21.
The two articles explicitly about Fitzgerald and Zelda were “Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number-” (published during May and June 1934) and “Auction-Model 1934” (July 1934). Both were run with a joint byline crediting Fitzgerald and Zelda. I have chosen to emphasize Fitzgerald’s authorship above because his name would have been more recognizable to the male readers of Esquire. Scholars agree, however, that Zelda was the primary author of these pieces, which were revised by Fitzgerald prior to publication. In his biography of Fitzgerald, Matthew J. Bruccoli compares a portion of Zelda’s original text to Fitzgerald’s revised version in order to show how he “polished” her prose and worked to make larger thematic points more explicit for readers. See Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, 2nd rev. ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 385.
Arnold Gingrich, “Backstage with Esquire,” Esquire, June 1936, 28.
Quoted in James L. W. West, “Fitzgerald and Esquire,” in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Approaches in Criticism, ed. Jackson R. Bryer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 155.
E. B. White, “Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, March 14, 1936, 11.
I am citing from the essay that appears in The Liberal Imagination because it is the most readily available. This text, however, published in 1950, uses material from two earlier pieces Trilling had written on Fitzgerald, an introduction he wrote for the New Directions edition of The Great Gatsby in 1945 and a review of The Crack-Up, also from 1945, published in The Nation. For more information on this article, and other secondary materials on Fitzgerald, see Jackson R. Bryer, The Critical Reputation of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Bibliographical Study (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1967).
Lionel Trilling, “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” in The Liberal Imagination(New York: Viking, 1950), 243–44.
Marc Dolan, Modern Lives (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996), 134.
Perhaps the most famous of Fitzgerald’s relapses took place during a freelance film job in early 1939. He was hired by United Artists to help improve the script for a movie called Winter Carnival. The plot revolved around the winter carnival at Dartmouth, and in February he traveled to the university with fellow scriptwriter Budd Schulberg. On the plane, Budd convinced Fitzgerald to share a bottle of champagne with him, which led to a three-day bender that got both writers fired. The whole experience was later memorialized in Schulberg’s novel, The Disenchanted, a book based, in part, on their trip to Dartmouth. For an account of Fitzgerald’s difficulties during his final years, see Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 432–94. For a con¬cise history of Fitzgerald’s work in Hollywood, see Alan Margolies, “Fitzgerald and Hollywood,” in The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Ruth Prigozy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Sheilah Graham, Fitzgerald’s partner during his final years, has also written extensively of her time with him.
In particular, see Sheilah Graham, Beloved Infidel: The Education of a Woman (New York: Holt, 1958); The Rest of the Story (New York: Coward-McCann, 1964).
William Troy, “F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Authority of Failure,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2006), 28.
Alfred Kazin, “An American Confession,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work, ed. Alfred Kazin (Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company, 1951), 180. Kazin’s depiction of The Crack-Up is certainly darker and more tentative than Trilling’s portrayal. For instance, he reads “Handle with Care” literally and suggests that Fitzgerald’s ultimate commitment to art is a means of survival only, not a “heroic” revelation. His piece does, however, ultimately accord with the larger “tragic hero” story outlined above.
Wright Morris, “The Function of Nostalgia: F. Scott Fitzgerald,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Arthur Mizener (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 29.
James E. Jr. Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique(New York: New York University Press, 1964), 128.
Arnold Gingrich, “Introduction,” in The Pat Hobby Stories (New York: Scribner, 1962), xi–xii.
He wrote to a former lover, Beatrice Dance, in March 1936, “For myself don’t take that little trilogy in Esquire too seriously.” See Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan, eds., Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1980), 427–28.
Henry Dan Piper, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait (New York: 1965), 240. The Post ultimately declined, but he did write another set of melancholy reflections for Esquire. The three pieces, “An Author’s House,” “Afternoon of an Author,” and “An Author’s Mother,” were published in July, August, and September of 1936, respectively.
Stephen W. Potts, The Price of Paradise: The Magazine Career of F. Scott Fitzgerald (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1993), 74.
Fitzgerald spun off the success of his “How to Live on $36,000 a Year,” first published in 1924, into two other articles, “How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year” and “The High Cost of Macaroni.” The latter article, alternatively titled “What Price Macaroni” in correspondence with his agent, ultimately went unpublished. For the short history of “Macaroni,” see Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., As Ever, Scott Fitz-: Letters between F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent Harold Ober, 1919–1940 (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1972), 67n, 78, 79n, 81, 89, 91.
See John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer, eds., Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 227–30.
A. Banerjee, “A Move towards Maturity: Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘the Crack-up,’” Revista Alicantina de estudios Ingleses 8 (1995): 48.
Kirk Curnutt, “Making a ‘Clean Break’: Confession, Celebrity Journalism, Image Management and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘the Crack-up,’” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 32, no. 4 (1999): 299.
Milton Hindus, F. Scott Fitzgerald: An Introduction and Interpretation(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968), 90.
The two main published collections of Fitzgerald’s business letters are Bruccoli, As Ever and Kuehl and Bryer, Dear Scott. Several other collections of Fitzgerald’s correspondence have important letters left out of these collections. For example, The Correspondence contains a much quoted letter to Max Perkins, not included in Dear Scott, where Fitzgerald complains that reporters “twist [my words] to make an idiot out of me.” Bruccoli and Duggan, Correspondence, 92. See also Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994)
Andrew Turnbull, ed., The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), 137–291, 391–408.
For examples of several interviews from the late 1920s where Fitzgerald is identified primarily by his “flapper” novel, see Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jackson R. Bryer, eds., F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time: A Miscellany (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1971), 274–81.
A. Scott Berg, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 19; Curnutt, “Clean Break,” 316.
For more detailed accounts of Fitzgerald’s years at Princeton, see Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 41–79; Andre Le Vot, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography, trans. William Byron (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1979), 30–55.
Much work has been done analyzing and debating the emergence of the professional-managerial class. For Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s article, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” as well as a series of articles discussing the evolution of the middle class at the turn of the century, see Pat Walker, ed., Between Labour and Capital (Boston: South End Press, 1979).
See also Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (New York: Verso, 1996), 119.
Michael Augspurger, An Economy of Abundant Beauty: Fortune Magazine and Depression America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 14.
John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2002), 240, fn. 28.
Janice Radway, “Research Universities, Periodical Publication, and the Circulation of Professional Expertise: On the Significance of Middlebrow Authority,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (2004): 213.
Many critics have argued that the rise of the university system was central to the development of the concept of “youth” around the turn of the century. For more on the emergence of a “youth” subculture in America, see Dolan, Modern; Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 245–72.
For an interesting application of this work to Fitzgerald’s writing, see Kirk Curnutt, “F. Scott Fitzgerald, Age Consciousness, and the Rise of American Youth Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Ruth Prigozy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
For the standard work on the development of advertising in the early twentieth century, see Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
For a work that treats earlier decades, primarily the 1880s through the 1920s, see Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983). See also Ohmann, Selling Culture, 81–117.
Ruth Prigozy, “Introduction: Scott, Zelda, and the Culture of Celebrity,” in The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Ruth Prigozy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 7.
The piece, along with a brief note about its publication history, is collected as “An Interview with F. Scott Fitzgerald” in Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 33–35. This “interview” follows the typical pattern of Fitzgerald publicity. First, the “interviewer” describes Fitzgerald’s appearance, which he finds unexpectedly striking. Then, he poses a few simple questions that Fitzgerald answers with spontaneous wit. Finally, as Fitzgerald’s enthusiasm takes over, the interviewer fades into the background to document the author’s passionate burst of words.
Arthur Mizener, ed., Afternoon of an Author (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 83–85.
I am indebted to Bryer’s “Introduction” for pointing out the emergence of this idea in Gatsby criticism. See page xix for more elucidation and examples of this point. Also, see Malcolm Cowley, “Third Act and Epilogue,” New Yorker XXI (1945).
Quoted in Jackson R. Bryer, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception (New York: Burt Franklin & Co, 1978), xix.
In calculating Fitzgerald’s earned income, I deducted both Zelda’s earnings and advances against his future novel, which functioned more like loans than payments on future earnings. In 1927, Fitzgerald’s earned income was $22,935.81, of which $15,300 came from Post fiction, amounting to roughly 67 percent. In 1928, that proportion rose, as his income increased slightly to $23,423.93, but his Post earnings shot up to $22,050, or 94 percent of the total. For the next four years, the Post would dominate Fitzgerald’s earnings. In 1929, total earned income was $30,018.18, with $27,000 from Post fiction (90 percent). 1930: $25,638.13 total, $25,200 from Post fiction, or about 98 percent. 1931: $37,554.85 total, $28,800 from Post fiction (77 percent). 1932: $15,343.40 total, $14,605 from Post (95 percent). 1933: $16,208.03 total, $7,650 from Post (47 percent). 1934: $13,550.35 total, $8,100 from Post (60 percent). 1935: $16,503.13 total, $5,400 from Post (32.7 percent). 1936, the last year he sold stories to the Post: $10,180.97 total, $5,000 from Post (49.1 percent). For more details, see F. Scott Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ledger(Washington, D.C.: NCR/Microcard Editions, 1972).
The best source of information on Fitzgerald’s short story writing is Potts, Magazine Career. For historical information on The Saturday Evening Post, see John William Tebbel, George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948).
For a more recent cultural history, see Jan Cohn, Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989).
The best source on Esquire’s early years is still Gingrich’s Nothing but People. For several contemporary accounts that add a few details to Gingrich’s book, see George H. Douglas, The Smart Magazines(Hamden, CT: Shoe String Press, 1991); Merrill, Esky.
Fitzgerald’s novels, as was typical at the time, sold far better than his short story collections. This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned each sold approximately 50,000 copies in their first year of publication. The Great Gatsby sold its initial run of 20,870 copies and had a second printing of 3,000 in the same span of time. By contrast, Tender Is the Night sold only about 15,000 copies. Fitzgerald’s first collection of short stories, Flappers and Philosophers, sold more than 15,000 copies in its first several months of publication, but sales slowed quickly. Tales of the Jazz Age quickly sold its first 8,000 copies and ran through two smaller printings in its first year. All the Sad Young Men sold 16,170 copies in the same amount of time. In contrast, Taps at Reveille sold less than 5,100 copies. For more informa¬tion on Fitzgerald’s sales, see James L. W. West, “F. Scott Fitzgerald, Professional Author,” in A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Kirk Curnutt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 56–61. Also, see Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur., 31, 45, 62, 68, 133, 217, 391.
For an interesting examination of Zelda’s life and illness that problematizes this diagnosis, see Linda Wagner-Martin, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman’s Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 120–96.
For more on the exchange between Fitzgerald and Hemingway, see Matthew J. Bruccoli, Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994), 171–75.
Carlos Baker, ed., Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981), 438.
For example, in late 1930, Zelda wrote, “I was nervous and half-sick but I didn’t know what was the matter. I only knew that I had difficulty standing lots of people.” Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, eds., Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 71.
Scott Donaldson, “Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Ruth Prigozy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 174.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1978), 318.
For a similar reading of this phrase, see Morris Dickstein, “Fitzgerald: The Authority of Failure,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jackson R. Bryer, Ruth Prigozy, and Milton R. Stern (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 313.
Quoted in Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962), 265.
For the original articles, see F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald, “Does a Moment of Revolt Come Sometime to Every Married Man?” McCall’s 51 (1924): 21, 36, 82.
The pieces are also collected separately. Scott’s reply was included in Bruccoli and Bryer, Miscellany, 184–86. Zelda’s version is collected in Zelda Fitzgerald, The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 395–96.
Any discussion of Fitzgerald’s personal feelings about these references would take me far outside the scope of my argument. I will merely say that evidence suggests he was quite ambivalent about his lingering persona. On one hand, he still clearly felt pride in these notices and kept collecting such clippings, many of which recalled his ability to capture the mood of the younger generation in This Side of Paradise, until his death. For relevant selections from Fitzgerald’s scrapbooks, see Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr, eds., The Romantic Egoists (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974), 204–05.
On the other hand, Fitzgerald was not always pleased by these mentions, in part because they conflicted with his efforts to construct a more “literary” image. In a semiautobiographical piece published in late 1936, “Afternoon of an Author,” the narrator stops to listen to music and bitterly remarks, “So long since he had danced, perhaps two evenings in five years, yet a review of his last book had mentioned him as being fond of night clubs; the same review had also spoken of him as being indefatigable. Something in the sound of the word in his mind broke him momentarily and feeling tears of weakness behind his eyes he turned away. It was like in the beginning fifteen years ago when they said he had ‘fatal facility,’ and he labored like a slave over every sentence.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, Afternoon of an Author, ed. Arthur Mizener (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 181.
For a slightly condensed version of Mok’s article, see Bruccoli and Bryer, Miscellany, 294–99. For the original article, see Michel Mok, “The Other Side of Paradise: Scott Fitzgerald, 40, Engulfed in Despair,” New York Post, September 25, 1936.
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© 2011 Timothy W. Galow
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Galow, T.W. (2011). On the Limitations of Image Management: The Long Shadow of “F. Scott Fitzgerald”. In: Writing Celebrity. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119499_5
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