How F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Overlooked Story Collection Helped Me Write My LA Novel

In this essay, Krista Diamond returns to the lesser-known years of F. Scott Fitzgerald's life in Los Angeles. Fitzgerald is mostly associated with New York and the East Coast, but two brief periods of his life were spent in California. The first was in 1927 with Zelda, and the second ten years later for a job at MGM. During that second stay, Zelda was hospitalized, their daughter Scottie was in school, and Fitzgerald needed the money from screen work. Diamond writes about the collection The Pat Hobby Stories, seventeen stories Fitzgerald wrote in 1939 and 1940 for Esquire. Their central character is a washed-up screenwriter in Hollywood. Fitzgerald wrote them for the income, and many scholars have dismissed them as minor work. But the essay's author sees something more than humor and hack work in them. She regards them as stories shadowed by age, failure, addiction, shame, and the fear of the end. In Diamond's view, Fitzgerald's Los Angeles is a city where death does not arrive with darkness. It arrives with the dazzling California sunshine. Pat Hobby fails again and again, yet he cannot stay away from the studio. The studio is not just his workplace. It is a home he clings to. That very urge to remain in a place that no longer has much room for him comes close to Fitzgerald's own experience in the final years of his life. The author then brings in her own experience. She wrote her debut novel, Close Relationships with Strangers, in Los Angeles, a novel about a lonely paparazzi photographer. While writing it, she reread The Pat Hobby Stories, this time not from a distance but in the very city where the stories had been written. Diamond writes that on first reading she had assumed Fitzgerald hated Los Angeles. But years later, in that same city, she saw something else. In Pat Hobby she found the trace of a kind of hope, a man who fails but keeps trying. For the author, this naive dream goes by another name in Los Angeles. Hope.

Read the full story at LitHub →