Synopses & Reviews
A fascinating study in self-satire that brings to life the Hollywood years of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The setting: Hollywood. The character: Pat Hobby, a down-and-out screenwriter trying to break back into show business, but having better luck getting into bars. Written between 1939 and 1940, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was working for Universal Studios, the seventeen Pat Hobby stories were first published in Esquire magazine and present a bitterly humorous portrait of a once-successful writer who becomes a forgotten hack on a Hollywood lot. "This was not art," Pat Hobby often said, "this was an industry" where whom "you sat with at lunch was more important than what you dictated in your office."
The Pat Hobby sequence, as Arnold Gingrich writes in his introduction, is Fitzgerald's "last word from his last home, for much of what he felt about Hollywood and about himself permeated these stories."
Synopsis
Written for Esquire magazine late in Fitzgerald's career, The Pat Hobby Stories is a bittersweet, humorous recollection of a down-and-out Hollywood screenwriter trying to break back into show business who has better success breaking into bars.
About the Author
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, attended Princeton University, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre, and the couple divided their time between New York, Paris, and the Riviera, becoming a part of the American expatriate circle that included Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. Fitzgerald was a major new literary voice, and his masterpieces include The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender is the Night. He died of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of forty-four, while working on The Love of the Last Tycoon. For his sharp social insight and breathtaking lyricism, Fitzgerald stands as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS Introduction by Arnold Gingrich
Pat Hobby's Christmas Wish
A Man in the Way
"Boil Some Water -- Lots of It"
Teamed with Genius
Pat Hobby and Orson Welles
Pat Hobby's Secret
Pat Hobby, Putative Father
The Homes of the Stars
Pat Hobby Does His Bit
Pat Hobby's Preview
No Harm Trying
A Patriotic Short
On the Trail of Pat Hobby
Fun in an Artist's Studio
Two Old-Timers
Mightier Than the Sword
Pat Hobby's College Days
Appendix