What little I’ve accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back — but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: “I’ve found my line — from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty — without this I am nothing.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gatsby Unchained
A paperback tie-in version for the 1949 movie featuring Alan Ladd. Not exactly how I pictured Gatsby, but there’s no accounting for taste.
Fitzgerald: “utter helplessness”
I am thirty-six years old. For eighteen years save for a short space during the war writing has been my chief interest in life, and I am in every sense a professional. Yet even now when, at the recurrent cry of “Baby Needs Shoes,” I sit down facing my sharpened pencils and a block of legal-sized paper, I have a feeling of utter helplessness. I may write my story in three days or, as is more frequently the case, it may be six weeks before I have assembled anything worthy to be sent out. I can open a volume from a criminal law library and find a thousand plots. I can go into highway and byway, parlor and kitchen, and listen to personal revelations that at the hands of other writers might endure forever. But all that is nothing — not even enough for a false start.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “One Hundred False Starts” (1933)
Making Gatsby
Fitzgerald’s handwritten manuscript of The Great Gatsby (via)
Quote of the Day
Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (via)
Fitzgerald’s briefcase
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s briefcase. The monogram reads:
Scott Fitzgerald
597 – 5th Ave.
New YorkThe address is not Fitzgerald’s but that of his publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Source
Zelda
Zelda Fitzgerald, 1924, age 23. Zelda died on this day in 1948. (via scribnerbooks)
Fitzgerald
