The Pat Hobby Stories

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Overview

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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780684804422
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	12/06/1995
Series:	Scribner Paperback Fiction Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	218,902
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and for the next decade the couple lived in New York, Paris, and on the Riviera. Fitzgerald’s masterpieces include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.

Date of Birth:

September 24, 1896

Date of Death:

December 21, 1940

Place of Birth:

St. Paul, Minnesota

Education:

Princeton University

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