I have read nothing like these stories and I know that I will never read anything like them again. When my brother convinced me to read these stories I was, at first, a little skeptical about F. Scott Fitzgerald. I had heard my brother rant and rave about him before but now I understand why he was ranting and raving about him so.
I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this collection of Pat Hobby Short stories. I am now excited to pick up the next F. Scott Fitzgerald Book that my brother will let me borrow.
Through the eyes of Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby, Hollywood hack writer, we see a different side of golden age tinseltown, where an extraordinary number of talented writers and artists migrated to in the 1930's and 40's, only to butt their heads against militant mediocrity and the "studio system." As an archetype, Pat Hobby stands in for them brilliantly.
Also recommended: What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg, The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, and The Player by Michael Tolkin.
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."