F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the Pat Hobby stories in 1939 and 1940, while he was working for Universal Studios. They appeared monthly in Esquire from January 1940 to May 1941. He intended for the stories to be collected and published in a single volume after their magazine run was finished. Fitzgerald, who died in December 1940, never had the chance to fulfill this intention. The collection did not appear until 1962. Unlike The Last Tycoon, however, the book presents a complete and polished work that requires no editorial apologies or explanations.
The Pat Hobby Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scribner’s (1962), 159 pp.
The book contains seventeen stories that vary in length from six to thirteen pages. All are set in Hollywood at the time they were written. Most take place on the lot of an unnamed studio. Each story recounts an episode in the fading career of Pat Hobby, a script writer who has been in the movie business for twenty years. His best days were in the 1920s, when he could afford a driver, a swimming pool and a wife (or three). Now things have gotten tough, and Pat must plead and scheme just to get a short-term gig. He makes one move after another that would seem deplorable in the outside world but barely annoys his associates in the film industry. That’s partly because they have a different moral compass and partly because all his maneuvers result in comical failure. Pat, who has a strong sense of entitlement, never thinks he’s doing anything wrong. More than that, he doesn’t understand why his career has crumpled. He still gets along with the higher-ups, has acquaintances everywhere, and knows as much as he ever did. True, he cannot write anything longer than a sentence or generate any new ideas. But that hasn’t changed. In a sense Pat is no different from millions of other people who see work disappearing through no fault of their own. Some of the stories are funnier than others, but all are engagingly written. Readers may find it difficult to skip this piece of light entertainment from one of America’s most honored novelists.
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