F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Popular Magazine Formula Story of the Twenties

Abstract

F. Scott Fitzgerald earned most of his living in 1920s and 1930s (up until 1937, when he went to Hollywood) by writing stories for popular magazines. He published fiction in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Liberty Magazine, The Smart Set, Scribner's Magazine, Hearst's International Magazine, Redbook, Ladies' Home Journal, Woman's Home Companion, Vanity Fair, McCall's, and others. In all, 164 of his stories were published in magazines, and earnings from stories far exceeded royalties from novels. in 1925, year The Great Gatsby was published, most of his income came from magazine fiction--$11,025 for five stories compared to $1981.85 (though he had received a $4264 advance) for novel (Price xi). By far largest number of stories were published in The Saturday Evening Post, and by 1929 Fitzgerald was receiving up to $4000 per story from that publication, which was most lucrative outlet for magazine writer and had a circulation by mid twenties of over two and one-half million. Fitzgerald's bitter resentment of toll in time, energy, emotion, and self-respect taken by writing of these stories is legendary. His comment in a letter to Hemingway that the Post now pays old whore $4000 a screw is typical of self-disparaging remarks he made about magazine fiction. Matthew Bruccoli emphasizes this resentment in title of his final collection of magazine The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and quotes from Fitzgerald statement that provides source for title: I have asked a lot of my emotions--one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was extra I had. Now it is gone and I am just like you now. (front) Despite cost and despite resentment, however, Fitzgerald mastered tricks and techniques of commercial story and was able to tailor his plots and themes to tastes and values of mass audience for which he was writing. Fitzgerald complained that he could not do what he called pattern stories, and indeed by mid-thirties he seems to have lost ability to produce kind of formula stories that magazines like The Saturday Evening Post wanted. But in meantime he ground out dozens of stories that follow most popular formulas of time. It is true that, as Matthew Bruccoli says, Even his weak stories are redeemed by what can be conveniently called 'the Fitzgerald touch'--wit, sharp observations, dazzling descriptions, or felt emotion (xii). It is also true that in better like Winter Dreams, Fitzgerald can begin with a popular formula and adapt it into something much more probing and profound than strictly commercial writers ever produced. But awareness of formulas is often apparent, and manipulation of them is frequently blatant. Fitzgerald's use of popular formulas is most apparent when subject is success or love and success (the two are usually inseparable in Fitzgerald's world as well as that of other popular writers of time). The dream of material success, quest for Golden Girl, questions of wealth and social position represent a realm in which Fitzgerald's strongly felt personal emotions coincided with central obsession of times. It is understandable, then, that he drew heavily on this capital in his magazine stories. To get a more concrete sense of relationship of Fitzgerald's fiction to other popular formula fiction of twenties, it will be helpful to survey some of fiction dealing with success from several of magazines in which Fitzgerald published frequently.(1) Almost all stories that I sampled from popular magazines are somehow concerned with economic success, and majority of them have problems involving success in a career as a major theme. …