Life in the Real West Egg

The American Scholar has a rather interesting piece about Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s constant struggles with money. I am not entirely convinced by the mathematical conversions of Fitzgerald’s income into today’s dollars, but the article provides some good insight into how the novelist and short-story writer handled in real life something that constantly occupied him in his fiction:

In “How to Live on $36,000 a Year,” Fitzgerald wrote that in 1920, three months after marrying Zelda, he ran out of money. “This particular crisis passed” when he discovered the next morning that publishers sometimes advance royalties. As he put it, “So the only lesson I learned from it was that my money usually turns up somewhere in time of need, and that at the worst you can always borrow—a lesson that would make Benjamin Franklin turn over in his grave.”

You can read the full article here.

Photo of Robert Redford in the film adaptation of The Great Gatsby: Forbes.