F. Scott Fitzgerald And What We Owe To Ourselves

Although Fitzgerald’s passion lay in writing novels, only his first book sold well enough to support the opulent lifestyle that he and his wife Zelda adopted as New York celebrities.

To make matters worse, his beloved Zelda had already left him once because she, at the time, suspected that he was financially incapable to support this way of living.

Uh-oh.

‘Houston, we have a problem’.

In dealing with this issue, Fitzgerald made a crucial mistake.

As we’ll see, Fitzgerald’s wrong turn is an important warning about how being less than we can be eats us up from the inside.

It’s the 1920s, you’re a brilliant writer whose works are not selling and you have a beautiful wife who will leave you when you’re monetarily unable to support the preferred life of glory.

What do you do?

Like most professional authors at the time — Ernest Hemmingway, for example, did it too — Fitzgerald supplemented his income by writing short stories for magazines.

Fair enough, Scott, life is not all puppies and sunshine.

Fitzgerald’s “whoring” didn’t stop there, however.

He continued to struggle financially — considering the extravagant spending he and his wife engaged in — and made a deal with film companies to write comedies and other insignificant movie scripts, leaving him unable to cultivate his skills as a novelist.

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