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

F. Scott Fitzgerald earned most of his living in the 1920s and 1930s (up until 1937, when he went to Hollywood) by writing stories for the 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 the stories far exceeded royalties from the novels. Even in 1925, the 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 the novel (Price xi). By far the largest number of the stories were published in The Saturday Evening Post, and by 1929 Fitzgerald was receiving up to $4000 per story from that publication, which was the most lucrative outlet for the magazine writer and had a circulation by the mid twenties of over two and one-half million. Fitzgerald's bitter resentment of the toll in time, energy, emotion, and self-respect taken by the writing of these stories is legendary. His comment in a letter to Hemingway that "the Post now pays the old whore $4000 a screw" is typical of the self-disparaging remarks he made about the magazine fiction. Matthew Bruccoli emphasizes this resentment in the title of his final collection of the magazine stories, The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and quotes from the Fitzgerald statement that provides the source for the 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 the extra I had. Now it is gone and I am just like you now. (front) Despite the cost and despite the resentment, however, Fitzgerald mastered the tricks and techniques of the commercial story and was able to tailor his plots and themes to the tastes and values of the mass audience for which he was writing. Fitzgerald complained that he could not do what he called "pattern stories," and indeed by the mid-thirties he seems to have lost the ability to produce the kind of formula stories that magazines like The Saturday Evening Post wanted. But in the meantime he ground out dozens of stories that follow the most popular formulas of the 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 the felt emotion" (xii). It is also true that in the better stories, like "Winter Dreams," Fitzgerald can begin with a popular formula and adapt it into something much more probing and profound than the strictly commercial writers ever produced. But the awareness of the formulas is often apparent, and the manipulation of them is frequently blatant. Fitzgerald's use of popular formulas is most apparent when the 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 the time). The dream of material success, the quest for the Golden Girl, questions of wealth and social position represent a realm in which Fitzgerald's strongly felt personal emotions coincided with the central obsession of the times. It is understandable, then, that he drew heavily on this capital in his magazine stories. To get a more concrete sense of the relationship of Fitzgerald's fiction to other popular formula fiction of the twenties, it will be helpful to survey some of the fiction dealing with success from several of the magazines in which Fitzgerald published frequently.(1) Almost all the stories that I sampled from the popular magazines are somehow concerned with economic success, and the majority of them have problems involving success in a career as a major theme. …