To: F. Scott Fitzgerald...

On the 127th anniversary of your birth...

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1929 photo portrait by Nickolas Muray) Used in a year-long print advertising campaign for the Woodbury Soap Company, in which Fitzgerald featured as one of three judges—the two others being actor John Barrymore and newspaperman Cornelius Vanderbilt IV—who were purportedly selecting the winners of monthly beauty contests.

When you wrote The Great Gatsby, you had penned the most consequential American novel of the 20th century, capturing with pinpoint accuracy the greatness of America, and its weakness — the American dream, which, bereft of a moral compass, destroys. Then, you launched Hemingway’s career, while your own life imploded — that illusive American dream, your destruction. But you had an illness, alcoholism, and a jealous wife who abetted your disease to keep you from your gift, to keep you from painting with words, drawing those ineffable portraits of America at time when we were losing our moral bearings. You did it with This Side of Paradise (1920), spurred to turn an unremarkable novel into a masterpiece to win over Zelda, a high-spirited Alabama beauty. It launched you into the literary stratosphere and made you and Zelda the “It” couple of Manhattan after you wed on April 20, 1920 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Then came The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) and, all the alcohol-fueled parties on Long Island, and your escape to Paris in 1924, and the Riviera, where, with uncharacteristic discipline, you finished The Great Gatsby, writing the definitive party scene.¹ Your new friend Hemingway longed to see you replicate Gatsby in your next work. But you did not have the discipline of Hemingway. Perhaps he could have helped you more as you helped him and, though he tried, it was not in his DNA and, admittedly, it was a tall order. God bless, Scott! You are an American treasure.

Mary Claire Kendall is author of  Oasis: Conversion Stories of Hollywood Legends, published in Madrid under the title También Dios pasa por Hollywood. She has completed a biography about Betty Hutton, as well Oasis II, featuring six more legends of Hollywood, and is currently writing a book about the life of Ernest Hemingway viewed through the prism of faith due to be published in late 2024.

1. See The Great Gatsby: Midnight in Manhattan, seven minutes in, for “the party scene.”