The setting: Hollywood: the character: Pat Hobby, a down-and-out screenwriter trying to break back into show business, but having better luck getting into bars. Written between 1939 and 1940, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was working for Universal Studios, the seventeen Pat Hobby stories were first published in Esquire magazine and present a bitterly humorous portrait
The setting: Hollywood: the character: Pat Hobby, a down-and-out screenwriter trying to break back into show business, but having better luck getting into bars. Written between 1939 and 1940, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was working for Universal Studios, the seventeen Pat Hobby stories were first published in Esquire magazine and present a bitterly humorous portrait of a once-successful writer who becomes a forgotten hack on a Hollywood lot. “This was not art” Pat Hobby often said, “this was an industry” where whom “you sat with at lunch was more important than what you dictated in your office.”
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Wonderful Wonderful. Funny. And, it seems to me, very accurate. If there just was one additional element … a love interest maybe or landlady … it would make a terrific TV series. But as it stands, it’s a teffific collection of short stories. And I’ll settle for that.
The Pat Hobby Stories Granted how good the best of Scott Fitzgerald is, I was anxious to read The Pat Hobby Stories as well. I knew, of course, that they reflected his period in Hollywood. But having read them, I have to say that they are very slackly written, and throw nothing like the same light on Hollywood as, say, William Goldman’s books. They don’t have any great style, or insights, or surprises.
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