Pat Hobby Stories [Paperback]

F Scott Fitzgerald (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0684717611 | ISBN-13: 978-0684717616

This is an electronic edition of the complete book complemented by author biography. This book features the table of contents linked to every story. The book was designed for optimal navigation on the Kindle, PDA, Smartphone, and other electronic readers. It is formatted to display on all electronic devices including the Kindle, Smartphones and other Mobile Devices with a small display.

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The Pat Hobby Stories are a collection of 17 short stories written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, first published by Arnold Gingrich of Esquire magazine between January 1940 and May 1941, and later collected in one volume in 1962. The last installments in Esquire of The Pat Hobby Stories were published posthumously; Fitzgerald had died in 1940.

Pat Hobby is a down-and-out screenwriter in Hollywood, once successful as "a good man for structure" during the silent age of cinema, but now reduced to an alcoholic hack hanging around the studio lot. Most stories find him broke and engaged in some ploy for money or a much-desired screen credit, but his antics usually backfire and end in further humiliation.

Drawing on his own experiences as a writer in Hollywood, Scott Fitzgerald portrays Pat Hobby with (self-)mocking humor and nostalgia.

— Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

 

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--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Pat Hobby's Christmas Wish
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A Man in the Way

"Boil Some Water-Lots of It"

Teamed with Genius
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Pat Hobby and Orson Welles
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Pat Hobby's Secret
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Pat Hobby, Putative Father
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The Homes of the Stars

Pat Hobby Does His Bit
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Pat Hobby's Preview
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No Harm Trying
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A Patriotic Short
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On the Trail of Pat Hobby
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Fun in an Artist's Studio
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Two Old-Timers
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Mightier than the Sword
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Pat Hobby's College Days

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

About the Author

  F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, attended Princeton University, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and the couple divided their time among New York, Paris, and the Riviera, becoming a part of the American expatriate circle that included Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. Fitzgerald was a major new literary voice, and his masterpieces include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of forty-four, while working on The Love of the Last Tycoon. For his sharp social insight and breathtaking lyricism, Fitzgerald stands out as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Simon Schuster Trade
• ISBN-10: 0684717611
• ISBN-13: 978-0684717616
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,558,075 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the major American writers of the twentieth century -- a figure whose life and works embodied powerful myths about our national dreams and aspirations. Fitzgerald was talented and perceptive, gifted with a lyrical style and a pitch-perfect ear for language. He lived his life as a romantic, equally capable of great dedication to his craft and reckless squandering of his artistic capital. He left us one sure masterpiece, The Great Gatsby; a near-masterpiece, Tender Is the Night; and a gathering of stories and essays that together capture the essence of the American experience. His writings are insightful and stylistically brilliant; today he is admired both as a social chronicler and a remarkably gifted artist.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hollywood Without The Glamour and Glitz, October 17, 2001

By 

Christine Lynn Jones - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pat Hobby Stories (Paperback)

Pat Hobby, once a successful Hollywood screenwriter, is nothing more than a pathetic has been. Broke, tired, and scrambling to find work, Pat takes on some unconventional methods to fill his pockets and put his name back on the big screen. But things don't turn out as smooth as Pat hopes. After all, as Pat himself repeatedly states, "I'm just a writer," and, "it's a dog's life." Pat's antics backfire and in almost every story he is left with nothing but humiliation.

The Pat Hobby stories were written between 1939 and 1940, when Fitzgerald himself was struggling to keep afloat in Hollywood. Fitzgerald paints the Hollywood scene as cold, calculating, and manipulative. A place where kissing up is more important than the quality of your talents, a place where the writer gets no respect, and a place that most likely today harbors the same attitude that Fitzgerald so deftly described in his final days.

In reading the Pat Hobby Stories, one can feel Fitzgerald's own sense of poor self-worth, despair, and hopelessness. Yet ironically, a twist of dark humor is thrown into the stories, evoking in the reader an ambiguous response of laughing at Pat Hobby while pitying him at the same time. This collection is not only entertaining and easy to read, but is one that will give you broader insight into the late great F. Scott Fitzgerald.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Heartbreak from the Dream Dump, August 14, 2003

By 

Jeffrey K. Tyzzer (Sacramento, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Pat Hobby Stories (Paperback)

Most people know F. Scott Fitzgerald as one of the deans of the lost generation and an icon of the jazz-age. But toward the end of his life, in the late 1930's, Fitzgerald was also a writer for MGM studios, and these stories represent vividly and tragically this period of his life.

Through the eyes of Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby, Hollywood hack writer, we see a different side of golden age tinseltown, where an extraordinary number of talented writers and artists migrated to in the 1930's and 40's, only to butt their heads against militant mediocrity and the "studio system." As an archetype, Pat Hobby stands in for them brilliantly.

Also recommended: What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg, The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, and The Player by Michael Tolkin.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby, August 30, 2006

By 

A reader (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pat Hobby Stories (Paperback)

Fitzgerald's early fiction often deals with the case of the young man who harbors elaborate and perhaps outlandish aspirations for success. In the Pat Hobby stories -- Fitzgerald's last published work -- we see depicted a 49-year-old man whose dreams have collided with a bleak reality. Years after his brief heyday as a well-paid film writer in the days of silent films, he is now quite simply a failure.

And yet Pat Hobby is a unique type of loser, one who sympathizes with the bosses and moguls rather than his fellow downtrodden peers at the bottom of the totem pole. Witness for example the startling scene in which Hobby, with righteous indignation, takes a lunch tray to attack an extra who had the audacity to sit at the VIP table in the studio canteen and refused to move. This scene offers a fascinating insight into Fitzgerald's own psychology, if one views Hobby as an alter ego for the author, while also raising broader questions about American culture.

"A Patriotic Short" is the story which best encapsulates these questions, as Hobby bitterly reflects on the contrast between his illustrious past, when he had a house with a swimming pool that was once admired by the President himself, and his current menial assignment editing a lame film script. Here, in just a few pages, Fitzgerald deftly weaves together the American obsessions with celebrity, the presidency, and of course the swimming pool, into a commentary on the idea of success itself.

Any mention of a swimming pool by Fitzgerald evokes the sad fate of Jay Gatsby. And though we might find Hobby a less sympathetic character than Gatsby, in many ways he represents the other side of the same debased coin. Both are tragic figures, equally unable to fulfill their dreams of glamour, and perhaps both equally the victims of the American ethos of success.