Tax Lawyer's Blog

“There are no second acts in American lives.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald -

In 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote what is arguably the greatest American novel ever written: The Great Gatsby . 

Now a man named William J. Quirk, through a friend of a friend of Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie, has come into possession of the author’s 1919 through 1940 tax returns and has written a fascinating article for the American Scholar on what those returns reveal about the great writer:

Fitzgerald’s annual income was remarkably consistent, although some years were better (1938, $58,783) and some worse (1931, $9,765). But most years were pretty close to $24,000. Despite his high income, he was not able to save or, as he said, “amass capital.”

Fitzgerald’s only income came from his writing. Zelda  brought no capital into the marriage, and he had none. Zelda became ill in 1929 when they were both very young—she 29, and he 33. In 1930–31, a 15-month stay for Zelda in a sanatorium on Lake Geneva cost $13,000. Zelda stayed ill the rest of Fitzgerald’s life. He felt obliged to provide the best care, but because of doctor and sanatorium bills, he lost hope of controlling his finances.

Friends advised Fitzgerald to economize on Zelda’s medical expenses. He wrote to Max Perkins , his legendary editor at Scribner, on October 16, 1936: “Such stray ideas as sending my daughter to a public school, putting my wife in a public insane asylum, have been proposed to me by intimate friends, but it would break something in me that would shatter the very delicate pencil end of a point of view.”

Here are a few of Fitzgerald’s more brilliant utterances:

> Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

> The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

> In the real dark night of the soul it’s always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”

> That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

> Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy – one of those unenventful times that seem at the moment only a link between a past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

(Hat Tip: Paul Caron )

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