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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780684804422
ISBN: 0684804425
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 192
Publication Date: 1995-12-06
Publisher: Scribner
Studio: Scribner

A fascinating study in self-satire that brings to life the Hollywood years of F. Scott Fitzgerald

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."

The Pat Hobby sequence, as Arnold Gingrich writes in his introduction, is Fitzgerald's "last word from his last home, for much of what he felt about Hollywood and about himself permeated these stories."

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A good book about Hollywood. . .
Review: What a picture. . .
I do get to see Hollywood in the late 1930s. More, though, I get to see Fitzgerald not, in free fall, but, not at his best. Yet, the pictures he is still able to create.
This is a picture from his short story, "Babylon Revisted," Fitzgerald's tale of a once-foolish, now-widowed father hoping to gain custody of his young daughter: "His first feeling (in remembrance of that "crazy spring") was one of awe that he had actually, in his mature years, stolen a tricycle and pedaled (a drunk girlfriend) all over (town) between the small hours and dawn. In retrospect it was nightmare. . .How many weeks or months of dissipation to arrive at that condition of utter irresponsibility?"
The man pedaling that tricycle, I would argue, is Pat Hobby. And these are his collected tales--seemingly unfinished--of dissipation.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby
Review: 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.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The original thing.
Review: Of all Fitzgerald's works, these stories are most accessible, especially for those who saw the golden age of television. Of course, my approach to these short stories was from the height of "Gatsby," and the knowledge of the great film,"The Bad and the Beautiful," so I was taken by surprise with the charm, humor and the creative inspiration found in these Hollywood toss-offs. Not only are they insider truths but hung-over fantasies all at once. Groucho and Robert Cummings came to mind as I laughed out loud. Mel Brooks and Woody Allen should pay him dividends,as well as the TV studios who borrowed from his charming, off-beat take on the Hollywood system.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: More Heartbreak from the Dream Dump
Review: 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 brilliantly 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.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Brilliant Pat Hobby Stories
Review: The Brilliant Pat Hobby Stories are just as the title says, brillliant. I have never red a collection of stories as this. The wit of Mr. Fitzgerald is astonishing as he captures ones attention and then ends the story with a dramatic twist that will leave one rolling on the floor.

I have read nothing like these stories and I know that I will never read anything like them again. When my brother convinced me to read these stories I was, at first, a little skeptical about F. Scott Fitzgerald. I had heard my brother rant and rave about him before but now I understand why he was ranting and raving about him so.

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this collection of Pat Hobby Short stories. I am now excited to pick up the next F. Scott Fitzgerald Book that my brother will let me borrow.

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