Melville House Books

F. Scott Fitzgerald

What do an author’s financial records have to say about their work? Plenty, says William J. Quirk, who found himself in a unique position to examine the career of no less than F. Scott Fitzgerald after coming into possession (via a colleague who worked with Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie Fitzgerald) of the great writer’s personal financial records, including his tax returns and budget ledgers written in his own hand. And in an essay for The American Scholar, Quirk says “the returns and the ledgers reveal a great deal about Fitzgerald — how he lived and how he struggled.”

For example:

“To start with, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift is untrue. Fitzgerald was always trying to follow conservative financial principles. Until 1937 he kept a ledger — as if he were a grocer — a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition. No one could call Fitzgerald frugal, but he was always trying to save money–at least until his wife Zelda’s illness, starting in 1929, put any idea of saving out of the question. The ordinary person saves to protect against some distant rainy day. Fitzgerald had no interest in that. To him saving meant freedom to work on his novels without interruptions caused by the economic necessity of writing short stories. The short stories were his main source of revenue.”

The records also reveal that some things in the book business haven’t changed all that much — Fitzgerald, even as someone who “from the beginning, was recognized as a major American writer,” didn’t get rich off his famous books. He made far more money off writing for magazines and Hollywood. Says Quirk, “His best novels, The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), did not produce much income. Royalties from The Great Gatsby totaled only $8,397 during Fitzgerald’s lifetime.”

That’s not the only thing that suggests a writer’s lot is not all so different than it was a century ago. Quirk also details how Fitzgerald — whom the records reveal to have been “impeccably honest” in his reporting to the IRS, at a time when there was far less regulation to be so — struggled to understand his place in the gray area of official American culture inhabited by artists:

On his 1924 tax return, he deducted $2,450 as a business expense for a “trip to Europe for the purpose of obtaining material for stories, etc.” Fitzgerald understood that personal expenses like meals, clothes, and rent are not deductible. But Section 162 of the Internal Revenue Code allows a deduction for the ordinary and necessary expenses of carrying on a trade or business. There is no doubt that being an author is a trade or business. Fitzgerald regularly deducted his recurring expenses — typing, rent, and so forth — without any problem. What about a trip to Europe to gather material? … Fitzgerald’s reasonable argument simply is that the line between personal and business, in his case, didn’t exist. But the IRS has always insisted there is a line — even if it has to be artificially drawn — and when it objected to the deduction, Fitzgerald decided to give it up.

Note, however, one error of scholarship on Quirk’s part: He cites Fitzgerald’s novella May Day as being part of a group of short stories written by Fitzgerald (in a desperate effort to make enough money to get back to novel-writing) in the winter of 1923-24. However, May Day was actually first published in July, 1920 in H.L. Menken‘s Smart Set magazine, and collected in 1922 in Tales of the Jazz Age.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.