Narrative Authority and Competing Representations: The Pat Hobby Stories and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Hollywood

Abstract F. Scott Fitzgerald spent the end of his life writing about the Hollywood movie industry and its forced writing collaborations, lack of authority for writers, and inferior stories that were claimed as superior representations of the world. While critics and scholars have largely acknowledged and praised Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, his stories about a hack Hollywood writer named Pat Hobby have not been similarly acclaimed. These stories have been overlooked, and when they have been addressed, critics have claimed that the connection between those stories and The Last Tycoon was solely one of expedience. This same argument has been used to discuss many of Fitzgerald's magazine stories; whether or not that treatment is valid, this judgment of the Pat Hobby Stories is unjust. Not only in The Last Tycoon but also in the Pat Hobby stories readers discern Fitzgerald's linkage between the inability of Hollywood to represent American experience in anything but the tritest ways and the movie industry's dysfunctional handling of its writers. In the Pat Hobby stories, Fitzgerald also expresses his dismay with the Hollywood system by creating a main character who can hardly claim the job title “writer.”