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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Long-lost Fitzgerald story finally published

Hillel Italie Associated Press

NEW YORK – A year before F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack, he completed a short story about a hard-drinking writer diagnosed with cardiac disease.

“And as for that current dodge ‘No reference to any living character is intended’ – no use even trying that,” Fitzgerald warns at the start of “Temperature,” an 8,000-word piece dated July 1939 that is receiving its publishing debut in the current issue of the literary quarterly The Strand Magazine.

Presumed lost for decades, “Temperature” was written while the author known for “The Great Gatsby” struggled to find work in the movie business and hoped to revive his fiction career. His screenwriting contract with MGM had expired and twice in 1939 he had been hospitalized because of alcoholism.

“He felt anachronistic and was trying to find a voice that didn’t echo with the Jazz Age,” Kirk Curnutt, author of “The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald,” wrote in a recent email. “To this end he experimented with more hardboiled tones and sardonic comedy.”

Set in Los Angeles, “Temperature” is an antic story of failure, illness and decline, common themes in Fitzgerald’s work.

Andrew F. Gulli, managing editor of The Strand, came upon the manuscript earlier this year while looking through the rare books and manuscript archive at Fitzgerald’s alma mater, Princeton University.

“Fitzgerald … couldn’t help using his satirical abilities to mock everyone from doctors, Hollywood idols and the norms of society,” Gulli said of the story.

Fitzgerald called Hollywood a “hideous town,” but also “the history of all aspiration.” It was the author’s literary setting for the rest of his life. By early 1940, he was turning out his self-deprecating “Pat Hobby” stories, dispatches about a failing screenwriter that ran in Esquire. He also worked on a Hollywood novel he left unfinished, “The Love of the Last Tycoon,” released posthumously as “The Last Tycoon.” Fitzgerald died in December 1940 at age 44.