A new book by F. Scott Fitzgerald was reviewed in yesterday's NYTimes Book Review section--lost short stories found and published for the first time now, 77 years after his death. This set me to brooding about him and about myself. Few writers have ever owed an earlier one as much as I owe Fitzgerald. I was 10 when he died, 20 when an English professor put me onto him. I found Tender Is The Night incredibly touching. I was so enthralled by the Great Gatsby that I memorized parts of it the way you would poetry, to the point where one day the prof asked me to teach the class about Gatzby and its author, which I did. Because of Fitzgerald the literary career I had considered for myself now took sharper form. I would become the greatest writer who ever lived, greater even than him--and because he had spent so much time on the French Riviera and because Tender Is The Night is set there, that was where I would go to write the first of my great novels. Fitzgerald's Riviera was all it and I would need to give it pizazz. So at 23, my life's savings in my pocket ($500) I followed him to Nice. But--but I met a local girl there the first day, and for a time Fitzgerald and novel writing went out the window. We got married three months later on no money and are still married. I did have a literary career (17 novels, 11 other books, my God!) and it did begin on the Riviera, though it took us four years to get back there on a permanent basis, and for me to get paid regularly for writing books and articles, much of the non-fiction about France and from France. As for becoming the greatest writer who ever lived, I didn't make it. But nobody else ever did either, which is some (small) consolation.
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