The Pat Hobby Stories
The Pat Hobby Stories is a collection of short stories by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. The 17 stories were originally published by Arnold Gingrich of Esquire magazine between January 1940 and May 1941, and later collected in one volume in 1962. The last five installments of The Pat Hobby Stories were published in Esquire after Fitzgerald's death in December 1940.
Pat Hobby, the protagonist in the stories, is a down-and-out screenwriter in Hollywood, [Los Angeles, California|Hollywood], once successful as "a good man for structure" during the silent age of cinema, but now reduced to an alcoholic hack hanging around the studio lot. Most stories find him broke and engaged in some ploy for money or a much-desired screen credit, but his antics usually backfire and end in further humiliation. Drawing on his own experiences as a writer in Hollywood, Fitzgerald portrays Pat Hobby with self-deprecating humor and nostalgia.
In an introduction to The Pat Hobby Stories, editor Arnold Gingrich notes how "while it would be unfair to judge this book as a novel, it would be less than fair to consider it as anything but a full-length portrait. It was as such that Fitzgerald worked on it, and would have wanted it presented in book form, after its original magazine publication. He thought of it as a comedy."