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Reflections of a working writer and reader

No matter how this may shock mankind, the duty of philosophy is to say everything. Marquis de Sade

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Interview with F Scott Fitzgerald

The Guardian’s edited version of “The Other Side of Paradise, Scott Fitzgerald, 40, Engulfed in Despair” by Michel Mok, first published in the New York Post, September 25 1936

The author’s wife, Zelda, had been ill for some years. There was talk, said his friends, of an attempt at suicide on her part one evening when the couple were taking a walk in the country outside Baltimore. Mrs Fitzgerald, so the story went, threw herself on the tracks before an oncoming express train. Fitzgerald, himself in poor health, rushed after her and narrowly saved her life.

and

. . . for some months Fitzgerald wrote slogans for street car cards.
“I remember,” he said, “the hit I made with a slogan I wrote for the Muscatine Steam laundry in Muscatine, Iowa - ‘We keep you clean in Muscatine.’ I got a raise for that. ‘It’s perhaps a bit imaginative,’ said the boss, ‘but still it’s plain that there’s a future for you in this business. Pretty soon this office won’t be big enough to hold you.’”

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