The Pat Hobby Stories (1962) consists of seventeen tales about a barely employable forty-nine-year old Hollywood hack screenwriter whose schemes to better himself usually collapse or backfire. The Hobby stories originally appeared in the magazine Esquire between January 1940 and May 1941; five of them were published posthumously. Fitzgerald’s first biographer, Arthur Mizener (1907-88), included three Hobby stories in his selection of Fitzgerald’s fictional and non-fictional prose, Afternoon of an Author (1957), but the whole run was not published until 1962, in a volume edited and introduced by Arnold Gingrich (1903-76), the creator of Esquire and its editor until 1961. Esquire was Fitzgerald’s chief magazine outlet in the last five years of his life and the stories he published there are much shorter and snappier than those in his earlier main outlet, the Saturday Evening...
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Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "The Pat Hobby Stories". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 February 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7354, accessed 09 June 2026.]
