Honorees Writing about
Fitzgerald
Festival honorees, often write or talk about Fitzgerald. John Updike was the festival honoree in 2002. In 2003 John Updike wrote an introduction to Fitzgerald's deeply felt "The Rich Boy". An adaptation of this was published by The Guardian and can be read here. The first 2 paragraphs are below.
"The Rich Boy", one of Fitzgerald's more ambitious and deeply felt short stories, contains a sentence that occasioned a tiff between the author and his formidable friend and rival, Ernest Hemingway. In August 1936, after Fitzgerald had confessed in print the low ebb of his fortunes and mental condition, Esquire published a Hemingway story, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", containing this passage from the autobiographical hero's thought-stream:
"The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, 'The rich are different from you and me.' And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him."