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Rejection Letters
To 
Famous Authors

found in the Special Collections
 of the New York Public Library 

issue: 1
:
F. Scott Fitzgerald

in his penultimate year
 of financial free fall

personal literary fruition 
and professional literary rejection

Charity Case presents HANDOUT, Issue 8, December 2021. Rejection Letters
To
Famous Authors
found in the Special Collections
of the New York Public Library
issue: 1
F. Scott Fitzgerald
in his penultimate year
of financial free fall
personal literary fruition 
and professional literary rejection. IMAGES collage of: 1) picture of F. Scott Fitzgerald as a child 2) Telegram to Fitzgerald from Kenneth Littauer: WE ARE UNABLE TO USE STORY. BELIEVE ME I AM SORRY. I AM AIRMAILING YOU TODAY SUGGESTIONS ABOUT A SERIAL YOU MAY FIND INTERESTING. all images of letters & telegrams are from the
 New York Public Library
 Special Collections
 Crowell-Collier Publishing Company records, 1931-1955
page 2. Letter dated September 19th, 1939. Dear Scott: Here are both the stories. I like BETWEEN PLANES very much indeed, but we can't use it for the reason I gave you in my telegram. The other one just isn't a story, according to our definition. Would it interest you to know that Woman's Home Companion is looking for a serial? What they want would be right up your alley - something young, glamorous and contemporary. They would not order this sight unseen, but they might be willing to do business on the basis of 15,000 words and a synopsis of the balance. If you have any ideas, why don't you drop me a line about them? Sincerely yours, Kenneth Littauer Fiction Editor. The telegram Littauer refers to in this letter, rejecting a story because Collier’s isn’t into the ‘sex angle.’ The other story is rejected because it ‘just isn’t a story.’ TELEGRAM to Fitzgerald: CANT TAKE STORY ACCOUNT SEX ANGLE SORRY AND THANKS DOES SCRIPT GO TO OBER? KENNETH LITTAUER
page 3 Telegram to Fitzgerald: September 20th, 1939, as described on the cover page. bottom text: The NYPL Collier’s collection also includes the 1940 letter of despondent editor Max Wilkinson rejecting Faulkner: ‘I was unable to persuade my peers that they were for Collier’s. Believe me, I am sorry to be returning these pieces to you.’
page 4 letter to Otis A. Kline from the Fiction Department. text: On 21 September 1939 Fitzgerald telegraphs his daughter ‘You can register at Vassar. It cost a hemorrhage.’Fitzgerald’s desperate need for money in his last years is well known, and colors all of his correspondence. In this letter from 26 September another story
‘The Pearl and Fur’
is rejected by
Otis Kline. In a 19 September letter to Harold Ober, he had written that he ‘can’t possibly pay [his daughter’s] Vassar tuition of $615.00. I’m working today on an Esquire story to get her back [t]here.’ In the same letter he referred to working in Hollywood as ‘almost as much fun as the war.’
page 5 picture of soldier in WWI Editor Kenneth Littauer was a pilot in WWI near Dunkirk and then a Commanding Officer and then a Major, receiving among other medals the US Distinguished Service Cross. In WW2 he served as Colonel and helped plan the D-Day bombings. Littauer had rejected another Fitzgerald story over the Summer in a letter of 21 July 1939: 
 ‘Here is the manuscript of the unhappy story. I give you my word none of us knows precisely what you had in mind when you wrote it. Of course it is very easy to supply any number of morals to fit the story. This is unfortunate. A successful popular story imposes its own moral or morals and leaves nothing to the wisdom and ingenuity of the reader.’ Fitzgerald submitted another piece on 25 July 1939, writing, ‘Here is your Hollywood story,’ an early draft of Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. On 28 July 1939, Littauer wired another rejection:
 ‘Discard too elliptical or something. Anyway the point eludes us all which means some pretty bright and poigniant minds have fumbled. What now? Remorsefully’
page 6 picture of Zelda Fitzgerald 27 September 1939
Fitzgerald writes to Dr. Suitt, at Zelda’s sanatorium in North Carolina: 
‘As you know I tried to give Zelda every luxury permissable when I could afford it (the trip to Florida, etc) but it is simply impossible to pay anything, even in instal[l]ments when one drives in a mortgaged Ford and tries to get over the habit of looking into a handkerchief for blood when talking to a producer. ‘If things go as bad as they have for another month, the hospital can reimburse itself out of life insurance. This is a promise.’ He would be dead in 15 months. 2 October 1939
 Fitzgerald receives a letter from Harold Ober:
‘Cosmopolitan has returned “Director’s Special” with the following letter:
“It’s really heart-breaking to return a Scott Fitzgerald story. I think everybody in our kind of work today really gets a thrill from seeing that name in print or on a manuscript. I read “Director’s Special” with the highest hope and was terribly disappointed that I could not whole-heartedly recommend it. That opinion seemed to be general here, I regret to say.’
page 7 picture of Harold Ober, a middle-aged white man. Fitzgerald’s break with his agent Harold Ober took place over 1939. On 18 July, Fitzgerald had written to Littauer:
‘I would like to send the story directly to you, which amounts to a virtual split with Ober. … Relationships have an unfortunate way of wearing out, like most things in this world.’ and on 25 July:
‘…in fact a novel a highly dilatory evasiveness is responsible for my attitude toward our relationship. Harold Ober was a literary agent who founded 
Harold Ober Associates 
in 1929
 which still exists.
page 8 picture of F. Scott Fitzgerald, approximately 30 years old 2 October 1939
 Harold Ober letter continued from page 6 ‘The editor of Collier’s told me a few days ago that you had sent a story direct to him. I really don’t think you are helping yourself by sending stories off direct to editors. Every author I know has difficulty in his writing after working for a time in Hollywood. This is so true that I have heard a great many editors comment on it. Most of them think that working in Hollywood ruins an author. I know that it needn’t ruin an author permanently but I think it is important to get a story just right before offering it.’ 3 October 1939 Fitzgerald telegrams Ober:
‘You have no idea how much
a hundred dollars means now.’
page 9 photographs of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, their child 4 October 1939 Fitzgerald responds to Ober’s letter:
‘I sent the stories to Collier’s for the simple reason that it seemed difficult to deal with someone who treats you with dead silence. Against silence you can do nothing but fret and wonder.’

then

‘Anyhow I have “lived dangerously” and I may quite possibly have to pay for it, but there are plenty of other people to tell me that and it doesn’t seem as if it should be you.’ 

and a PS

‘Could you mail me back these stories? I have no copies. Don’t you agree that they are worth more than $250? One of them was offered to Collier’s in desperation - the first Pat Hobby story but Littauer wired that it “wasn’t a story.” Who’s right?’ 6 October 1939 Fitzgerald writes to Zelda:
‘…work has been difficult. I am almost penniless… You will remember it took me an average of six weeks to get the mood of a Saturday Evening Post story.’

closing with

‘Your life has been a disappointment, as mine has been too. But we haven’t gone through this sweat for nothing. Scottie [pictured at bottom] has got to survive and this is the most important year of her life.’
page 10 picture of Maxwell Perkins, an older white man, in business suit in an office 11 October 1939 Fitzgerald wires editor Maxwell Perkins (pictured below),
‘Ober to be absolutely excluded from present state of negotiations.’ Perkins was a famous editor of Fitzgerald, 
Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and others,
portrayed in several movies
including:
Cross Creek (1983)
 &
Genius (2016) 17 October 1939 Fitzgerald writes Kenneth Littauer:
‘…I still don’t want Ober to have anything to do with the negotiation. For five years I feel he has been going around thinking of me as a lost soul, and conveying that impression to others. It makes me gloomy when I see his name on an envelope.’
page 11 copy of letter to Fitzgerald from Littauer Dear Scott, Here is MIKE VAN DYKE'S CHRISTMAS WISH which is good reading but from our standpoint not a rounded short story. I am sorry that you have decided not to go ahead with the serial. If you ever reconsider don't feel that the door is closed upon the deal. I said goodbye to you the other night both bewildered and depressed. I still feel pretty sad. Sincerely yours, Kenneth Littauer. On 19 October 1939, 
Littauer rejects ‘“Mike Van Dyke's Christmas Wish” which is good reading 
but from our standpoint 
not a rounded 
short story.’
page 12 picture of burning building, the medical clinic where Zelda lived. undated Fall 1939 Fitzgerald writes Dr. Robert S. Carroll, Zelda’s doctor at the Highland Hospital Sanatorium in North Carolina:
‘I seem to have completely lost the gift for the commercial short story, which depends on the “boy-meets-girl’ motif.” I can’t write them convincingly any more which takes me complete out of the big money in that regard. … It requires a certain ebullience about inessential and specious matters which I no longer possess.’ Zelda died, along with 8 other women, in a fire at Highland Hospital in 1948. The Hospital had been given to Duke University in 1939.
page 13 picture of Zelda Fitzgerald sitting picture of "Save Me The Waltz" book cover undated Fall 1939 Fitzgerald writes to Zelda, commenting on the 
‘letters of quiet abuse from your family’
he has received. Zelda’s novel Save Me the Waltz had been published in 1932, and Fitzgerald was infamously angry with her for writing the book he was trying to write - what became Tender is the Night. Fitzgerald had written to his wife that she was a ‘third-rate writer’ - more biting than any rejection in this zine.

Her short stories as well as Save were (re)published in 1991 and several times since as The Collected Writings Of.
page 14 title "F-Stop Fitzgerald" image of 6 F-stops, from photography, labelled 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8. inside each white circle is text from Fitzgerald's "The Last Tycoon": He asked her to
 sit close in the car, 
and she did, but they did not seem close, because for that you have to seem to be growing closer. picture of Otis A. Kline, middle-aged white man piicture of Kline's book "Planet of Peril" picture of George Latimer, older white man George Lorimer (page 16) was a journalist and famous editor of the Saturday Evening Post, described in his NYTimes obituary as a ‘strong foe of the New Deal’ (although he ‘discovered’ socialist writer Jack London). ‘As an ardent apostle of Big Business and the middle class, he guided what the late Will Rogers once called “America’s biggest nickelodeon” from 1899 to 1937, and in that period built its circulation to phenomenal heights and its profits to an equally lofty level.’ ‘Mr. Lorimer made a big business of the craft of writing. He found those who could manufacture for him the serials, short stories and articles which he instinctively knew would appeal to millions of Americans and paid them extraordinarily well.’ ‘Critics … charged him with doing business in mediocrity, pandering to the escapism dormant in most people, [and] failing to accept the facts of life.’ Otis A. Kline (page 4) was a songwriter, adventure novelist, and literary agent who worked at Collier’s at this time.
page 15 picture of Telegram from Littauer to Fitzgerald: FIRST SIX THOUSAND PRETTY CRYPTIC THEREFORE DISAPPOINTING. BUT YOU WARNED US THIS MIGHT BE SO. CAN WE DEFER VERDICT UNTIL FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF STORY. IF IT HAS TO BE NOW IT HAS TO BE NO. REGARDS. 28 November 1939 Fitzgerald wires William Perkins
after Kenneth Littauer at Collier’s
rejected an early draft of
 The Last Tycoon:
‘I guess there are no
great magazine editors left.’
page 16 back cover Fitzgerald’s last kiss to Littauer. picture of Telegram from Fitzgerald to Littauer: November 28, 1939: NO HARD FEELINGS. THERE HAS NEVER BEEN AN EDITOR WITH PANTS ON SINCE GEORGE LORIMER. Handout is published by 
Charity Case
 www.handoutzine.com
handoutzine@handoutzine.com

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