What F. Scott Fitzgerald's tax returns reveal about his life and times
“Youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Several years ago, my colleague and friend Matthew Bruccoli, an English professor and author of books about 20th-century American writers, made a surprising request. He said he had F. Scott Fitzgerald’s income tax returns covering his working life, 1919–1940, and asked if I would like to write an article with him based on the returns. Matt was for many years a good friend of Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie, and in her will she had appointed him a trustee for the trust she had set up for her four children. It seemed to me such an amazing find; I asked Matt how he had obtained the returns. One day, he said, while he was helping Scottie organize things, they came across the tax returns. Scottie, saying that they wouldn’t interest anyone, was going to throw them out. Matt, who didn’t believe in throwing anything out, asked if he could take them. He sent the returns to me; Matt’s death in June of 2008 meant I would have to write the article without him.
What can be learned from Fitzgerald’s tax returns? To start with, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift is untrue. Fitzgerald was always trying to follow conservative financial principles. Until 1937 he kept a ledger—as if he were a grocer—a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition. No one could call Fitzgerald frugal, but he was always trying to save money—at least until his wife Zelda’s illness, starting in 1929, put any idea of saving out of the question. The ordinary person saves to protect against some distant rainy day. Fitzgerald had no interest in that. To him saving meant freedom to work on his novels without interruptions caused by the economic necessity of writing short stories. The short stories were his main source of revenue.
Until the Hollywood years (1937–40), Fitzgerald handwrote his income tax returns. During the Hollywood years, the returns were prepared by accountants and typed. He, of course, kept his ledgers by hand. Regardless of how they were transcribed, the returns and the ledgers reveal a great deal about Fitzgerald—how he lived and how he struggled.Previously:
The ledger for 1919 shows earnings from short-story sales of $879, an amount below that required for a tax return. But the next year Fitzgerald was suddenly rich. In 1920 he earned $17,055 and paid $1,444 in taxes—an overall effective tax rate of about 8 percent. Fitzgerald sold 11 short stories to magazines for $3,975 and four short stories to the movies for $7,425; he received $6,200 in royalties from This Side of Paradise. The novel, published in April 1920, went through printing after printing, totaling 49,075 copies—more than any of his other novels during his lifetime. His royalties between 1920 and 1923 came to $13,036, which, again, was more than the royalties from any of his other novels.
The publication of This Side of Paradise when he was 23 immediately put Fitzgerald’s income in the top 2 percent of American taxpayers. Thereafter, for most of his working life, he earned about $24,000 a year, which put him in the top 1 percent of those filing returns. Today, a taxpayer would have to earn at least $500,000 to be in the top 1 percent. The 1920 census reported the American population as 106,021,537. That year only roughly 7 percent of the population—7,259,944—even filed tax returns. Today, about 45 percent of the population files returns: 134,000,000 returns out of a population of 300,000,000....MORE
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And from the intro to 2010's "Straddling Jeff Immelt (GE)":
Long time readers know that I've been bullish on GE for two months.
At the same time I don't have much respect for Mr. Immelt's management prowess.
It's either schizophrenia or art:
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."Of course that quote is from Fitzgerald's 1936 Esquire essay "The Crack-Up", by which time his mental problems (and Zelda's) were quite advanced....
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
