"How to Live on $36,000 a Year"

From Library of America's Story of the Week, September 18, 2022:

From F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, All the Sad Young Men & Other Writings 1920–1926

Two weeks before F. Scott Fitzgerald’s new play, The Vegetable, made its debut, the author sent a frantic letter to Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s:

I have got myself into a terrible mess. As you know for the past month I have been coming every day to the city to rehearsals and then at night writing and making changes on the last act and even on the first two. It’s in shape at last and everybody around the theatre who has seen it says it’s a great hit. I put aside the novel three weeks ago and wrote a short story but it was done under such pressure that it shows it and [Metropolitan editor Carl Hovey] doesn’t want it. I am so hard pressed now for time trying to write another for him that I'm not even going [to] the Harvard Princeton game Saturday. . . .

If I don’t in some way get $650 in the bank by Wednesday morning I’ll have to pawn the furniture.

As Perkins had in the past and would again so many times in the future, he arranged have additional funds put into Fitzgerald’s bank account.

Fitzgerald had spent nearly two years trying to find a Broadway producer willing to take on The Vegetable, the first play he had written since his student days. Finally, in the summer of 1923, Sam H. Harris, owner of a Broadway theater on 42nd Street in Manhattan, agreed to finance the production. Sam Forrest, who was currently staging the hit Owen Davis play, Icebound (which would win the Pulitzer Prize), signed on as the director. Ernest Truex, star of the popular 1921 play (and 1923 movie) Six-Cylinder Love, played the lead role. Convinced that the show would be a critical and commercial success, Scott and Zelda eagerly anticipated the royalties a Broadway hit and national tour would bring. Accompanied by their neighbors Ring and Ellis Lardner, the Fitzgeralds went to Atlantic City for the tryout run, and Zelda sent an account of the opening night to her friend Xandra Kalman in Minnesota:

In brief, the show flopped as flat as one of Aunt Jemima’s famous pancakes—Scott and Truex and Harris were terribly disappointed and so was I as I had already spent the first week’s N.Y. royalty for a dress to wear to the opening night that could not be exchanged. . . . The first act went fine but Ernest says he has never had an experience on the stage like the second. . . . People were so obviously bored! And it was all very well done, so there was no use trying to fix it up.

For much of 1923, work on the play had kept Fitzgerald from writing short stories for magazines—his bread and butter—and he published only two that year. His earnings nevertheless totaled nearly $28,750, comprising an unexpected $10,000 for the movie rights to his first novel, This Side of Paradise (a film that would never be made); an additional $3,500 for other work for the movies, including title cards for the silent-film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Glimpses of the Moon; advances of $3,939 for his next novel, which would eventually be titled The Great Gatsby; and the remaining amount from book royalties, essays, and short stories (including four that would appear the following year).

Unfortunately, the Fitzgeralds somehow managed to spend close to $36,000—an exorbitant sum in 1923, when the average American earned $1,400. After the show flopped, Scott owed several thousand dollars to various friends and to his agent, Harold Ober. His ineptitude with finances inspired him to write the self-mocking autographical account, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year,” as well as a sequel sent from Europe, “How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year,” both of which The Saturday Evening Post enthusiastically published. A decade later, Fitzgerald told Perkins that the two articles “attracted such wide attention in their day that I have yet to hear the last of them.”....

....MUCH MORE

The BLS inflation calculator says that $1.00 in 1923 has the same buying power as $16.44 which implies the $36K is equivalent to $591,840 in 2022. Another source says $1.00 = $17.32.

However, as noted in the introduction to "Cleopatra Was Worth $96 Billion"—and many other places, usually dealing with the price of wheat in 1265 England*:

Converting money values over time is one of the most difficult tasks facing the historian. 

And especially going back as far as Cleopatra's time but as luck would have it, March 27 marks the reinstatement of her reign as Queen, 47 BCE, so let's roll with it...

Or beer in Krakow:

Clicking through the Krakow--and the other cities too but we're using Krakow as our example--data, beyond the oats and beef we find that in 1373 folks were paying 17 grams of silver per litre of beer, which price inflated to 53.4 grams per in 1652 and collapsed to 0.008 grams/L by 1844, also known as "The happy time".