It used to be that accept­ing an advance on an unwrit­ten nov­el was as good as admit­ting fail­ure before the work is even fin­ished. Can you imag­ine blue-blood nov­el­ists Edith Whar­ton or Hen­ry James tak­ing a check before fin­ish­ing their books?

F. Scott Fitzger­ald may have been a long-suf­fer­ing wannabe when it came to high soci­ety, but he nev­er pre­tend­ed to be any­thing but a busi­ness­man when it came to writ­ing. For near­ly his entire pro­fes­sion­al life he kept a detailed ledger of his income from writ­ing, in which he not­ed the $3,939 advance he received for his in-progress nov­el, The Great Gats­by. The new Gats­by film out this sum­mer is the fifth adap­ta­tion. The first earned Fitzger­ald $16,666. (See the sur­viv­ing footage here.)

Recent­ly dig­i­tized by the Uni­ver­si­ty of South Car­oli­na, the lined note­book, which the writer prob­a­bly packed with him on all of his trav­els, paints a pic­ture of a prag­mat­ic busi­ness­man repeat­ed­ly on and off the wag­on. Sound like Gats­by? Maybe a lit­tle.

The famous­ly hard-drink­ing Fitzger­ald must have done his admin work after the hang­over wore off and before hap­py hour. He metic­u­lous­ly not­ed every pen­ny of every com­mis­sion earned, divid­ing the book into five sec­tions: a detailed “Record of Pub­lished Fic­tion,” a year-by-year account­ing of “Mon­ey Earned by Writ­ing Since Leav­ing Army,” “Pub­lished Mis­ce­lani (includ­ing nov­els) for which I was Paid,” an unfin­ished list of “Zelda’s Earn­ings” and, most inter­est­ing of all, “An Out­line Chart of My Life.”

A true Jazz Age sto­ry­teller, Fitzger­ald sets up the droll social scene of his own ear­ly days: Not long after his birth on Sep­tem­ber 24, 1896, the infant “was bap­tized and went out for the first time—to Lambert’s cor­ner store on Lau­rel Avenue.”

It’s worth a stroll through Fitzgerald’s clipped account of his child­hood, for the humor and the poignant ref­er­ences to birth­day par­ties and child­hood mis­chief. By 1920 the writer is mar­ried and has some pro­fes­sion­al momen­tum. In the mar­gins of that year’s page, he writes “Work at the begin­ning but dan­ger­ous toward the end. A slow year, dom­i­nat­ed by Zel­da & on the whole hap­py.”

By the last entry, the state of Fitzgerald’s life is grim—“work and wor­ry, sick­ness and debt.” The book reads like a whirl­wind of drink­ing, writ­ing, trav­el and jet-set­ting. Fitzger­ald holds his gaze steady on social dynam­ics, not­ing gath­er­ings and argu­ments with friends along­side the notes about his cre­ative bursts and dry spells.

Kate Rix writes about edu­ca­tion and dig­i­tal media. Vis­it her web­site at and fol­low her on Twit­ter @mskaterix.

Here is a rare record­ing of Flan­nery O’Con­nor read­ing an ear­ly ver­sion of her wit­ty and reveal­ing essay, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in South­ern Fic­tion.”

O’Con­nor gives an elo­quent out­line of her vision as both a South­ern and a Catholic writer. She defends her work against crit­ics who say it is high­ly unre­al­is­tic. “All nov­el­ists are fun­da­men­tal­ly seek­ers and describers of the real,” she says, “but the real­ism of each nov­el­ist will depend on his view of the ulti­mate reach­es of real­i­ty.” In the pub­lished ver­sion of the essay, she writes:

When­ev­er I’m asked why South­ern writ­ers par­tic­u­lar­ly have a pen­chant for writ­ing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to rec­og­nize one. To be able to rec­og­nize a freak, you have to have some con­cep­tion of the whole man, and in the South the gen­er­al con­cep­tion of man is still, in the main, the­o­log­i­cal. That is a large state­ment, and it is dan­ger­ous to make it, for almost any­thing you say about South­ern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal pro­pri­ety. But approach­ing the sub­ject from the stand­point of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hard­ly Christ-cen­tered, it is most cer­tain­ly Christ-haunt­ed. The South­ern­er, who isn’t con­vinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and like­ness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instruc­tive. They cast strange shad­ows, par­tic­u­lar­ly in our lit­er­a­ture. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a fig­ure for our essen­tial dis­place­ment that he attains some depth in lit­er­a­ture.

This pas­sage can be heard, in dif­fer­ent form, begin­ning at the 3:40 mark in the record­ing. Like many of O’Con­nors essays, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in South­ern Fic­tion” was writ­ten not for pub­li­ca­tion, but for pub­lic read­ing. She was known to rewrite and rearrange these pieces between read­ings. In this record­ing, O’Con­nor is using the piece as a prepara­to­ry state­ment for a read­ing of her clas­sic sto­ry, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

We don’t know the date of the record­ing, but the text dif­fers sig­nif­i­cant­ly from the posthu­mous­ly pub­lished ver­sion, so per­haps it is an ear­ly ver­sion. The ear­li­est extant record­ing of the essay that we know of was made on Octo­ber 28, 1960 for the Dorothy Lamar Blount Lec­ture Series at Wes­leyan Col­lege in Macon, Geor­gia. There is also known to be a record­ing of O’Con­nor read­ing the piece on Novem­ber 16, 1962 at East Texas State Uni­ver­si­ty.

To com­pare the record­ed ver­sion to the one even­tu­al­ly pub­lished in Mys­tery and Man­ners: Occa­sion­al Prose, you can click here to open the essay in a new win­dow.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare 1959 Audio: Flan­nery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’

Hear Flan­nery O’Connor’s Short Sto­ry, “Rev­e­la­tion,” Read by Leg­endary His­to­ri­an & Radio Host, Studs Terkel

Flan­nery O’Connor’s “Every­thing That Ris­es Must Con­verge” Read by Estelle Par­sons