Considered one of the finest American writers of the twentieth century, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was the author of various novels and short stories chronicling life in the US during the Roaring Twenties.

A Hollywood hack who has fallen on hard times since the end of the Silent Era, Pat Hobby spends his time hanging out in the studio lot attempting to devise schemes - such as pressing his secretary for blackmail material against a studio executive - to get more work and earn on-screen credits. Oblivious to his own shortcomings and filled with feelings of self-importance, he embarks on a course towards ever-increasing humiliation, suffering setbacks on both the professional and romantic fronts.

A vivid account of Hollywood and its politics and hierarchies, these stories - which draw from Fitzgerald's own travails as a screenwriter - were first printed in Esquire, although they were written with a view to being published as a cohesive volume.

He was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a generation.