"good prose"

last written words of Scott Fitzgerald

Jeffrey Meyers, in the biography pictured above, writes that novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at 3:00pm, Saturday, December 21, 1940. Death came to the 44 year old in the West Hollywood apartment of his friend Sheilah Graham as he sat in an armchair eating a candy bar and making notes on an article titled “An Analytical Long-Range View of the 1940 Football Team” in the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

I discovered that Fitzgerald’s copy of the Weekly was among papers Graham donated to Princeton University. Contacting the archives, I learned that the following paragraph of the article was circled:

“Faced with such men as Reagan [a Penn player], Arico of Dartmouth, Willoughby of Yale, or Mazur of Army, a player has his work cut out for him. The first prerequisite of a good tackler is his desire to tackle. You must want to tackle. After that it is a matter of training and the ability to think quickly and act quickly.”

Penciled in the margin, in Fitzgerald’s unmistakable handwriting, were two words: “good prose.”

Interesting that these were the last words written by a writer known for his good prose.

Earlier this year I visited Fitzgerald’s grave in St. Marys Catholic Cemetery, Rockville, Maryland.

May he rest in peace.

Fitzgerald was initially buried in Rockville Cemetery but was transferred to St. Marys in 1975 — but that’s a story (and it’s a good one) for another time.