A Letter From F. Scott Fitzgerald

The more things change, old sport, the more they stay the same.

Portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald taken in 1929 by photographer Nickolas Muray, four years after the publication of his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby.

Dear MJ,

I’ve been meaning to write, for decades actually. But when I saw you lumbering around my old Saint Paul, Minnesota, neighborhood recently—walking up and down Summit Avenue, gawking at its Victorian mansions with pristine lawns like Augusta fairways—I decided the time was right.

Procrastinator that I am—and no, there is no booze in the afterlife, mercifully—I put it off a few more days until the deadly collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, which seemed, to me at least, eerily analogous to my own fatal collapse in December 1940, the main difference being I fell into a river of gin. (Fun fact: Francis Scott Key, my namesake—and second cousin three times removed on my father’s side—was the man solely responsible for the dreadful and nearly unsingable “Star-Spangled Banner” lyrics.)

At any rate, today I put pen to paper with t…