F Scott Fitzgerald's final bow: Lost Pat Hobby story ‘Double Time' published at last

Indian Express

18-07-2025

For decades, it sat unnoticed in Princeton University's Fitzgerald Papers, a sheaf of untitled, unassuming pages, misfiled and forgotten. Now, more than 80 years after it was written, a long-lost story from F Scott Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby series has surfaced. Titled Double Time for Pat Hobby, it made its public debut this summer as part of The New Yorker's 2025 Flash Fiction series.
The discovery feels laced with Fitzgeraldian irony: a half-forgotten story about a washed-up Hollywood hack, rescued from obscurity long after its creator's death. Written in 1940, just months before Fitzgerald's own curtain call, Double Time bears all the hallmarks of the Hobby stories: grim humor, showbiz sleaze, and faded glamour.
The Pat Hobby stories, 17 in total, written during Fitzgerald's late, lean years in Hollywood, were his final sustained body of work. Once the golden boy of the Jazz Age, he had become a hired pen in an industry that barely tolerated him. Arnold Gingrich, his editor at Esquire, later recalled, Fitzgerald treated the Hobby stories as 'a collective entity,' obsessively rearranging them to suggest a loose continuity, writes Nasrullah Mambrol, the founder of literariness.org. But they were ultimately fragmented, episodic sketches, each tale resetting the clock on Pat's slow-motion downfall.
Pat Hobby himself is a 49-year-old has-been, a studio-era barnacle clinging to a world that has moved on. He is lazy, bitter, conniving, and autobiographical. If Gatsby was the dreamer and Nick the observer, Pat is the survivor, trapped in a purgatory of bad scripts and worse luck. He does not chase green lights; he scams per diems.
In Double Time, Pat lands not one gig but two, a fluke windfall that he juggles with all the grace of a con man on borrowed time. Thanks to a chance encounter at Santa Anita racetrack, he finds himself working (loosely defined) for two studios at once, bouncing between lots, dodging responsibility, and rationing his gin. The ruse falls apart in an ending that is farcical and fatalistic. He is undone not by his incompetence, but by a studio doctor who spots him through a hole in the wall.
Fitzgerald famously wrote the Hobby stories for money. He sweated over every revision, telegramming edits even as his health declined and his debts mounted. The result is an uneven but fascinating body of work. Some stories read like polished vignettes, others like hurried sketches. Collectively, they signal a shift in Fitzgerald's style: more clipped, less lyrical, as if anticipating the cool realism of the postwar novel.
For years, critics dismissed the Hobby tales as minor works, epilogues to a once-brilliant career. But that verdict is beginning to turn. Recent scholarship has begun to reevaluate them as satirical portraits of the Hollywood machine, or even experiments in self-erasure. Pat Hobby may be a loser, but he is also a survivor, a stand-in for the author who created him, doggedly rewriting his own decline.
The credit for Double Time's resurrection goes to Anne Margaret Daniel, a literary scholar and longtime Fitzgerald excavator, who edited a collection of previously unpublished stories by Fitzgerald, I'd Die for You and Other Lost Stories (Scribner, 2017). The manuscript had been hiding in plain sight within the Fitzgerald archives at Princeton, where the author began his literary career as an undergraduate. He never graduated, distracted by writing, romance, and war, but Princeton remained an emotional anchor. That Double Time should reemerge here feels fitting.
The university has been digitising its Fitzgerald holdings in recent years, including fragments such as the 'Ur-Gatsby' draft (discarded early version of The Great Gatsby) and the corrected Trimalchio galleys (original galley proofs of The Great Gatsby, which were initially titled Trimalchio). Now, Double Time, the missing piece of the Fitzgerald mosaic, joins the ranks.
Double Time reads like a noir-tinged screwball comedy, full of misdirection. Pat Hobby is too delusional to be tragic and too pitiful to be heroic. But Fitzgerald gives him dignity as even if success remains elusive, he persists.
In 2025, Pat feels relevant. One can sneak glimpses of him in a freelancer faking productivity, the veteran pushed aside by younger talent. That Fitzgerald wrote him in the shadow of his own downfall only sharpens the resonance.
Fitzgerald once claimed there are no second acts in American lives. Pat Hobby, and perhaps Fitzgerald himself, show that it is perhaps not true. Double Time may be their last bow, but they remain onstage.
Aishwarya Khosla is a journalist currently serving as Deputy Copy Editor at The Indian Express. Her writings examine the interplay of culture, identity, and politics.
She began her career at the Hindustan Times, where she covered books, theatre, culture, and the Punjabi diaspora. Her editorial expertise spans the Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Punjab and Online desks.
She was the recipient of the The Nehru Fellowship in Politics and Elections, where she studied political campaigns, policy research, political strategy and communications for a year.
She pens The Indian Express newsletter, Meanwhile, Back Home.
Write to her at [e-mail] or [e-mail]. You can follow her on Instagram: @ink_and_ideology, and X: @KhoslaAishwarya. ... Read More