Today, we know F. Scott Fitzgerald as one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. Tragically, in his own time, many regarded Fitzgerald as a failure. Sure, he was one of the highest paid writers of his time, but his novels sold poorly, and the critical reviews were precisely that–critical.
This weighed heavily on Fitzgerald, who had a sensitive and vulnerable soul, as many artists do. As Sarah Churchwell, an expert on 20th- and 21st-century American literature and author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, explained on the Daily Stoic podcast:
“He pinned so much personal hope and ambition and desire and sense of his self-worth as an artist on Gatsby. And its comparative failure devastated him. And, in my view, it really precipitated his spiral…With Gatsby, he made this choice that he was going to write a masterpiece, and then it was met with bafflement. And he lost a lot of his self-confidence and a lot of his momentum at that point.”
Fitzgerald was dogged by his inability to practice what Epicteus called the chief task in life: differentiating between what is in your control and what isn’t. And when things didn’t go Fitzgerald’s way, he had trouble coping. After the reception (or lack thereof) of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald began drinking more. He had trouble focusing. He constantly battled thoughts of, what will the critics think of this? What will the public say about that? This headspace makes it hard to write, and consequently Fitzgerald would only finish one more complete novel following Gatsby. Like an athlete who suffers an injury and has to retire in their prime, Fitzgerald left a lot of potential on the table.
If only he could have defined success the way Marcus Aurelius talked about. Real success, real mastery, real sanity, Marcus wrote, means tying your well-being to your own actions. To your effort, not the results. To your judgment, not what the critics say. To what is in your control, not what isn’t. And be tough enough, brave enough, to endure what isn’t in your control.
