F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway: Both towering figures in the history of American literature, the two writers shared a complicated real-life relationship. At times they were friends, at times enemies; often they were drinking buddies, and always they regarded each other with an odd mixture of admiration and jealousy.
Fitzgerald, a few years older and the first to become a literary star, hooked an unpublished young Hemingway up with his editor at Scribner's, helping to launch Hemingway's career. Hemingway called Fitzgerald's talent "as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings." On the other hand, Hemingway got into a nasty war of words with Fitzgerald's wife Zelda, and after Fitzgerald sent a ten-page letter full of mostly-constructive criticism on a draft of A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway offered a not-so-constructive three-word response: "Kiss my ass."
They were both notorious alcoholics, and surely all the booze played its part in the two men's prickly relationship, and in the failed relationships they both maintained with most of the people around them. Despite standing among the giants of American literature, both men ended up essentially drinking themselves to death.
Still, while neither man's biography had a happy ending, both men's novels live on. It's easy to overlook the cranky pettiness that took over their real-life relationship when we've been left with the fictional majesty of The Great Gatsby or For Whom the Bell Tolls. Maybe somewhere in the great hereafter, Hemingway and Fitzgerald are sitting together, sharing a drink and having a laugh. Or a fight. Could be either, really.
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