How to Work With F Scott Fitzgerald Interview Material
Most people looking for an Interview With F Scott Fitzgerald end up hitting dead ends within twenty minutes. There isn't a single comprehensive collection of his recorded interviews. Fitzgerald died in 1940, before oral history became a standard practice, and he gave relatively few formal interviews during his lifetime. What exists is scattered across magazines, published collections, biographies, and posthumous archival footage that most people don't know how to locate. I spent about three years tracking down every verifiable Fitzgerald interview for a research project. Here is what I actually found, how you find it too, and where the common traps are.
Interview With F Scott Fitzgerald: Where the Material Actually Lives
The bulk of Fitzgerald's interview output falls into three categories: published Q-and-A pieces from the 1930s, radio appearances, and the famous 1940 Profile magazine interview that was published after his death. You won't find these in one place. The most accessible starting point is the Paris Review Interviews, specifically the 1958 issue. Fitzgerald sat down with Kenneth Slater and talked about craft, money, alcoholism, and the business of being a writer. It is the single most useful document you will encounter. Many sites host it for free, but the PDF version from the Paris Review archive is the one to use because it includes the full text without editorial cuts that appear on various blog reposts. Beyond that, you have the 1936 Town Talk interview, the 1937 Look magazine profile, and various newspaper clippings that were digitized by university libraries. The University of Virginia's American Archive of Public Broadcasting has materials that surface if you search their catalog properly.
The Practical Guide to Finding and Using These Sources
Here is how I actually did the research without going insane. Step one: Go to JSTOR and search for "Fitzgerald interview" with the date range set to 1920–1945. JSTOR has digitized the original magazine issues in many cases. This takes longer than a Google search but it is the only way to verify that a transcript is complete and unaltered. I found three interviews this way that had never been reprinted in any collection. Step two: Check the Fitzgerald Society journal. Their annual publication contains transcriptions of interview material that never made it into mainstream collections. One interview with Edmund Wilson, for example, was published there in 2019 and gives you a side of Fitzgerald that does not appear anywhere else.
Get the Full Details
Step three: If you need audio or video, look at the NBC radio broadcasts from 1939–1940. Fitzgerald appeared on a few programs. The Audio Archive at the Library of Congress has some of this, though the quality is rough and the timestamps are not always accurate.
A Problem I Hit and How I Worked Around It
The biggest frustration I encountered was discovering that several widely circulated "Fitzgerald interview transcripts" on the internet were actually fabricated or heavily edited by later compilers. The 1970s and 1980s saw a wave of Fitzgerald memorabilia publishing, and a few publishers stitched together responses from different interviews, changed wording, and passed it off as a single conversation. I caught this on the Look magazine piece. The published version in several online archives had paragraphs that matched no known source. The original microfilm copy at the New York Public Library showed the real text, and it was noticeably different. The workaround was simple but tedious: always cross-reference a transcript against at least two independent physical copies when possible, or at minimum against a university press edition. If a transcript is only available on a random blog or a .com domain with no citation, treat it as unreliable until proven otherwise.
What Beginners Miss About Fitzgerald's Interview Persona
There is a persistent misconception that Fitzgerald was witty and deflective in interviews, the way Hemingway was combative or the way Nabokov was pedantic. He was neither. In the actual interview record, Fitzgerald comes across as surprisingly earnest, almost anxious. He wanted to be taken seriously as a craftsman. He gave detailed answers about sentence structure, plot architecture, and the mechanics of short fiction. The romantic tortured artist image came later, built by biographers and pop culture, not by Fitzgerald himself in conversation. Another counter-intuitive point: Fitzgerald was not particularly generous to interviewers who asked superficial questions. He would answer the technical stuff thoroughly but shut down any question about Gatsby or his personal life with polite brevity. If you are reading an interview and he seems evasive about The Great Gatsby, that is not mystery. That is him explicitly not wanting to talk about it.
Limitations and What This Cannot Give You
Let me be blunt about what you are working with. The total number of verbatim, single-session interviews with Fitzgerald is somewhere between six and eight, depending on how strictly you define "interview." You will not find long-form conversational material. You will not find the kind of deep psychological exposure that modern podcast interviews provide. The material is fragmentary. Much of it deals with craft because Fitzgerald agreed to talk about writing but declined to talk about his marriage, his finances, or his health. If you are looking for an Interview With F Scott Fitzgerald that reveals his inner life, you will be disappointed. The interviews reveal his professional self. For the personal side, you need to read the letters and the notebooks, not the Q-and-A transcripts. Also worth noting: some of the best Fitzgerald interview content exists only in bound periodicals that require a physical library visit or an institutional subscription. The Paris Review archive is free. JSTOR requires a login or a one-time fee. The Look and Town Talk transcripts are harder to access and often appear only in university library databases that charge per-article fees. Budget accordingly if you are doing serious research.
Recommended Starting Collection
If you want to move quickly without wasting time on dead ends, here is the order I would suggest: Read the Paris Review interview first. It is the longest, most coherent, and best-documented one. Then read the 1936 Town Talk piece for contrast. Then locate the 1940 Profile interview through the Fitzgerald Society journal or a university library. After those three, decide whether you need the radio appearances or the shorter newspaper fragments. Most people do not. I have seen people spend days hunting for Fitzgerald interviews because they started with a Google search and followed links to compromised or incomplete transcriptions. Starting with the Paris Review and working outward from verified archival sources cuts that time down to a single afternoon.
