If there’s an afterlife and F. Scott Fitzgerald is in it, he must be furious he left the land of the living so soon. Since he died in December, 1940, when he was just 44, he’s had some of the best years of his publishing career. New collections of stories and essays! A new piece in the New Yorker! Most of a novel, heralded as brilliant! Not to mention the movie adaptations and the millions of copies of The Great Gatsby sold to high school and college students! Can you imagine the royalties he’s missed out on? Plus, he’s finally a genius.
This isn’t the first time Gulli’s found and published previously unknown work by a famous dead author. One of his hobbies is visiting the archives of writers he admires and going through their papers. “It’s a fun, wonderful thing,” he says. “As a kid, my greatest wish was to meet great writers.” He’s discovered short stories by James M. Cain, John Steinbeck, Joseph Heller, and Tennessee Williams, an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson, and an article by H.G. Wells. But he says “Temperature” is special.
