F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald was the chronicler of the Jazz Age, author of This Side of Paradise (1920), The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934). Broke and out of fashion by the late 1930s, he moved to Hollywood to write for the studios and lived his last years with the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, who found him after his fatal heart attack in December 1940. He was an obsessive line-editor of his own prose and of hers — which is exactly the setting in which this piece of advice was handed over.