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Who really said it

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy

Written by F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896–1940 · American novelist & short-story writer
Verified In copyright

This line appears among the aphorisms in Fitzgerald’s own notebooks, grouped by him under the heading “E” and published posthumously in The Crack-Up (1945), edited by his friend Edmund Wilson.

Last verified 8 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Verified quote & credit

“Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy” Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy. — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (1945)

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Estate of F. Scott Fitzgerald / New Directions Publishing Corp.). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald — American novelist & short-story writer. Theme: "Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

The source

Work
The Crack-Up
Section
The Notebooks (heading “E”)
Editor
Edmund Wilson
Published
1945, New Directions Publishing

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

The notebook text as printed in The Crack-Up reads “I will write you a tragedy” — the wording carried by both WIST and Wikiquote, which cite that 1945 edition. Popular circulation and quote-aggregator sites contract it to the “I’ll” form used as this page’s searched title.

WIST Quotations entry with citation

How we verified this

  • Fitzgerald recorded the line in his private notebooks, kept until his death in 1940.
  • It reached print posthumously in The Crack-Up ↗ (1945), Edmund Wilson’s edited collection of Fitzgerald’s essays, letters, and notebook excerpts.
  • The citation is corroborated by Wikiquote’s Fitzgerald page ↗, which lists it under “Notebooks” with the same source.
  • It is sometimes wrongly sold or captioned as a line from Tender Is the Night, but it does not appear anywhere on Wikiquote’s page for that novel ↗.
In copyright

The line comes from The Crack-Up, first published in 1945 by New Directions — well after the 1931 cutoff for presumptive U.S. public domain — so it remains under copyright, held by Fitzgerald’s estate and his publisher.

Fact-check

Often misattributed

The authorship isn’t in dispute, but the source is often garbled or omitted by quote-aggregator sites.

Tender Is the Night (novel) Wrong work

Some product listings and quote pages present the line as if it were dialogue or narration from Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender Is the Night; it does not appear in the novel’s text, per Wikiquote’s compiled quotations from it ↗.

Unsourced meme quote No citation given

Most social-media and quote-image circulations of the line drop the source entirely, presenting it as a floating Fitzgerald aphorism with no citation, which obscures that it comes from a specific, identifiable book.

The line is genuinely Fitzgerald’s own, from his notebooks as published in The Crack-Up (1945) ↗ — not from any of his novels.

Context

Why it mattered

Fitzgerald jotted this line among the numbered aphorisms of his private notebooks, not in a novel or published essay, and never saw it in print himself — it surfaced five years after his death when Edmund Wilson edited The Crack-Up (1945), a collection of Fitzgerald’s confessional essays, letters, and notebook excerpts.

The line has since taken on a life of its own: it gave its title to Lisa Belkin’s 2005 nonfiction book Show Me a Hero and the 2015 HBO miniseries adapted from it, both about the political battle over public housing desegregation in Yonkers, New York.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

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Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

WIST Quotations citationwist.info

Curated quotation entry citing The Notebooks (E), The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (1945)
F. Scott Fitzgeralden.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote page listing the quote under Notebooks, Notebook E (1945)
Show Me a Heroen.wikipedia.org

Wikipedia article on the HBO miniseries, noting its title derives from this Fitzgerald quotation
The Crack-Upen.wikipedia.org

Wikipedia article on the 1945 Edmund Wilson-edited collection containing Fitzgerald's notebooks
Tender Is the Night quotationsen.wikiquote.org

Confirms the line does not appear among quotations from this frequently mis-cited novel
Quote with source citationazquotes.com

Independent quotation site citing 'The Crack-Up, Note-Books (1945)' as the source

American novelist

About F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald

1896–1940 · American novelist & short-story writer

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is best known for The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), novels that made him the chief chronicler of the Jazz Age. He also kept working notebooks of observations, overheard lines, and aphorisms, which his friend and literary executor Edmund Wilson gathered and published after Fitzgerald’s death in 1940.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “The Notebooks.” In The Crack-Up, edited by Edmund Wilson. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1945.

MLA (9th ed.)

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. “The Notebooks.” The Crack-Up, edited by Edmund Wilson, New Directions Publishing, 1945.

APA (7th ed.)

Fitzgerald, F. S. (1945). The notebooks. In E. Wilson (Ed.), The crack-up. New Directions Publishing.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy’?” Last verified 8 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/show-me-a-hero-and-ill-write-you-a-tragedy

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