Hubris was a central theme underlying many Greek tragedies and, later, Shakespearean plays. Mythological victims of fatal pride included Agamemnon, Achilles, Sisyphus, and Icarus. The last was the son of Daedalus, the brilliant architect of King Minos’ labyrinth. Before escaping his maze and the Minotaur on wax wings, he precautioned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, but the daring young man did so anyway and was swallowed by the sea. Soaring for Olympus themselves, more than a few literary geniuses have come to tragic ends too.

“This sickness to express oneself: What is it?” wondered the tormented but inexhaustible poet, playwright, essayist and novelist, Jean Cocteau.

Ventured From Here to Eternity’s James Jones, "The quality which makes a man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and is masochistic.”

The author was likely remembering the ambitious Freud’s own pronouncement after many titles of his own such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “Writers write for fame, wealth, power, and the love of women.”

Ignoring the likes of the Brontes, the two Georges (Eliot and Sand), and others, the misogynist father of psychoanalysis omitted the greatest motivation for the most determined aerialists such as himself: immortality. Unlike most other professions, literature can promise immortality, at least for a while. Few writers in history enjoyed such status in their own lives until the birth of literary stars in the eighteenth and nineteen centuries – the few such as Voltaire, Hugo, Balzac, Kipling, and Dickens.

Other Europeans followed in their wake, but literary celebrity didn’t reach full blossom until the arrival in the star-obsessed America of three supremely ambitious writers, the fathers of what would become known as The Great American Novel. Launching their own careers in the wake of the Wright Brothers, all were born within three years of each other, all but one were Nobel laureates, and all suffered more than full measure of their profession’s paradise, purgatory, and hell.

***

When F. Scott Fitzgerald was still in the womb, his two sisters, ages 1 and 3, died in an epidemic. Named after one, he said: “I think I started then to be a writer.”

Twenty years later, he was working for the literary magazine at Princeton. Here, one classmate criticized him for “narcissistic self-absorption,” and another for “impenetrable egotism.” Dropping out of the university, Fitzgerald penned The Romantic Egoist. But his Princeton pal, Charles Scribner, rejected the autobiographical novel. Scott took a $35 a week New York ad agency job, writing signs for streetcars, and soon quit. “I was a failure—mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer,” he recalled. “I got roaring weeping drunk on my last penny and went home.”

Back at his parents’ house, Scott wallpapered his room with 122 rejection slips for his short stories, sketches, and jokes, later composing “One Hundred False Starts” about this period. His other Princeton pal, Edmund Wilson, the future dean of American criticism, consoled him: “I believe you might become a very popular trashy novelist without much difficulty.” By this time the aspiring young novelist confessed to “developing a two-cylinder inferiority complex.”

But, rolling with the punches, Fitzgerald turned his rejected novel into This Side of Paradise. After Scribner’s Maxwell Perkins released it in 1920, the twenty-four-year-old shouted from a downtown hotel window, ““I am Voltaire! I am Rousseau!”

Not only had he realized his dream of early acclaim, his dream girl, Zelda, the flamboyant southern belle, had agreed to marry him because of it. He spent the rest of his life drunkenly chasing that first high -- jumping into fountains, driving his editor Max Perkins into a pond, and spitting one-hundred-franc notes from his mouth along the Montparnasse -- only to break down again because he could never catch it. He had even predicted this reversal of fate after the initial euphoria of his Paradise publication wore off: “I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”

In 1919, before his breakthrough, Fitzgerald earned $879. In 1920, after the release of Paradise, he made $18,000, ten times more than the average American. By the mid-twenties, with novel royalties plus story and movie-right sales, his income doubled. But, to support his new Gatsbyesque lifestyle with his insatiable Daisy, he borrowed large sums from Perkins and his agent, Harold Ober.

No small share of the fund was for 80-proof inspiration. “Drink heightens my emotions,” Scott confessed. “Any stories I wrote when sober were stupid.” Though he called drinking “a slow death,” by way of proving his commitment to the Dionysiac muse, he introduced himself to strangers as an alcoholic. Meanwhile, at bars and parties, he challenged his colleagues: “Can you name a single American artist except James and Whistler who didn’t die of drink?”

Though his second and third novels -- The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) and The Great Gatsby (1925) -- enjoyed critical acclaim, sales were disappointing. By 1927 his annual royalties had dropped to $153, and two years later to $32. 

By 1929, unable to finish a follow-up novel, Scott wrote to his then prosperous friend, Ernest Hemingway: “Perhaps the house will burn down with the ms. and preferably me in it.” Later he published an essay about his creative struggles: “One Hundred False Starts.” Teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and alcohol-fueled insanity, he followed the confessional up with a second, “The Crack Up,” which opened with the line: “All life is a process of breaking down.”

By this time, Hemingway was losing patience with him. “He seems to almost take pride in his shamelessness of defeat,” America’s new heavyweight novelist wrote their editor, Perkins. “He had a marvelous talent and the thing is to use it – not whine in public.” Earlier he’d made light of his colleague’s insecurities by sending him a poem “Lines to be Read at the Casting of Scott Fitzgerald’s Balls into the Sea from Eden Rock.”

As Fitzgerald’s fortunes fell and Hemingway’s rose with three glorified novels, Scott lost hope for their personal and professional relationship, “I could talk with the authority of failure—Ernest, with the authority of success,” he said. “We could never sit across the table again.”

His brutally competitive and acerbic colleague began publicly badmouthing him. “Please lay off me in print,” he wrote Ernest after the publication of the Crack-up. “If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse.”

After nine years of countless false starts, Fitzgerald released Tender is the Night in 1934. This autobiographical swan song dramatized his corrosive relationship with Zelda, their mutual infidelities, her descent into madness, and his into violent alcoholism. Like its predecessors, this novel which again plumbed the depths of stunningly superficial socialites, was well reviewed but failed to return its author to financial security.

Though he said he “hated the place like poison,” to stay afloat Scott fell into the black hole of terminal literary legends: Hollywood. Here he confessed to “whoring” himself at MGM for $1,000 weekly, adapting for the screen such bestsellers as Gone with the Wind and Sex and the Single Girl. Proving that, indeed, there were no “second acts in American lives,” at least in his case, his scripts were shelved or uncredited and his contract cancelled. He tried to end it all with pills, then morphine, only to confess afterwards that he was a “even a failure at suicide.”

All that was left to the great novelist now was his monogamous relationship with the bottle.  “He was a vicious drunk, one of the worst I’ve ever seen,” said his last mistress, the Hollywood columnist, Sheilah Graham, with the bruises to prove it. She also recalled his umpteenth hospital dry-out: “In 1935 he saw beetles and pink mice scurrying all over him and elephants dancing on the ceiling.” Even so, detox proved impossible for him: “I couldn’t seem to get sober enough to tolerate being sober.”

Five years later, just before Christmas – his liver and lungs shot – Scott suffered his third heart attack and perished, leaving his last novel, The Last Tycoon, unfinished. His former lover, Dorothy Parker, among the handful at his wake, quoted the words of Jay Gatsby’s own father at his murdered son’s unattended burial: “Poor son of a bitch.”

In his first will, Fitzgerald had called for a grand send-off “in accordance with my station,” but had later amended the request to “the cheapest possible funeral.” In the final year of his life, he earned $33 in royalties and his work was all but forgotten.

***

Just before Fitzgerald died, Ernest Hemingway released A Farewell to Arms which became an overnight sensation and a Book-of-the-Month club selection. Though Papa hadn’t seen his friend in three years, he sent him a copy of the novel, inscribed: To Scott with affection and esteem. Neither were quite true, as the recipient knew. Nevertheless, he wrote back with congratulations and praise. But, in his notebook, he dismissed Papa’s war novel as “a thoroughly superficial book… with all the profundity of [Daphne Du Maurier's best-selling] Rebecca.”

Scott dared not reveal his true feelings to his notoriously prickly and vindictive colleague though he had helped launch his career, recommending his first novella, The Torrents of Spring, to Charles Scribner in 1926.

The first benefactors of the young novelist -- a Kansas City Star cub journalist turned Red Cross ambulance driver – were other “Lost Generation” American expatriates in Paris: Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, and Ford Maddox Ford.

Ford’s TransAtlantic Review accepted Hemingway’s first stories rejected by Redbook and the Saturday Evening Post.  But the aspiring author felt the meager run killed his chances of landing an immediate book deal and that, in the meantime, he would be plagiarized and forgotten. “I will have to quit writing and will never have a book published,” he wrote his other editorial patron, Pound. “I feel cheerful as hell. Those goddamn bastards!” He denounced Ford to Gertrude Stein as “a liar and a crook.”

Following the TransAtlantic debut, Sherwood Anderson persuaded his publisher, Boni and Liveright, to release In Our Time. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am for getting myself published,” Ernest wrote the esteemed author of Winesburg, Ohio. His sponsor had given him a “crackerjack” review, though he had trashed his, Anderson’s, own new title, Many Marriages, the year before. “Besides, all criticism is shit anyway,” Ernest ingratiated. “Nobody knows anything about it except yourself.”

Boni held first-refusal rights for his follow-up title. But, by this time, Fitzgerald had put a word in for Papa with his own, more prestigious house, Scribner. So, to ensure Boni’s rejection, freeing him to jump ship, Hemingway submitted The Torrents of Spring, a hatchet job on the house star, Anderson, his benefactor.

“Wrote it to destroy Sherwood and various others,” he told Pound. “…. It’s the first really adult thing I’ve done. Jesus Christ, it is funny.”

Sherwood didn’t get the joke. “There is the desire always to kill,” he told his friend Gertrude Stein. “He cannot bear the thought of any other men as Artists… He wants to occupy the entire field.” 

As a result of the betrayal, Stein, the godmother to Hemingway’s son, ostracized the ingrate from her salon. After the success of The Sun also Rises, the former friends took off the gloves. Gertrude said Ernest learned how to write from her; Ernest said Gertrude learned how to write from him. Hitting below the belt, she called him “fragile” and “yellow,” and he hit lower still with “a bitch is a bitch is a bitch.” Finally, in a masterful stroke of projection, he told his remaining allies: “I swear she was damned nice before she got ambitious.”

Hemingway’s difficulty with women began when his mother, Grace -- an opera singer who ran the family household and earned far more than her henpecked physician husband – outfitted her 3-year-old-boy in pink dresses while calling him “Sweetie’s Dutch Dolly,” inspiring him to later say: “She hated my guts and I hated hers.” Overcompensating for his early humiliations, he called himself “Papa,” became a boxer, a bullfighting aficionado, a gun-toting sportsman, and a war journalist. But it was no small irony that his first alter-ego hero in The Sun Also Rises was a wounded, impotent veteran.  Only a year after the publication of this acclaimed roman a clef, his father committed suicide and, blaming his emasculating mother, Ernest confessed: "My life was more or less shot out from under me.”

Following this first novel with the even more popular, A Farewell to Arms, Papa now felt in a position to pontificate as a literary exemplar: “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector.”

At this point, the shitstorm from his detractors doubled. Sinclair Lewis, America’s first Nobel laureate in Literature, called him “a monosyllabic simpleton.” H.L. Mencken dismissed him as a “bad boy afraid of the dark.” Virginia Wolfe found his characters “flat as cardboard… crude… and unreal.” And even his own implacable mother, Grace, called In Our Time “filth” and mailed it back to him.

Even so, Papa still had many enthusiastic fans, not least of whom was his first wife, Hadley, who said, “Sometimes when I wake up and see his beautiful face, I think I’m sleeping with Christ.” He lived off her trust until the success of The Sun Also Rises, then divorced her and married the wealthy Vanity Fair writer, Pauline Pfeiffer. After a decade together, his growing fame began to drive them apart.

“I wish we could stop it all now, the prestige, the possessions, the position, the knowledge,” Pauline told him. Soon after divorcing her he married fellow war journalist, Martha Gellhorn, who came to feel the same way as her predecessor, prompting Papa to say: “If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.” At last, he tied the knot with his fourth wife, Mary, who said: "I wanted him to be the Master, to be stronger and cleverer than I; to remember constantly how big he was and how small I was."

During the second and third marriages, Papa became the first writer to grace the covers of Life, Look, and Time magazines. Meanwhile, he gave his critics FYI’s on his ascent to the literary stratosphere. “In writing I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus. If they don’t understand that, to hell with them.” Since, indeed, many critics didn’t, he dispensed with euphemism: “I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.”

Having established his divine credentials, he went mano e mano with the atheists. He called Fitzgerald “a rummy and a liar”; Thomas Wolfe “a glandular giant with the guts of three mice”; Faulkner a “strange phony… and a no-good son of a bitch”; and told Charles Scribner he hoped the new boy on the bestseller block, James Jones, would “kill himself as soon as it does not damage your sales.”

In his otherwise laudatory and diplomatic memoir, Scribner called Hemingway “a two-timer and not above despicable tricks,” adding that working with him was “like being strapped to an electric chair.” 

When even A Farewell to Arms failed to disarm his critics, Papa vented to Max Perkins: “You see what they can’t get over is 1. That I am [his italics] a man. 2. That I can beat the shit out of any of them. 3. That I can write. The last hurts them the worst. But they don‘t like any of it. But Papa will make them like it.”

But he failed to make them like his follow-up, The Green Hills of Africa (1935). Now the pugilist with a glass jaw wanted to do more than KO his detractors. “I would like to take a tommy gun and open up at 21 [Club] or in the N.R. [New Republic] offices or any place you name and give shitdom a few martyrs and include myself,” he wrote his still steadfast friend, John Dos Passos, though he considered him a money-grubbing “pilot fish.”

Ezra Pound was another long-suffering ally. But when he hit Hemingway’s jugular, saying “he sold himself for the God Almighty dollar,” Papa was quick to defend his artistic purity: “Publicity, admiration, adulation, or simply being fashionable are all worthless and are extremely harmful if one is susceptible to them.” Economizing on modifiers, as was his forte, the magazine cover writer/sportsman added: “If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.”

Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway lubricated the muse more than most. He called booze the “Giant Killer.” But only for lesser giants than himself, despite the fact that as early as 1937 his doctor told him to dry out or die. “Write drunk, edit sober,” had always been his motto. Otherwise, Papa said he drank “to make people more interesting.” So, as people became less and less interesting to him, especially critics, his habit increased. Meanwhile, the gestation of his novels -- eleven years between Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, then another eleven between that and The Old Man and the Sea -- required more and more courage, too.

When Faulkner won the Nobel in 1950, Hemingway wrote his confidante, Harvey Breit, “As long as I’m alive he has to drink to feel good about having it.” Though he insisted he had “no respect for the institution,” when he himself was awarded the Holy Grail four years later he called to his wife, Mary, “My Kitten, I’ve got that thing!” But, convalescing from another near fatal bush plane crash at the time, Papa had Swedish ambassador, John Cabot, deliver his acceptance and collect his check. 

His last novel, The Old Man and the Sea, helped earn him the Nobel. He wrote a friend that the novella would “destroy the school of criticism that claims I can write about nothing except myself.” But was his old man’s fate so different? 

Santiago hooked a trophy marlin, only to fruitlessly try to fight off sharks that stripped it to the skeleton. Allegorically, the literary predators whom Papa blamed for savaging his magnificent work? Or his mental deterioration which was making it harder and harder to even land trophies? And why such a cruel fate: because Santiago, like Papa, had “violated his luck” by going too far out “beyond all people in the world”?

Though some felt Hemingway had never graduated from being a voyeuristic journalist of war, death, and dangerous sport, he fancied himself as one of literature’s greatest innovators in the age of Virginia Wolfe and James Joyce. Perhaps the most stinging rebuke of his minimalist work by a few was that it was derivative – a Stephen Crane/Mark Twain hybrid peopled with unreflective, self-absorbed, alter-ego characters. But, unlike them, he was indeed remarkable for being the first author to turn simplicity into an affectation.

After his brief Old Man and the Sea revival, an exhausted, embittered Hemingway couldn’t drink his way into a short story or even an inauguration piece for JFK. He attributed the final block not to the Giant Killer, depression, and escalating paranoia, but to the Mayo Clinic electro-shock treatments which he said, “put me out of business.” 

“Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it,” he told the Paris Review in 1958. But, for him, as with most serious artists, the inability to further create is death. 

During a fallow period in 1936, he wrote the Lost Generation bon vivant and diva, Sarah Murphy, that he was thinking of “blowing my lousy head off.” Later, he told Ava Gardner how he avoided doing so: “I spent a lot of time killing animals and fish so I won’t kill myself.” An upbeat attitude also helped him persevere. “The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over," he explained. His second reason was expressed by his alter-ego, Robert Jordan, the dynamiter and martyr of For Whom the Bell Tolls: "You have to be awfully occupied with yourself to do a thing like that."

By the early sixties, however, life was showing no signs of getting swell again or less self-obsessed for Hemingway. He had suffered many near fatal accidents during his career, including air crashes, but now he seemed to be in an irreversible dive. While traveling for his final shock treatments, he tried to walk into the propellers of an airplane. Returning from the hospital to his Idaho hunting lodge, he took early retirement just as his physician father had done years before. Recalling the tragic incident, Ernest, whose obsessive themes were courage and heroism, later said: “My father was a coward. He shot himself without necessity.”

***

When asked by a friend for his reaction to Hemingway’s suicide, the As I Lay Dying author, William Faulkner, replied: “I don’t like a man who takes the short way home.”

The two Nobel laureates had met once and had exchanged only a few brief, guarded letters in the forties. Though polite with one another and even faintly complimentary, each was well aware of the other’s harsh assessments. Faulkner, speaking to a University of Mississippi class of his rival who prided himself in his Santiago fortitude above all, declared: “Hemingway has no courage… and has never crawled out on a limb.”

For his part, the most celebrated novelist of the South certainly had crawled out on limbs throughout his career and had the bruises to prove it.

After being rejected by the U.S. Army, the 5’5”, 125-pound Faulkner did a brief stint in the Canadian Air force. Afterwards, he published his first story, “Landing in Luck,” about a cadet who nearly crashes on his first solo flight. As a boy, William and his brothers, infatuated with the Wright brothers, had made their own flying contraptions and had taken turns as flight-test dummies. Twenty years later, he spent his first royalties on a single-engine Waco Cruiser. His youngest brother, Dean, took it up and died in a crash. The tragedy would haunt William for the rest of his life.

After the publication of his first story, Faulkner indeed landed in literary luck. He appealed to his fellow southerner, Sherwood Anderson, for help launching his first novel, and the veteran did what he’d done for Hemingway. He sent the book to his publisher, Boni and Liverwright, and Soldiers’ Pay was released to critical acclaim in 1926.

Like his colleagues, from an early age Faulkner was attracted to the world’s most purgatorial profession.  “I want to be a writer like my great-grandaddy,” he told his 3rd grade teacher in Oxford. Colonel W.C. Faulkner, the author of The White Rose of Memphis, had begun his own career as a man of action, not words. As a Mexican American war hero, W.C. had had three fingers blown off by a cannon ball; as a hard drinking railroad tycoon turned Mississippi statesman he’d knifed a rival who had blocked his membership in the Knights of Temperance, only in the end to be fatally shot himself by his railroad partner whom he had jilted. 

The year after the release of Soldiers’ Pay, William sent Boni Flags in the Dust. “At last, and certainly, I have written THE book. I believe it is the damdest best book you’ll look at this year,” he wrote his editor. Ordering the penniless author to return his $200 advance, the editor replied: “The story really doesn’t get anywhere and has a thousand loose ends. You don’t seem to have any story to tell.”

Faulkner tried to shrug off the rejection but felt “like a parent who is told that its child is a thief or an idiot or a leper,” he wrote a friend. “I hid my own eyes in the fury of denial.” His mother, Maude, wrote Boni, begged them to reconsider. They wouldn’t. Faulkner was furious, thinking he was finished. Thus began his own consumptive affair with the Giant Killer.

From the twenties on, Anderson, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway made more from their short fiction than from their novels -- up to $4,000 per piece from Harpers, Colliers, American Mercury, or the Saturday Evening Post. So, Faulkner’s decided to join the bandwagon. But all his magazine submissions were rejected.

His poetry met with the same fate. At last -- urged on by his champion, Phil Stone, who had introduced him to Anderson – Faulkner signed his name to John Clane’s “Lines from a Northampton Asylum” and submitted it to The New Republic. The famous poem was rejected. Upping the ante, he copied “Kublai Khan” and submitted it under the correct name, Samuel T. Coleridge.

“We like your poem, Mr. Coleridge, but we don’t think it gets anywhere much,” the editors wrote back.

By this time, Stone, through connections with a U.S. senator, had secured his friend a job in the Oxford post office where he read, played poker, and got drunk. After being fired, Faulkner declared: “Thank God I won ‘t ever have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.” Of his hunt for a new job, he later told The Paris Review: “The best job that was ever offered to me was to become the landlord of a brothel…  It’s the perfect milieu for an artist.”

He might have taken it had the publishing gods not smiled on The Sound and Fury, then As I Lay Dying. “I have created quite a sensation,” the ex-postmaster wrote to his wife, Estelle, during a 1931 publishing junket to New York. “I have learned with astonishment that I am now the most important figure in American letters.” Giddy with success, he declared: “I’m the best in America by God!”

But he was still strapped for cash. Hoping to hit the jackpot, he wrote Sanctuary, dedicating the title to Sherwood Anderson. Alarmed by the Southern gothic potboiler peppered with rape, murder, and lynching, Faulkner’s editor wrote: “Good God, I can’t publish this. We’d both be in jail!”

Black Sun Press, a Parisian vanity house bankrolled by expat American poet and lush, Harry Crosby, took a chance on Sanctuary, as it had with other scandalous work from Wilde, Pound, and Joyce.

In a final attempt to cash in on his hard-won fame, Faulkner joined the stampede to Hollywood though he, like Fitzgerald, hated the place like poison. Arriving there in 1932, he too earned a $1,000 a week on scripts. Jack Warner of Warner Bros. later boasted that he paid the greatest American novelist hardly enough to cover his bar tabs. By 1941, the author told his Random House publisher, Bennett Cerf, he only had 60¢ in his pocket and needed $100 to avoid electric shut-off.

By this time, Faulkner, suffering alcoholic seizures, had become a regular in electro-shock sanitoriums. By the fifties, he was being hospitalized every three months. But he continued to assure his editors, “When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there’s no stopping me.” When the doctors tried to dry up his fix anyway, he protested, “Pouring out liquor is like burning books!”

Despite their disagreements, Faulkner and many of his male colleagues were on the same page regarding the benefits of WUI writing. So, one wonders: How many novels of 20th Century Golden Age would have been created if not for literary doping? Hemingway argued that Faulkner’s talent, like Fitzgerald’s and so many others, had been “lost in the sauce.” But his rival’s liver lasted three more years than his own.

The chronicler of Yoknapatawpha County completed his three greatest titles – The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom Absalom! – in seven years. A decade after the last, he told his university students, “I feel I’m written out. I don’t think I’ll write much more.” Two years later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize and he begrudgingly attending the ceremony. Returning from Stockholm, he refused President Kennedy’s invitation for a celebratory White House dinner, saying: “I’m too old at my age to travel that far to eat with strangers.” 

Earlier, when the eminent critic, Malcolm Cowley, asked permission to do biographical essay for The Portable Faulkner collection, the author responded: “This is not for me. I will protest to the last. It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history.”

By this time, one of Faulkner’s only pleasures was fox hunting and RUI horseback riding, though he had been thrown and badly injured many times. After a particularly bad fall, he was carried to his dry-out alma mater, Wright's Sanatorium, for the last time. At age 64, he suffered a fatal heart attack here on his grandfather, the Colonel’s, birthday. Taking “the short way home,” Hemingway had closed his own books almost exactly a year prior.

***

All three artists reserved the utmost respect for Gustave Flaubert. The perfectionist writer, ever in search of “le mot juste” – the right word -- declared: “You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.” Thus, the father of Madam Bovary, the suicide, famously concluded: “Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living.” 

The American trinity surely agreed, though each had enjoyed far more acclaim and success in their own lifetimes than their French predecessor who, impoverished and suffering from epilepsy and syphilis, closed his books at age 59. “He dreamed of funeral love, but dreams crumble and the tomb abides,” Flaubert had written not long before his fatal stroke. And so, his American successors were grounded too, but their names still abide in syllabuses and literary histories.

William Faulkner was borne by his pallbearer brothers to the family plot in Oxford’s St. Peter's Cemetery where the minister read, fittingly, from the Book of Job. Faulkner had requested that his epitaph simply read: He made the books and he died. Instead, his long-suffering widow, Estelle, chose a more uplifting farewell: Beloved, Go with God.

Though Ernest Hemingway had once said, “Every thinking man I know is an atheist,” he briefly converted to Catholicism. Disapproving of divorce and suicide, the Church might have denied him a resting place had he not been an icon. So, saying, “We pass no judgement on that [suicide] and ask no questions," the reverend Robert J. Waldemann, presided over Papa’s services at St. Charles Church of Our Lady of the Snows near his house in Ketchum, Idaho. In attendance were his fourth wife, Mary, his three sons, other relatives and his remaining friends – a bullfighter, his biographer, his publisher, and no writers. When Mary had found him on the floor with part of his crown missing, Papa had been dressed in what he’d called his “Emperor’s Robe.” The New York Times reported that, for internment, the Nobel laureate was “dressed casually in a sportcoat and slacks.” His minimalist stone bore no epitaph, only his full name and two dates.

In death, as in life, Scott Fitzgerald was denied the privileges of his colleague. Though raised as a Catholic and educated at Holy Angels Convent School, the author of This Side of Paradise, having abandoned the faith and foregone both communion and confession, was deemed unfit to lie in the consecrated ground of the family plot in St. Mary’s cemetery. So, he was buried a mile away in Rockville Maryland’s Union Cemetery. He lay alone there for thirty-five years until his reputation miraculously resurrected: then, the Archbishop William Baum -- declaring that the deceased’s characters “sought God and grace” after all -- ordered that he be relocated to St. Mary’s. Here the Tender is the Night novelist lies beside his father, the soap salesman whom he called a failure, and below his Ophelia, the mad Zelda, whom Hemingway had always predicted would “destroy” him. The great artist is visited regularly by strangers who leave whiskey bottles, pens, and pennies on his stone inscribed with the last line from Gatsby fitting for his colleagues too:

So we beat on. Boats against the current. Born back ceaselessly to the past.

David Comfort is the author The Insider’s Guide to Publishing (Writers Digest). His other nonfiction titles are from Simon & Schuster and Kensington. His literary essays appear in Pleiades, The Montreal Review, Stanford Arts Review, and Johns Hopkins' Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, and The Philosopher (UK). His short fiction appears in The Evergreen Review, Cortland Review, The Morning News, 3:AM among other journals. He is a Pushcart Fiction Prize nominee, and finalist for Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren, Narrative, and Glimmer Train Awards.

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