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| F. Scott Fitzgerald |
F. Scott Fitzgerald December 21 marks the eighty-third anniversary of author F. Scott Fitzgerald's death in Los Angeles at age forty-four. Not as often mentioned these days is that one of Fitzgerald's fellow authors, Nathanial West, would die in a traffic accident along with his wife Eileen the next day while returning to Los Angeles from an aborted hunting trip in Mexico - most likely to attend Fitzgerald's funeral. West caused the accident that claimed their lives on that fateful trip by absentmindedly blowing through a stop sign.
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| Nathanial West |
West and Fitzgerald became close friends as fellow Hollywood novelists, and he is best known for his novels Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. Eileen, as it turns out, died only four days before the Broadway play My Sister Eileen, a play based on her sister Ruth McKenney's 1938 memoir of the same name, had its hugely successful opening night in New York. She and West had only been married for about six months at the time of their deaths.
The book became the source of many other works, including the Broadway play, a musical, a radio play, two movies, and a CBS television series that aired in 1960. Sadly, Eileen lived to see none of this.
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| Eileen McKinney West |
