The Argument Fitzgerald and Hemingway Never Finished: Are The Rich Really Different?

Even Fitzgerald and Hemingway couldn't quite figure it out.

In a legendary argument, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) and Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) disagreed about rich people. According to a trusted quote detective, anecdotes like these have one foot planted in fact and the other firmly rooted in fiction.

Fitzgerald remarked, “The rich are different from you and me.”

Hemingway’s patronizing reply, “Yes, Scott, they have more money.”

The problem is that the conversation never took place.

In 1925, Fitzgerald penned a brief essay titled “The Rich Boy” for Redbook Magazine. In the third sentence, he says something about wealth that is quite telling:

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”

Fitzgerald would go on to become a highly successful and well-known Hollywood screenplay and author, so we can see that this is the justification of a 26-year-old who is just out of college and about to climb the ladder of success.

Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway had an on-again, off-again father-son/brother relationship, and in his short tale, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway decided to reprimand Fitzgerald for his na?veté.

Hemingway wrote a scathing rebuke (this is the original version) for the August 1936 issue of Esquire:

“The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race….”

Fitzgerald was in a rage. He voiced his disappointment to Hemingway who responded with what Fitzgerald described as a “crazy letter,” which contained neither a sincere apology nor an explanation. Additionally, he complained to Charles Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, who was in charge of both authors. When Scribner reproduced “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in the 1938 anthology of Hemingway stories, Perkins used his editorial authority to smooth out the error.

He replaced “Scott Fitzgerald” with “Julian” in the story.

The infamous account of Fitzgerald’s “conversation” with Hemingway was immortalized due to the following steps.

First, Fitzgerald made a cryptic notation of the instance in his private notebook.

Then Fitzgerald’s buddy, the well-known book critic Edmund Wilson, assembled a collection of his unpublished writings into a book titled The Crack-Up after Fitzgerald passed away in 1940. The book was released in 1945. Wilson included a footnote explaining that passage in the book: He wrote, “According to Fitzgerald, ‘The rich are different from us.’ and Hemingway replied, ‘Yes, they have more money.”

Finally, the coup de grace. A famous literary critic, Lionel Trilling, repeated what he called the “famous exchange” that “everyone knows” in a review and essay about The Crack-Up, which was published in The Nation.

In one respect, Fitzgerald and Hemingway were no different from the rest of us. They disagreed about rich people.