Master and Model: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Role in Richard Yates’s “Saying Goodbye to Sally”

The American fiction writer Richard Yates, whose life bore many biographical parallels to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, explicitly described Fitzgerald as his “master” in an essay and wrote a short story, “Saying Goodbye to Sally,” focused on the personal and professional parallels between Fitzgerald’s final years as a Hollywood screenwriter in the late 1930s and the period in the early 1960s when Yates worked in Hollywood writing movie scripts. This essay discusses recent criticism of Yates’s life and work, and closely examines his short story’s use of Yates’s thinly disguised alter ego.