1979: The Writer's Life

We've been reorganizing the garage, and I've been going through a lot of old paperwork to see what can be tossed away. Among other things, I found boxes upon boxes of old tax forms and documentation stretching back to 1979, my first year as a full-time professional writer.

I've tossed away pounds and pounds of old bills and canceled checks, but I've hung onto the actual tax forms and my expense sheets, which provide a picture of how I survived in those days.

On New Year's Day, 1979, I found out that I'd sold three historical novels to Dell, my first sale after some years of struggle in the business of selling fiction. I was 25 years old.

(The sale had actually been on December 31, but various New Year celebrations both in New York and New Mexico distracted everyone concerned and kept me from being informed until the New Year.) What this means is that I was a full-time writer for the whole year, and the figures I've dug up should apply for the whole period.

I sold the novels for $10,000 apiece. I got half on signing, and another five grand on completion of the first book--- and apparently I earned nothing else, since my total income for the year seems to have been $20,000, plus $180 in interest. This is odd, because I seem to remember that I was clerking in a game store when I made my first sale, another in series of part-time jobs that I'd been scuffling through since being kicked out of grad school. Possibly I was being paid under the table, and the income never got reported. Or maybe my memory is faulty.

I spent $170 each month on rent for my 900-square-foot two-bedroom apartment, locatedly in a downwardly-mobile working-class neighborhood. (It's nearly gentrified now.) I spent $155.26 on office supplies, mainly paper and typewriter ribbon. The utilities that weren't part of my rent came to $168.02. Postage was $28.20. The agent took a commission of $2000. (Ah, the days when they only took ten percent!) Auto expenses came to $1250. "Printing" was $325--- could that have been Xeroxing? "Telephone and telegraph" came to $129.07. Medical expenses came to $84.60, which is an indication of how well I was taking care of myself--- which is to say, not at all.

My biggest, grandest expense was $514.80 for a reconditioned IBM Model D office typewriter.

As far as the actual tax forms go, Schedule G was used for income averaging, a wise move since my previous two years' income had been crap. (The IRS has since closed this loophole for the self-employed.)

I took $350 depreciation on my 1972 Chevy Van 10, a wretched, rusty piece of Detroit ghastliness that I had bought thirdhand for $2000 some years earlier. It continually threatened to shake itself to pieces, the tires kept deflating for no understandable reason, and the person who sold it to me was later busted for running a chop shop. (I kinda wondered why the serial numbers on the car and engine didn't match.)

With all the deductions and income averaging and such, my adjusted gross income was $11,150.06.

My Social Security self-employment tax came to $950.87. As I seem to have paid $2138 in estimated taxes--- I suspect this figure is actually derived from the income-averaging on Schedule G, but I can't figure out how--- I ended the year with a refund of $1187.12, which must have come as a welcome surprise.

But wait! I have here a letter from the IRS, which states that I miscalculated Schedule G, and that I am due a further refund of $636.95. The IRS is honest, God bless 'em!

What's remarkable are the deductions that I didn't take. No business travel, no business meals. Apparently I just stayed home for the whole year and worked. I never actually met my first editor, one Andrea Cirillo, who some time in 1979 left Dell to edit a line of romances, and who was eventually replaced by someone else who I never met, either. (Those first three books had five editors in total, which should give you a clue about why they failed in the marketplace.)

With my income of $20,000 I wasn't living like a prince, but I was living considerably better than I'd lived before. Up till 1979 I was a wretched failure at everything I'd attempted, engaged in a futile tilt at the windmills of publishing: afterwards, I was an author. Not always a successful author, but one with a track record of accomplishment. Even the IRS sent me money!

The line between failure and success isn't narrow, but very wide. 1979 was the year I crossed from one to the other.

A Writer's Life

It turns out that F. Scott Fitzgerald's tax returns were never thrown out. An analysis by William J Quirk shows that Fitzgerald was not the irresponsible spendthrift of legend, but a very careful and reliable earner, who carefully documented his income and expenses. (Though, like all of us, he did sometimes wonder where the money went.)

Because our profession is, essentially, a gamble, success in the writing field tends to go to the smarter gamblers among us--- though of course it's possible for someone to succeed through dumb luck. Fitzgerald was a pretty smart gambler. He wrote very profitable short stories in order to supported his novels, few of which made much money (in my case I write novels to support my short story habit), but the upshot was that Fitzgerald had to juggle art and commerce in much the same way that all of us do.

And, of course, the tax returns are a glimpse into a style of life that exists now for only a very few.

What would Fitzgerald’s $24,000 annual income be worth today? It’s hard to say. Most economists, based on the Bureau of Labor’s Consumer Price Index, would multiply the amount by 12. That seems low. The CPI was designed in 1919, because prices had risen during World War I, to provide an index for cost-of-living adjustments for workers’ wages. The CPI today indexes all goods and services purchased by a middle-class consumer—which is not what we’re after. If you used Manhattan townhouses or beachfront property in the Hamptons as a basis for analysis, the multiplier would be astronomical. Perhaps a more reasonable measure for a high-income person would be the luxury car. In 1920, you could buy a Packard Single 6 for $2,975, which is probably the equivalent today of a Mercedes S550 costing $90,000, which suggests a multiple of about 30. If, to avoid exchange-rate issues, you used Cadillacs as the measure, it would be 20 times—$2,400 in 1925 and $48,000 today. The current dollar, based on that measure, is worth five cents compared to that of Calvin Coolidge’s day.

If we accept a 20-times measure, the modern equivalent of Fitzgerald’s annual income would be roughly $500,000. But a person earning $500,000 today does not live as well as Fitzgerald did. First, Fitzgerald’s income was almost tax free (5.5 percent effective rate), while today’s taxpayer making $500,000 would probably pay 40 percent in income and Social Security taxes. Second, various social changes have reduced the availability of servants—Fitzgerald had many—and has made having them so expensive that only the very wealthy can afford them. During the 1920s and 1930s, an upper-middle-class family generally had servants.

Fitzgerald, from the beginning, was recognized as a major American writer. During the Hollywood years, he was never paid less than $1,000 a week. Warner Bros., in the 1940s, paid William Faulkner $300 a week. From June 1937 to December 1938, Fitzgerald earned $85,000 at mgm—more than $1,100 per week . . .

Fitzgerald’s annual income was remarkably consistent, although some years were better (1938, $58,783) and some worse (1931, $9,765). But most years were pretty close to $24,000. Despite his high income, he was not able to save or, as he said, “amass capital.” Fitzgerald’s only income came from his writing. Zelda brought no capital into the marriage, and he had none. Zelda became ill in 1929 when they were both very young—she 29, and he 33. In 1930–31, a 15-month stay for Zelda in a sanatorium on Lake Geneva cost $13,000. Zelda stayed ill the rest of Fitzgerald’s life. He felt obliged to provide the best care, but because of doctor and sanatorium bills, he lost hope of controlling his finances. Friends advised Fitzgerald to economize on Zelda’s medical expenses. He wrote to Max Perkins, his legendary editor at Scribner, on October 16, 1936: “Such stray ideas as sending my daughter to a public school, putting my wife in a public insane asylum, have been proposed to me by intimate friends, but it would break something in me that would shatter the very delicate pencil end of a point of view.”

In 1936, he inherited $22,975 from his mother, but by that time his finances were lost past recall. When he died in December 1940, his estate was solvent but modest—around $35,000, mostly from an insurance policy. The tax appraisers considered the copyrights worthless. Today, even multiplying Fitzgerald’s estate by 30, it would not require an estate tax return.