Life...The Most Complicated Thought

The unexamined life is not worth living. ~Socrates

Literature World collides with Business World

It is interesting to find famous authors names in the business news. Today I came across an article titled F. Scott Fitzgerald Did His Own Taxes (Until He Arrived in Hollywood) posted on WebCPA (find it here). William J. Quirk reviewed Fitzgerald's tax returns (you can only do that if the author is dead...I think) and found

Fitzgerald’s ledger for 1929 recorded royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition, Quirk noted.

Fitzgerald kept the ledger and did his own taxes by hand until 1937, when he went off to Hollywood in search of further fame and fortune. Once he arrived in Tinseltown, Fitzgerald used accountants to prepare and type his returns.

This was interesting because I loved The Great Gatsby and dying to read/listen to "The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons." Quirk states that Fitzgerald's returns reveal a lot about his life. Interesting...The original article is here titled "Living on $500,000 a Year" in The American Scholar.


Second article sent to me was regarding Ayn Rand. I have listened to two of her books, We the Living and The Fountainhead. The article is titled "Greenspan Backs Key Obama Wall Street Reform Effort" at Huffington Post (read here). The article starts stating

A keystone of Obama's Wall Street reform agenda is getting support from the unlikeliest of corners. Alan Greenspan, an acolyte of Ayn Rand and extreme free-marketeer, is backing one of the most far-reaching elements of the financial overhaul: the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

In the article, Alan Greenspan admits that he was shocked to learn that this ideology was not right and was not working. The article further states, "He [Alan Greenspan] has already said that he erred in assuming that the market would take care of things--the Ayn Rand point of view--but this seems to go farther than he's gone before in calling for a new agency to protect consumers from financial products" to hammer the point that Alan Greenspan has now become a "former" Ayn Rand acolyte. I enjoyed reading Ayn Rand, but for me her novels were more like novels than an economic way of life. I understand her ideology, but I don't agree with it one hundred percent. Reading this article gave me a new insight. I remember, in college Alan Greenspan was worshipped in the economic world. At that time, I didn't take initiative to learn enough about Greenspan to know his ideology. I wonder what Ayn Rand followers have to say about this.

0 comments:

Followers

Search & Win