Do we seriously believe that if Fitzgerald was on the scene today, The New Yorker would not be publishing him and paying him equivalent rates.
Just so you know, The New Yorker was a top market but they never published him -- not when he was a hot new light, not in the middle of his career nor in the end. Even The Post eventually rejected him, and in his last four years alive it was the genius and charity of one editor who sustained him by being one of the few buyers of what were some of his best stories.
I also wonder about the premise that way back when there were hundreds of paying markets and you could make a living writing short stories. I suspect that that was only true for a tiny handful of top writers -- which is exactly what happens today.
There were so many people making a living at short stories alone because it was the golden age of magazine publishing -- the most profitable market for fiction. Novels were almost an afterthought: at the time, short stories paid more than novels. It held through the 20s and didn't taper off until after WWII. By 1930, some writers were paid thousands for a single short story -- and could only make a fraction of that on royalties from a novel.
These days, there are a handful of short story writers -- Jhumpa Lahiri, George Saunders, Charles D'Ambrosio come to mind -- who are making a comfortable living writing. True, they get grants and teaching positions to make ends meet, but remember that Fitzgerald wrote novels and sold to Hollywood to sustain his lifestyle.
He got more from one year of selling short stories than from the combined lifetime royalties of all four of his novels and his one play combined. Hollywood only gave him one screen credit and those years are considered a mistake -- it only took time away from him that he should have been doing more profitable work. (But luckily Esquire bought seventeen stories and some essays from him during those years that enabled him to send his daughter to Vassar.)
Outside of approximately two markets, I don't even know where to go to approach a story market as cited in the original link. That's my complaint and where I enjoyed both this and the King essay someone linked to -- stories are so unprofitable now: they're for academics or hobbyists; so to make it your living, you either (1) get an MFA and teaching job like the writers you mention or (2) get a good-paying job unrelated to writing and spend your weekends writing and submitting to the tiny hobby markets. Either way you cut it, you won't get the work through commercial story markets. But, as I've probably gone on about before, novels are where the money is now -- much more profitable than they
ever were in the 20th century.
I'm always a little skeptical about the "good old days," whatever the context.
And also of complaints that one has got to "get with the times" and accept certain facts as progress instead of trying to fight or change them, or even just point out where certain things are not on the up-and-up or as good now as they once were.
