Who is Chet Turnbeaugh?

Written by F. Scott Fitzgerald

In my younger and more vulnerable years, long before Gatsby, there was Chet...

His backstory was something of a mystery that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. 

He was born in Cook County, or was it Crook County? Either way, it spelled Chicago--that pearl of a city, illuminated by the moonlight off the icy waters of Lake Michigan, that glowed as bright as the pulsating green light at the end of Gatsby’s dock. 

He was an Oxford man, much like Gatsby--similar in that both of them only studied there a few months. Chet was an actor, an athlete, and a scholar. His words danced on the page during my daytime reading and his chorus of words echoed in my mind, on restless nights when I feigned sleep.

He took to his work with rigor and enthusiasm, despite having the Herculean task of writing tomes, a career that may have seemed a portentous road to less literary men. 

Many were quick to judge him for being a ghostwriter, and I remembered when I questioned my father about his line of work he advised me, “whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” 

Chet lived in a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow and worked on writing songs, poetry, screenplays, novels, television pilots, website blogs, and ghostwritten books. He was as prolific a writer as any I’d seen. Yet, he was a modest man who required no credit, or special praise, save for an honest means to make a living doing something that he loved. 

For this, I both admired and feared him. His steadfastness and devotion to his craft were unimaginable. He took great pleasure in helping others to find the joy in writing, the same way that the Muse found his fingertips, so many years ago.