Here's the intro to the latest Chuck Klosterman's America column in Esquire:
Jazz-Age drunkard F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote many trenchant thoughts in the somber days before his 1940 death, but few remain more famous than this one: "There are no second acts in American lives." It is the kind of sentence that defines an ethos. Many less-talented writers have since echoed this sentiment in stories of their own, typically in the introductory paragraphs of celebrity profiles and inevitably as a means for pointing out how inaccurate Fitzgerald actually was. In reality, there are lots of second acts in American life; it's what happens to everybody who isn't a) hyperprecocious and b) prone to drinking oneself into the boneyard. It's not that second acts are nonexistent; they're usually just less interesting than the first. If your life's first act is "hospital administrator," your life's second act will typically be "veteran hospital administrator." Such a narrative arc lacks panache.
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