F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives.” The line comes from his working notes for The Last Tycoon, published in 1941, after his death. Americans often quote it only to disprove it. In 2013, NPR used it in a report on politicians who had “fallen from grace only to rise again and disprove the line”: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Eliot Spitzer and Mark Sanford.
Fitzgerald had used the phrase earlier, around 1932, in the essay “My Lost City.” There he wrote: “I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York’s boom days.”