The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald

First published: 1945

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1931-1937

Locale: The United States and Europe

Principal Personages:

• F. Scott Fitzgerald, the autobiographer, an American novelist
• John Dos Passos, an American novelist
• T. S. Eliot, an Anglo-American poet and playwright
• Ernest Hemingway, an American novelist
• Ring Lardner, an American short-story writer and journalist
• Gertrude Stein, an expatriate American novelist and aesthete
• Edith Wharton, an American novelist
• Edmund Wilson, the most influential American critic of his day
• Thomas Wolfe, an American novelist

Form and Content

The heart of The Crack-Up is a series of three articles entitled “The Crack-Up,” “Handle with Care,” and “Pasting It Together.” These first appeared in the February, March, and April, 1936, issues of Esquire magazine. In these articles, F. Scott Fitzgerald recounts his physical, emotional, and spiritual breakdown at age thirty-nine and elaborates upon its consequences. Fitzgerald died in 1940, and two years later his old friend and fellow Princetonian Edmund Wilson put together a book composed of ten articles Fitzgerald had written between 1931 and 1937. They are arranged chronologically—the first, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” was published in November, 1931; the last, “Early Success,” was published in October, 1937. Wilson states in an introductory note that the articles form an autobiographical sequence vividly expressing Fitzgerald’s point of view and the state of his mind during the later years of his life. The book begins with Wilson’s long dedicatory poem in iambic-pentameter couplets. The content of the poem merges the warmth of Wilson’s friendship with his high regard for Fitzgerald’s writing—an appropriate tone, since the articles themselves combine impressive literary craftsmanship with candid self-revelation. Wilson’s choice of the heroic couplet is further evidence of the worth he assigns to his subject matter.

The articles are followed by excerpts from the Notebooks, grouped alphabetically under twenty-one headings devised by Fitzgerald himself (from “Anecdotes” to “Youth and Army”). This section is followed by two groups of selected letters, the first group addressed to Fitzgerald’s friends and the second to his daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald. The book was finally expanded to its ultimate length of 347 pages by the inclusion of letters written to Fitzgerald by literary notables (John Dos Passos, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, and Thomas Wolfe) and pieces written about Fitzgerald by Paul Rosenfeld, Glenway Wescott, Dos Passos, and John Peale Bishop.

Some of these letters and pieces by others date from the mid-1920’s. While interesting, they tend to diffuse the focus of the book, which is the Fitzgerald of a decade later. The first two-thirds of The Crack-Up is arranged very precisely, chronologically or alphabetically. The organization of the final third is far looser. Most readers may not be bothered, however, since Fitzgerald’s crash in the 1930’s is so inextricably linked with his dizzying success during the 1920’s.

The publication of The Crack-Up followed the posthumous publication of Fitzgerald’s uncompleted novel, The Last Tycoon, in 1941. These largely rehabilitated his literary reputation, which had markedly declined during the 1930’s. Fitzgerald’s loss of popularity, paradoxically, was a direct result of his immense popularity during the 1920’s. He was regarded as the spokesman for the Jazz Age, a chronicler of the United States’ boom times. With the coming of the Great Depression and the literary emergence of the proletariat, Fitzgerald seemed passe. The disappointing reception of Tender Is the Night (1934), a novel about the unhappy rich on the French Riviera, seemed to confirm his fallen state. A year later, Fitzgerald found his life in ruins: His literary celebrity had passed, his wife was institutionalized, he was tubercular and alcoholic. He cracked “like an old plate.” It is of these black days that he writes in The Crack-Up.

Critical Context

Few writers have been so closely associated with an era as was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was twenty-three years old as the 1920’s began and, as he put it, he marched along slightly ahead of the decade. His novel of rebellious youth, This Side of Paradise, was published toward the end of March, 1920, and he awoke to find himself famous. On April 3, 1920, he married Zelda Sayre, a beautiful and headstrong Southern belle, and they began to live the tumultuous life of the Roaring Twenties. Fitzgerald’s literary earnings went from $800 in 1919 to $18,000 in 1920, his story price from $30 to $1,000. He became the Jazz Age laureate, the best-paid magazine writer of the day. His crowning achievement of the decade, The Great Gatsby, appeared as he was approaching the end of his own twenties. Ten years later, the United States was mired in the Great Depression which had followed the stock market crash of 1929, and Fitzgerald’s personal life was mirroring the woes of the nation.

In 1936, Fitzgerald had only four more years to live. In The Crack-Up, he was attempting to cope with his disastrous loss of self-confidence and self-esteem. He was the embodiment of the American Dream gone wrong, eerily reminiscent of his creation Jay Gatsby. In 1937, Fitzgerald would sign a contract as a scenarist and turn from reality to Hollywood, as the rest of the nation was doing. Because The Crack-Up contains some of Fitzgerald’s finest writing, it would be an important book in a purely literary context. Because Fitzerald was such a uniquely representative figure, however, it is an important document of cultural history as well.

Bibliography

Aldridge, John W. “Fitzgerald: The Horror and the Vision of Paradise,” in After the Lost Generation, 1951.

Bishop, John Peale. “The Missing All,” in The Collected Essays of John Peale Bishop, 1948. Edited by Edmund Wilson.

Cowley, Malcolm. “Third Act and Epilogue,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work, 1951. Edited by Alfred Kazin.

Cross, K. G. W. “Afternoon of an Author,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1964.

Hook, Andrew. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s, 2002.

Morris, Wright. “The Function of Nostalgia: F. Scott Fitzgerald,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1963. Edited by Arthur Mizener.

Troy, William. “F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Authority of Failure,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work, 1951. Edited by Alfred Kazin