The Crack Up
Ratings6
Average rating3.7
15
Ratings6
Average rating3.7
The Crack-Up tells the story of Fitzgerald's sudden descent at the age of thirty-nine from glamorous success to empty despair, and his determined recovery. Compiled and edited by Edmund Wilson shortly after F. Scott Fitzgerald's death, this revealing collection of his essays as well as letters to and from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos tells of a man with charm and talent to burn, whose gaiety and genius made him a living symbol of the Jazz Age, and whose recklessness brought him grief and loss.
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When we think about F. Scott Fitzgerald, we generally think of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby, the artistic expatriate community in Paris, his tempestuous marriage to Zelda. What we don't usually think about is the end of his life. He died of a heart attack at 44 after a long struggle with alcoholism. This book was published after his death by his longtime editor and collects several nonfiction essays he wrote in the later part of his life, along with ephemera like letters, notebooks, and some pieces that other people wrote about him and his work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's a mixed bag. I found the essays, along with his letters to his daughter in her late teens/early 20s, to be the best and most engaging parts of the material. The notebooks are a slog (reading other people's bullet points of ideas isn't really very exciting), and many of the letters written to friends were written in a state of intoxication and start to sound very same-y after a whole. It's hard to know what to say about it since it's a collection without much of a unifying theme and is probably best left for Fitzgerald completists.
