The Crack-Up [Paperback]

F. Scott Fitzgerald (Author), Edmund Wilson (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1993

A self-portrait of a great writer 's rise and fall, intensely personal and etched with Fitzgerald's signature blend of romance and realism.

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. "Fitzgerald's physical and spiritual exhaustion is described brilliantly," noted The New York Review of Books: "the essays are amazing for the candor."

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1941) was one of the literary titans of the 20th century. A member of the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s, Fitzgerald’s writings best captured what he termed “The Jazz Age,” a period of declining traditional American values, prohibition and speakeasies, and great leaps in modernist trends. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 347 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation (September 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811212475
• ISBN-13: 978-0811212472
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,179,608 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Crack-Up, March 2, 2006

By 

Kevin Avery (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Crack-Up (Paperback)

"This is too real and there ain't no escape" -- Nick Lowe, "Cracking Up"


I carried F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE CRACK-UP around with me for almost ten years before I got around to reading it last month. It was one of those books that I felt I was literarily required to read, what with my affection for all things Fitzgerald -- especially Gatsby. Once I got into the book, I found parts of it fairly impenetrable, which must have been Fitzgerald's state of mind while writing some of the material, a posthumous hodgepodge of uncollected pieces, samplings of notebooks, and unpublished letters (both from and to the author).

An excellent companion piece to the book is the PBS American Masters documentary, F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: WINTER DREAMS, which draws heavily from THE CRACK-UP. The film, in its quest to simulate the elegance that its subject so desperately tried (and failed) to attain, unfortunately breezes over some key points in the writer's life; but the DVD is well worth checking out (literally, either from your local library or Netflix). (PBS's website makes up for some of these omissions with a nifty timeline that puts all of Fitzgerald's accomplishments into context with the tragic goings-on in his life. It also offers some additional footage that does not appear in the film, most notably interviews with E.L. Doctorow and Budd Schulberg, who wrote the screenplay for On the Waterfront and who, as a young screenwriter, was rewritten by Fitzgerald.)

Originally written as three essays for Esquire in 1936, "The Crack-Up" was Fitzgerald's bearing of his soul, his confession, his mea culpa to the world at large for letting them -- and himself -- down. It begins: "Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work -- the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside -- the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within -- that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again."

The literary world at large found such brash honesty unseemly, and Ernest Hemingway especially was disdainful of his friend's candor. But just as "The Crack-Up" essays unnecessarily confirmed that Hemingway was indeed a bastard, they also demonstrated that Fitzgerald could still write.

One of the most poignant and telling passages in THE CRACK-UP anthology appears in Fitzgerald's 1932 essay about New York, "My Lost City." Returning a couple of years after the stock market crash of 1929 ("I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives," he writes, "but there was certainly to be a second act to New York's boom days"), Fitzgerald found a new skyline awaiting him. The Empire State Building, all 103 floors and 1,454 feet, had risen out of the dust of the Big Crash. Fitzgerald "went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood -- everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora's box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits -- from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground."

Perhaps at that moment Fitzgerald discovered he had his limits, too, and that they were already in his past. One wonders how many times in the eight tortured years he had left, dealing with the insanity of Zelda and Hollywood, book sales all but evaporating, he looked back on that moment atop the Empire State Building and wished he had jumped.

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32 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars first crack,last light, October 19, 2001

By 

Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Crack-Up (Paperback)

If you ever wondered what the down side of the twenties were read this. The excess was all a grand show, an escape from post war realities. A whole generation seemed to refuse to grow up, at least for awhile. Maturity was forced upon Scott and in these short confessions he reveals that all was not well in paradise. He lived in a haze of liquor, that was the dream preserving liquid illusion. But reality was not to be fought off forever. This is as close to a biography as we have from Scott, and it is moving in the way it is moving to see an athlete we all wanted to believe would live forever come to his day of retirement. He had the ability or charisma compounded by artistic talent to embody not just his but a whole societies dreams. But his moment passed and by the time Scott wrote this his books were no longer the rage. What makes him such a tragic figure is that he never altogether let go of those first illusons, never went through a moment where he learned from them and let them go. And one senses just as he had the egotists ability to romanticize his life with his words he also had the ability to perhaps overdramatize his own demise. He was not a person to learn, become made of harder stuff, and continue. Still there is some good stuff in this book. His letters to his daughter( who also wished to become a writer) in which he urges her to read great authors including his own favorite Browning are touching and revealing.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vintage Fitzgerald, August 18, 2002

By 

Alydar "mum22boyz" (Manchester, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Crack-Up (Paperback)

F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the dreams and aspirations of so many people when he wrote of the fabulous excesses of the 20's - a time not unlike the recent "get-rich-quick" mania of the Internet bubble, which also crashed, destroying many fortunes and lifestyles.
In The Crack-Up Fitzgerald writes equally poignantly of the agony of the aftermath of such excess and unfulfilled desires and social insecurities. He was able to capture all of this so clearly because it was the life that he and Zelda aspired to and, from time to time, lived. But they were always just on the outside, depending on the generosity of others both financially socially. He takes no prisoners.
It is no surprise that he is still being widely read. Don't miss Fitzgeral - it doesn't really matter which of his books you start with, you will find yourself moving through the collection.