The Crack-Up - Softcover

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."

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.