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| Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, The Crack-Up, appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack- Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,
| | Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness”{{sfn|Hampl|2002|p=108|}}She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing: |
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| {{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.}}{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} | | {{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American conscious- ness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ af- forded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’}}{{sfn|Hampl|2002|p=108|}} |
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| This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight a particular moment the year 1936 and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that The Crack-Up collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly his literary task.
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| So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in Esquire? Scott Donaldson, writing in , says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression” {{sfn|Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction|2002|p=179}}. Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of angst, but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s de- pression”{{sfn|Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction|2002|p=179}}, as Donaldson has said? Is there little else?
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Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness”She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:
The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American conscious- ness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ af- forded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’
