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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.’

We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a macho culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in Heart of Darkness (1912); he had not written under a nom de plume as George Eliot had done. Yet, de- spite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.