User:JFordyce/sandbox

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  “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,

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.