F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay collection The Crack-Up was published in 1945. It appeared five years after Fitzgerald’s death and was assembled and edited by his friend and literary executor, Edmund Wilson.
The collection brings together three autobiographical essays originally published in Esquire in 1936: “The Crack-Up,” “Pasting It Together,” and “Handle With Care.” Fitzgerald wrote candidly about emotional exhaustion, creative decline, financial pressure, and his sense that his personal and artistic resources had been depleted. The essays were unusually revealing for their time.
The date is often confused because the individual essays appeared in 1936, while the book collection came later. The 1945 volume also included letters, notes, and assessments of Fitzgerald’s work, giving it a broader scope than the magazine pieces alone. Its posthumous publication helped preserve a stark record of Fitzgerald’s later struggles and contributed to the modern view of him as both a major novelist and a psychologically revealing autobiographical writer.