F. Scott Fitzgerald’s collection of autobiographical essays is titled The Crack-Up. The book was published posthumously in 1945, five years after Fitzgerald’s death.
Edmund Wilson edited the volume from essays, letters, notes, and other materials. It includes three essays Fitzgerald originally published in Esquire in 1936: “The Crack-Up,” “Pasting It Together,” and “Handle With Care.” Together, they examine his emotional exhaustion, declining confidence, financial pressures, and sense that his personal and professional life was breaking down.
The title can cause confusion because “The Crack-Up” was first the name of an individual essay before becoming the title of the larger collection. The book is also more than a conventional autobiography: it combines personal reflections with correspondence and assessments of Fitzgerald’s literary career. It offers an unusually direct view of the writer’s later years, although his candid tone and pessimism drew sharp criticism when the essays first appeared.