The crack-up, with other uncollected pieces, note-books and unpublished letters, together with letters to Fitzgerald from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Wolfe and John Dos Passos, and essays and poems by Paul Rosenfeld [and others] Edited by Edmund Wilson

This collection centers on the psychological collapse of F. Scott Fitzgerald during the mid-1930s, anchored by the title essay detailing his nervous breakdown and loss of creative confidence. Edited by Edmund Wilson shortly after Fitzgerald’s death, the volume assembles private notebooks, uncollected magazine pieces, and personal correspondence. It documents his financial anxieties, his struggles with alcoholism, and his evolving literary philosophy. The text includes external perspectives through letters from modernist peers like T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein, providing a contemporary critique of his talent and professional decline.

Biographers and students of American modernism read this treasury to see the raw mechanics of a writer's mind. It appeals to those seeking a primary-source account of the Jazz Age's aftermath and the reality of literary celebrity. Readers finish the book with an intimate understanding of Fitzgerald’s drafting process and the specific intellectual friction between major twentieth-century authors. It serves as a documentary record of how a prominent artist inventorying his own failures manages to maintain his stylistic precision.

Deep, inward-looking and contemplative; a moderate read.

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