Essays collected and published posthumously, purportedly as near to an autobiographical account as Fitzgerald gave of himself.

A collection of 8 of Fitzgerald's essays, over 100 pages from his notebooks, and selected correspondence.

The essays "Echoes of the Jazz Age", "My Lost City", "Sleeping and Waking", "The Crack-Up", and "Early Success" are excellent, demonstrating a perspective and a sense of self-awareness that I was not aware Fitzgerald had possessed.

The excerpts from The Notebooks make for good casual (bathroom?) browsing.

The rest of this collection is, as they say, for the completist only. ( )

Among F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final publications was a series of short articles done for Esquire Magazine in 1936. They are titled The Crack-Up and they deal primarily with his own sudden realization, at the age of 39 and only four years from his own death, that his life had, in his own eyes, been a failure.

There is a sense of sadness that runs through his always elegant prose that is heart-rending. Early in the essays he states

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

I could not help thinking that his brilliant writing, which he must surely have recognized as such, and his feelings of abject failure, were those “two opposed ideas” and that his great fear was that he would lose his “ability to function.”

As a general rule, I am more interested in what an author writes and the ideas and meanings I can come away with from his body of work than the author’s actual life. Fitzgerald is almost an exception to that rule. So much of what makes him a fascination is his own complicated and flawed life, his dealings with the madness of Zelda, his struggle to belong to a world he never feels quite comfortable in. He is Nick Carroway in so many ways, observing the glitz and glitter and often wondering just what he is doing in this place and time.

He speaks briefly about his own pursuit of Zelda as a young man who cannot support her family lifestyle and his change of fortune when he initially made good on his writing career.

The man with the jingle of money in his pocket who married the girl a year later would always cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity, toward the leisure class -- not the conviction of a revolutionist but the smoldering hatred of a peasant.

Even Scott realized in the end that his attempts to run with the “in-crowd” had tinted his life a different color than he had expected or wished. The essays are part and parcel of this realization, but, like all things Fitzgerald, there is a bit of duplicity there as well, a tiny indicator that the writer is still talking to you, not the man. Perhaps, by this juncture, the man is irretrievably lost.
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5698. The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (read 7 Jul 2020) This book's editor was Edmund Wilson and the book was published by New Directions. There is a lot of uninteresting stuff in the book, including snippets of prose Fitzgerald collected or wrote with the idea of using such in his writing. Fitzgerald died at 44 in 1940 and became much more celebrated after he died,.
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> Seize nouvelles et textes autobiographiques qui résument à eux seuls la vie brillante et fertile en désastres du grand romancier américain des années vingt. On va ainsi des charmantes histoires d'adolescence dont le héros, Basil Duke Lee, ressemble fort au jeune Scott, à la sombre expérience de La fêlure, un texte à l'accent pascalien, plein d'ironie et de détresse, où Fitzgerald arrive même à écrire sur son impuissance d'écrire. Il pensait que sa vie, ses passions, ses souvenirs, ses malheurs devaient servir son œuvre, car il n'avait pas d'autre foi que la littérature. C'est pourquoi tout ce qu'il raconte, avec tant de charme, fait de lui un écrivain exemplaire.
--Pauline Hamon (Culturebox)