The Crisis of Fitzgerald's "Crack-Up"

Abstract

F. Scott Fitzgerald's three Crack-Up articles that ran in Esquire for February, March, and April 1936 precipitated an extraordinary response from the magazine's readers. get letters from all over, Fitzgerald wrote editor Arnold Gingrich on March 20. These letters came from old friends who wanted to cheer him up, from total strangers who recognized something of their own plight in Fitzgerald's account of emotional exhaustion, and most of all from other writers, among them James Boyd, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Nancy Hoyt, John O'Hara, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, G. B. Stern, Julian Street, and Alexander Woollcott.1 As O'Hara put it in an April letter, suppose you get comparatively little mail these days that does not dwell at greater or less length on your Esquire pieces, and I guess few of the writers resist, as I am resisting, the temptation to go into their own troubles for purposes of contrast. (O'Hara then revealed that he had recently been jilted by his girl and had picked up a dose of clap on the rebound.)2 The very nature of Fitzgerald's articles called for some response. Here a well-known writer was admitting in print that he had cracked like a plate and lost much of the vitality that made him successful. Furthermore, at the end of the second article, Fitzgerald openly appealed for reader reaction. His story might not be of general interest, yet if anyone wanted more, he announced, there was plenty left. But perhaps his readers had already had enough. If so, he hoped they'd let him know.3

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