A move towards maturity: Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up

Abstract

When Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up essays first appeared in 1936—in the "pre-confessional" critical climate—they were received with disapprobation and sometimes condemnation even by his friends. Hemingway thought that they were "miserable" and Dos Passos felt Fitzgerald should not have made a public display of his "going to pieces." But I think that the essays are not so much as confessional as attempts at soul-searching and self-examination. Fitzgerald recognizes in them the fact that he must undergo a "spiritual conversion," that he must, as a novelist, write more objectively. During the short period, between the writing of these essays and his death, he did embark on a new, and as it turned out, a more mature strategy as an artist. The Crack-Up gives us an insight into the kind of novelist that he would have become, had he lived longer.