About the book
After F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, his lifelong friend Edmund Wilson gathered his essays, letters and notebooks into a posthumous collection meant to record his state of mind in his later years. At its center are three essays first printed in Esquire in 1936, written during his nervous breakdown, as he faced what he termed emotional bankruptcy. Other essays include Echoes of the Jazz Age and My Lost City. The notebooks are sorted under headings such as anecdotes, epigrams and ideas, and the letters run to Wilson, Ernest Hemingway and Frances Scott Fitzgerald. T.S. Eliot, Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein write about The Great Gatsby in letters included here, beside tributes by John Dos Passos and others.
Ryan Holiday put it on his list of 24 books most people have never heard of, calling it an honest, self-aware record of a man bent on his own destruction, whose notes and story ideas still show his genius.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Ryan Holiday (Founder/Brass Check)
If you like Asylum, read The Crack Up, a book put together by Fitzgerald’s friend Edmund Wilson after his death. It is such an honest and self-aware compilation of someone hell-bent on their own destruction. At the same time, Fitzgerald’s notes and story ideas within the book make it undeniably clear what a genius he truly was. It’s a sad and moving but necessary read.
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