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Discreditable confession

Francis Scott Fitzgerald 1937 June 4 (2) (photo by Carl van Vechten)

At The American Scholar, Patricia Hampl describes the negative reaction of the literary world to the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s autobiographical writing in “The Crack-Up”:

That Fitzgerald had published these personal essays in a glossy magazine seemed to vex his friends (Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Sara Murphy, the unsigned New Yorker “Talk of the Town” writer—the list goes on) as much as the sentiments themselves. Maxwell Perkins and Harold Ober, Fitzgerald’s loyal editor and literary agent, were still backing away from the essays as late as 1941, a year after the writer’s death, when Edmund Wilson was shopping around a posthumous collection of his old friend’s incidental nonfiction that included the “Crack-Up” pieces. Wilson admitted to Perkins that he, too, had “hated” the essays when he first read them in Esquire. But “if you read The Crack-Up through,” he argued, “you realize that it is not a discreditable confession but an account of a kind of crisis that many men of Scott’s generation have gone through, and that in the end he sees a way to live by application to his work.”

[read more] [hat tips – @DVNJr & @elyssaeast]

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Filed Under: NER Recommends Tagged With: F Scott Fitzgerald, Patricia Hampl, The Crack-Up

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Writing this poem was not a commentary on a rivalry between the sister arts—poetry and painting—but more an experiment in the ekphrastic poetic mode.

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