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F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary work refutes many of the core concepts of the American Dream. Fitzgerald's work shows repeated themes of dissatisfaction, disillusionment, and criticism of the American Dream through many of his most famous works such as The Great Gatsby, The Crack Up Essays, as well as his own personal life.

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The upbringing and experiences of F Scott Fitzgerald furthers the argument that his literature expressed criticisms and discontent with the American Dream. Fitzgerald was born as, “The son of an unsuccessful businessman who had to rely upon his wife’s inheritance to support his children”(F. Scott Fitzgerald Society; par. 4). He lived an average, middle class life however he was an, “outsider among the monied elite of his native St. Paul, Minnesota''(F. Scott Fitzgerald Society; par. 4). Not only this, but he was “hampered by poor grades” and eventually, “flunked out of Princeton”(F. Scott Fitzgerald Society; par. 4). Fitzgerald's upbringing was reflective of how he would be critical and disillusioned with the American Dream. First, Fitzgerald was raised in an environment within his father's failures, which would have cast doubt within him regarding the core concepts of the American Dream. Secondly, Fitzgerald was raised as an average child in an area full of elite, wealthy individuals. His writing shows strong themes regarding the moral corruption of the wealthy (who are supposed to embody the core concepts of the American Dream) which would have rooted from such an environment. Lastly, Fitzgerald's own failure in school likely contributed to his disillusionment of the American Dream as even though he worked hard to get where was, he ended up failing.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896-1940

Best known for The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934)-two keystones of modernist fiction-Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was the poet laureate of the "Jazz Age," a term he popularized to convey the post-World War I era's newfound prosperity, consumerism, and shifting sexual mores.

Fitzgerald first rose to fame at twenty-three by chronicling those changes in This Side of Paradise (1920). Before the age of thirty he published his masterpiece, Gatsby, but its artistic maturity was stymied for a decade by alcoholism, financial problems, and the mental illness of his wife, Zelda Sayre (1900-1948). By the time he completed Tender, the Depression had rendered the Roaring Twenties irrelevant, and Fitzgerald was considered a has-been. A half-decade later, he died in semi-obscurity, considered a failure, despite publishing 160+ short stories in his twenty-year career. Only posthumously would critics appreciate his merits, although understanding of his talent would compete with popular interest in his life and marriage.

Fitzgerald's main themes are ambition and loss, discipline vs. self-indulgence, love and romance, and money and class. Much like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, his work is instantly recognizable due to its distinctive prose style. Whereas Hemingway's is sparse and Faulkner's veers toward psychological abstraction, Fitzgerald's is intensely poetic to the point of rhapsodic, elevating his laments into veritable threnodies for the sureties and stable values that he felt modernity superannuated.

Born September 24, 1896, Fitzgerald suffered from a life-long inferiority complex that he later claimed distinguished him from Hemingway, his chief rival. "I talk with the authority of failure," he insisted. "Ernest with the authority of success" ( Notebooks 318). His sense of defeat was the product of several formative setbacks that became the building blocks of his fiction. The son of an unsuccessful businessman who had to rely upon his wife's inheritance to support his children, Fitzgerald was sensitive to his family's outsider status among the monied elite of his native St. Paul, Minnesota. An indifferent student, he found his craving for recognition hampered by poor grades that interfered with his extracurricular pursuits of popularity, especially after he flunked out of Princeton University in 1917.

Nor were his aspirations for military heroism any more successful. Although commissioned as a second lieutenant during the Great War, he described himself as the "army's worst aide-de-camp" ( Crack-Up 85)-largely because he preferred writing his first novel to tactics and training. As his 1936 story "I Didn't Get Over" suggests, the fact that he never saw combat-the Armistice arrived as his infantry regiment was preparing to ship abroad-was an additional lifelong regret.

Of even greater influence were his early romantic disappointments. Fitzgerald's desire for acceptance in the haute monde led him to court debutantes from whose circles he was doomed to be rejected. At nineteen, while dating Ginevra King, the daughter of a wealthy Illinois banker, he overheard a family member of hers (accounts differ as to whom) remark, "Poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls" ( Ledger 17). Two years later, while he was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda Sayre declined his initial marriage proposal because of his poor career prospects.

These snubs combined to become his most characteristic plotline, which typically revolves around the efforts of young men of humble backgrounds to prove themselves worthy of the daughters of a wealthier class. That Fitzgerald explored this theme both farcically ("The Offshore Pirate" [1920]) as well as tragically ("Winter Dreams" [1922], Gatsby) is indicative of how thoroughly his perceived unworthiness stamped him.

Because Fitzgerald promoted his fiction as autobiographical, early critics tended to dismiss him as a "facile" writer. Yet he never would have attracted the wide audience he did during his peak years of popularity (1920-1925) had he not possessed a talent for presenting personal milestones as representative of peers' collective experience. This Side of Paradise sold upwards of fifty thousand copies because protagonist Amory Blaine's thwarted ambitions are depicted as generational dilemmas: his failures in love and college are attributed not simply to personal shortcomings but to the sweeping changes of modern life, which caused young people to grow up "to discover all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths shaken" (260). With its unflattering portraits of adults and unrepentant vignettes of teenage initiation rituals-drinking and petting, most notoriously- Paradise gave voice to postwar youth by offering a realistic treatment of adolescent disaffection. In doing so, the book established the template for such 20th-century coming-of-age novels as J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963)-works that, like Paradise, resist the traditional Bildungsroman model by declining to conclude with their heroes entering adulthood.

More immediately, both the novel and Fitzgerald's earliest short stories-most published in The Saturday Evening Post-popularized a character type with which he remains inexorably associated: the flapper. With their bobbed hair, knee-baring skirts, and unapologetic coquetry, heroines such as Paradise's Rosalind Connage, Marcia Meadow in "Head and Shoulders," Ardita Farnam in "The Offshore Pirate," and Sally Carrol Happer in "The Ice Palace" (all 1920) modeled for female readers a self-consciously rebellious subcultural identity that freed them from the strictures of Victorian femininity. Nowhere is that freedom more obvious than when a character invokes Louisa May Alcott in "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" (also 1920): "Oh, please don't quote Little Women!" Marjorie Harvey responds. "What modern girl could live like those inane females?" ( Short Stories 33).

Fitzgerald capitalized upon adult worries over "flaming youth" by entitling his first story collection Flappers and Philosophers (1920), his second Tales of the Jazz (1922), and by opining on adolescent mores in interviews and articles. Even after the vogue for flappers faded, he remained fascinated with youth. Between 1927 and 1931, he wrote a series of thirteen "juveniles" for the Post that follow Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry through their late teens. Although nowhere near as well-known as Gatsby or Tender, these pieces, posthumously collected as The Basil and Josephine Stories (1973), offer as nuanced a portrait of the paysage moralisée as one will find on any shortlist of "young-adult" classics.

Despite his fixation with youth, Fitzgerald knew that to be regarded as more than a "flapper novelist" he must reach beyond his immediate generational focus to address broader cultural concerns. One interest that allowed him to do this was money. Keenly aware of the expanding consumer market, he examined the ways in which the Victorian values of hard work and frugality were losing their moral valence to a new mindset of abundance and leisure-time indulgence. At times he parodied the previously unimaginable wealth amassed by barons such as John D. Rockefeller. "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" (1922) tells the fantastical story of the world's richest man, who lives on a mountain-sized diamond in the Montana Rockies. The irony is that Braddock Washington's net worth is far from stable, for his diamond is so large that "if it were offered for sale not only would the bottom fall out of the market, but also, if the value should vary ... there would not be enough gold in the world to buy a tenth of it" ( Short Stories 193). Washington must thus keep the diamond's existence secret, which in turn requires him to either imprison or kill anyone who trespasses upon his Xanadu-like estate-a commentary both on the cutthroat extremes men like Rockefeller were said to go to protect their fortunes from the volatility of commodity markets but also the increasingly abstract and transitory nature of monetary values themselves.

In other cases, Fitzgerald preferred to moralize rather than satirize. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), traces the decay of an upperclass New York couple, Anthony and Gloria Patch, as they await an inheritance from Anthony's wealthy grandfather. Without any guiding motivation in life, Anthony and Gloria succumb to drink, concupiscence, and adultery, their degeneration only accelerating after they discover themselves excluded from their patriarch's will. Heavily influenced by naturalist fiction, The Beautiful and Damned is marred by didactic authorial intrusions and a confusing ending whose irony escaped many contemporary readers. (The Patches win a legal battle that recovers their lost fortune, but only after a breakdown that renders Anthony an invalid). Yet, despite its flaws, the novel captures the fear that prosperity encouraged laxity and dissipation.

Fitzgerald would explore this theme more successfully in his most anthologized short story, "Babylon Revisited" (1931). Charles Wales is a more sympathetic character than Anthony Patch because he recognizes how the extravagance afforded by the bull market cost him his family and landed him in a sanitarium. Even if his nostalgia for reckless living undermines his insistence that he has regained his moorings, his regret inspires incisive criticism of how affluence distorted his sense of reality: "The snow of twenty-nine wasn't real snow," Charlie concludes. "If you didn't want it to be snow, you just paid some money" ( Short Stories 633). In still other efforts, Fitzgerald trumpeted the Protestant work ethic as intently as any Babbittesque Rotarian that Sinclair Lewis might skewer. One of his most widely read stories during his lifetime, "George Jackson's Arcady" (1924), concerns a disillusioned businessman who discovers how many lives he has benefited by epitomizing the virtues of honorable effort and civic giving. Although virtually forgotten today, this proto- It's a Wonderful Life tale was deemed so inspirational that in 1928 it was republished in pamphlet form as part of a series promoting public readings of motivational texts.

One reason that Fitzgerald's critiques of Roaring Twenties mores continue to resonate has to do with what critics call his "dual perspective" or "double vision." His work does not merely sermonize against easy money and irrational exuberance. Instead, it acknowledges their appeal with great empathy, allowing readers to experience their allure rather than condemning them from a distance. The result, as Malcolm Cowley observed, is a mixture of a "maximum of immersion" combined with a "maximum of critical attachment" that creates a beguiling aura of ambiguity ("Double Man" 9).

The pinnacle of this trait is The Great Gatsby, in which narrator Nick Carraway stands both inside and outside of the action, at once enabling the enigmatic, nouveau riche Jay Gatsby in his quest to win back lost love Daisy Fay Buchanan with a fortune built from bootlegging and shady bonds while recognizing the unlikelihood of its success. Whether attending Gatsby's lavish Long Island parties, traveling into New York City with Daisy's philandering husband, Tom, or lending Gatsby his cottage for a rendezvous with Daisy, Nick is implicated in the intrigue in ways he cannot admit, especially when he is prone make statements such as, "Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known" (59). Whether such comments are meant sincerely or ironically is impossible to determine, suggesting that the dramatis personae are so caught in the flux of uncertainty that pragmatism and willful blindness have become their survival mechanism. In the end, Gatsby conveys a world so prone to cynical expedience and plausible deniability that the optimism of its titular hero can only seem tragically naïve.

Gatsby is considered Fitzgerald's crowning achievement because of its stylistic and structural concision. Both This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned suffer from episodic forms that dilute their drama, while characterization is frequently conveyed through omniscient exposition rather than organic development. By narrowing the temporal scope of his timeline (the story occurs over the summer of 1922) and employing Nick Carraway as an observer-narrator, Fitzgerald was able to both intensify and internalize the tensions surrounding Gatsby's pursuit of Daisy. At once imagistic, dream-like, and profoundly sad, the novel contains several of the most evocative symbols in all of American literature, including the green light at the end of Daisy's dock, the valley of ashes that separates Long Island from New York City, and the disembodied eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg that peer out from an abandoned billboard. The plot, moreover, asks to be read on different thematic levels: ostensibly a love story, Gatsby explores the limits of self-making, the delusions of materialism, and the intangibility of aspiration in a supposedly classless society. In the final paragraphs-Fitzgerald's most cited passage-Gatsby's ambition is even elegized as an expression of the American Dream:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter-tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (189)

Fitzgerald's other major novel, Tender Is the Night, is the obverse of Gatsby in almost every imaginable way. Written over the course of a tempestuous nine-year period that saw the author handicapped by alcoholism and Zelda's descent into mental illness, the book is chaotic, non-chronological, and fraught with "ruminations" and rhetorical "sideshows" that expound upon the historical, cultural, and philosophical import of its action ( Life in Letters 467). Nevertheless, the story of the degeneration of a promising psychologist, Dr. Dick Diver, and his unstable wife, Nicole Warren, explores how the ruptures of modernity render past ideals of character obsolete. On one level, the book refutes the "Great Man" theory of historical progressivism, showing how the moral fiber of Romantic destiny in which Fitzgerald wanted to believe had given way to fashionable decadence and self-destruction. It also captures the peculiar placelessness of the 1920s' globalization, depicting the drift of privileged Americans who expatriated to Europe (much as Fitzgerald and Zelda did throughout the second half of the decade).

Although Tender was at best a middling success when first published, its stature has grown over the years, with critics looking to its tangled subplots to appreciate how diverse phenomena shaped the era's sense of fragmentation. Based closely on Zelda's hospitalization in various Swiss sanitariums, Nicole's treatment for schizophrenia invites exploration of the psychoanalytic concepts of transference and counter-transference in her and her husband-doctor's mutual dependency. Dick Diver's infatuation with ingénue actress Rosemary Hoyt, meanwhile, illustrates the role of the cinema in fostering the unreality of modern life. Even the leitmotif of romantic warfare is illustrative, suggesting how the Great War militarized everyday interaction-including the battle between the sexes.

After Tender, Fitzgerald only attempted one more novel. The Last Tycoon remained unfinished at the time of his December 21, 1940, death, however. Posthumously published a year later, it is notable for its treatment of the Hollywood studio system in which the author had intermittently toiled since the mid-1920s. As such, it is the culmination of several notable stories that explore his ambivalence toward both the industry and the medium, including "Jacob's Ladder" (1927), "Magnetism" (1928), and a series of 1939-1940 tales featuring failed PR flak Pat Hobby.

Fitzgerald's nonfiction is also considered a major part of his oeuvre, in particular the Esquire triptych "The Crack-Up," which ignited controversy in 1936 for its beguiling confessions of squandered talent. His more commercial short stories-once derided as distractions from his "serious" work-are increasingly recognized for their craft and wit. Although Fitzgerald will remain best known for the elegiac melancholy of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, his short fiction reveals that he was as adept at comedy and fantasy as at tragedy-a testament to the breadth and range of his talent.

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Cowley, Malcolm. (1951). "The Double Man." Saturday Review of Literature 34 (February 14), 9-10, 42-44.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. All the Sad Young Men. (1926, 2007). (ed.) James L. W. West III. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
_____. The Basil and Josephine Stories. (1973). (ed.) Jackson R. Bryer and John Kuehl. New York: Scribner's, 1973.
_____. The Beautiful and Damned. (1922, 2008). (ed.) James L. W. West III. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
_____. The Crack-Up. (1945). (ed.) Edmund Wilson. New York: New Directions.
_____. Flappers and Philosophers. (1920, 1999). (ed.) James L. W. West III. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
_____. F. Scott Fitzgerald's Ledger: A Facsimile. (1973). (Intro.) Matthew J. Bruccoli. Washington D. C.: NCR Microcard Books/Bruccoli Clark.
_____. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. (1994) (ed.) Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribner's.
_____. The Great Gatsby. (1925, 1991). (ed.) Matthew J. Bruccoli. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
_____. The Last Tycoon. (1941). Republished (1993) as The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
_____. The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald. (1979). (ed.) Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
_____. The Pat Hobby Stories. (1962). (ed.) Arnold Gingrich. New York: Scribner's.
_____. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection. (1989) (ed.) Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribner's.
_____. Tales of the Jazz Age. (1922, 2002). (ed.) James L. W. West III. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
_____. Taps at Reveille. (1935). New York: Scribner's.
_____. Tender Is the Night. (1934). New York: Scribner's.
_____. This Side of Paradise. (1920, 1995). (ed.) James L. W. West III. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
_____. The Vegetable. (1923). New York: Scribner's.

SELECTED RESOURCES
Criticism
Berman, Ronald. (1994). The Great Gatsby and Modern Times. Urbana.: University of Illinois Press.
Bruccoli, Matthew J. (2002). Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. 2nd rev. ed. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2002.
Bryer, Jackson R. and Cathy W. Barks (eds.) (2002) Dear Scott/Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. New York: Scribner's.
Curnutt, Kirk. (2007). The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Curnutt, Kirk. (ed). (2004). An Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Oxford University Press.
Donaldson, Scott. (1983) Fool for Love. New York: Congdon and Weed.
Prigozy, Ruth. (ed). (2002) The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Oxford University Press.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald - F. Scott Fitzgerald Society

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F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896-1940 Best known for The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934)-two keystones of modernist fiction-Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was the poet laureate of the "Jazz Age," a term he popularized to convey the post-World War I era's newfound prosperity, consumerism, and shifting sexual mores.

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Source 2: Characterization Within the Great Gatsby

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Source 2: Characterization Within the Great Gatsby

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The Great Gatsby is one of the most famous literary works by F Scott Fitzgerald. The book is exemplary of Fitzgerald's criticisms and disillusions with the American dream. Jay Gatsby, the protagonist of the novel, is a rags to riches bootlegger who, despite his material success, struggles with his love interest, Daisy Fay. Fitzgerald’s characterization of Gatsby is reflective of himself with some saying, “Fitzgerald no doubt identified greatly with Gatsby and his dreams” however at the same time, “(Gatsby) mirrors the ambition, despair, and disillusionment of America in the 1920s: its ideals lost behind the trappings of class and material success”(Benson and Brannen; par. 6). The characterization of Jay Gatsby within the Great Gatsby is directly symbolic of the American Dream; On the surface, Jay Gatsby is the poster child of its concepts showing how through hard work, you can accumulate wealth. However, Gatsby also is representative of the major flaws within the American Dream as he is only representative of its materialistic side. Fitzgerald purposely characterizes Jay Gatsby as a selfish, dishonest, and manipulative man to critique the wealthy and powerful of the time.  This is reflective of Fitzgerald's over criticism of the American Dream showing his belief that many who found success through the American Dream may appear genuine on the surface, but truly are morally corrupt, dishonest individuals.

https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/EJ2111200594/SUIC?u=clar33415&sid=bookmark-SUIC&xid=bad9e98d

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The Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, within the Valley of Ashes

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Source 3: Symbolism Within the Great Gatsby

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Source 3: Symbolism Within the Great Gatsby

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In F Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald expresses his discontent towards the American Dream directly through symbolism of the novel’s setting tied into the characterization of Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s careful characterization of Gatsby, “introduces a supporting image for the Mammonism of Gatsby in the description of his house which serves, among other things, as the temple of his Philistinism”(Pearson; par 14). Fitzgerald implies that Jay Gatsby is supposed to be the physical embodiment of the American Dream. At the same time though, Fitzgerald makes it apparent to the reader that Gatsby is a “Mammonistic” individual driven by greed, reflecting his discontent with those who embody the ideals of the American Dream. Fitzgerald further conveys his discontent with the American Dream through symbolism present in the setting. The valley of ashes described within the novel, “is the result of Jay Gatsby's testament, the dust of a corrupted and perverted American dream; and like its biblical counterpart, it has its association with the worshiping of a false god, Mammon, incarnate in his son, Gatsby” (Pearson; par. 20). The valley of ashes is symbolic of many issues of the time, but notably the decayed remnants of the American Dream. Fitzgerald’s inclusion of the valley of ashes conveys his criticisms and animosity towards those supposedly representative of the American Dream.

https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/EJ2111200594/SUIC?u=clar33415&sid=bookmark-SUIC&xid=bad9e98d

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F Scott Fitzgerald's “The Crack Up” essays are exemplary of his dissatisfaction and disheartment with the American Dream. Fitzgeralds crack-up essays were written a few years before his death and he recounts how he felt that, “[he] was living hard, too, but: ‘Up to forty-nine it’ll be alright,’ [He] said. '[He] can count on that.’”(Fitzgerald; par. 5) but these efforts ended up being in vain. Fitzgerald refers to the core concepts of the American Dream in his Crack-up essays, plainly stating his failures and misfound hopes that were fueled in the hopes that through struggle, he would find success and happiness. The essays talk about how such notions proved futile and he ended up breaking mentally and physically. Fitzgerald’s criticism of the American dream within his crack-up essays is unlike his other literary works as he plainly states his discontent and disillusionment. Fitzgerald intends for the reader to plainly understand that he has essentially given up chasing the American Dream and that it proved futile in his efforts.

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The following is an excerpt from the essay "The Crack-Up," reprinted from The Crack-Up, a compilation of articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published in one book by New Directions Publishing. These articles were written during Fitzgerald's later years, between 1931 and 1937, when he was ill, drunk, in debt, and unable to write commercially. They first appeared in Esquire magazine in the 1930s.

This excerpt is reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing.

The Crack-Up
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
February 1936

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work - the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside - the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within - that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick - the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation - 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. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true. Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, or to what proportion could be mustered of both. It seemed a romantic business to be a successful literary man - you were not ever going to be as famous as a movie star but what note you had was probably longer-lived - you were never going to have the power of a man of strong political or religious convictions but you were certainly more independent. Of course within the practice of your trade you were forever unsatisfied-but I, for one, would not have chosen any other.

As the twenties passed, with my own twenties marching a little ahead of them, my two juvenile regrets - at not being big enough (or good enough) to play football in college, and at not getting overseas during the war - resolved themselves into childish waking dreams of imaginary heroism that were good enough to go to sleep on in restless nights. The big problems of life seemed to solve themselves, and if the business of fixing them was difficult, it made one too tired to think of more general problems.

Life, 10 years ago, was largely a personal matter. I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to "succeed" - and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills - domestic, professional and personal - then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.

For seventeen years, with a year of deliberate loafing and resting out in the center - things went on like that, with a new chore only a nice prospect for the next day. I was living hard, too, but: "Up to forty-nine it'll be all right," I said. "I can count on that. For a man who's lived as I have, that's all you could ask."

And then, ten years this side of forty-nine, I suddenly realized that I had prematurely cracked.

I Now a man can crack in many ways - can crack in the head - in which case the power of decision is taken from you by others! or in the body, when one can but submit to the white hospital world; or in the nerves. William Seabrook in an unsympathetic book tells, with some pride and a movie ending, of how he became public charge. What led to his alcoholism or was bound up with it, was a collapse of his nervous system. Though the present writer was not so entangled - having at the time not tasted so much as a glass of beer for six months - it was his nervous reflexes that were giving way - too much anger and too many tears.

Moreover, to go back to my thesis that life has a varying offensive, the realization of having cracked was not simultaneous with a blow, but with a reprieve.

Not long before, I had sat in the office of a great doctor and listened to a grave sentence. With what, in retrospect, seems some equanimity, I had gone on about my affairs in the city where I was living, not caring much, not thinking how much had been left undone, or what would become of this and that responsibility, like people do in books; I was well insured and anyhow I had been only a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, even of my talent.

But I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn't want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life - I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that I came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved - in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.

But now I wanted to be absolutely alone and so arranged as certain insulation from ordinary cares.

It was not an unhappy time. I went away and there were fewer people. I found I was good-and-tired. I could lie around and was glad to, sleeping or dozing sometimes twenty hours a day and in the intervals trying resolutely not to think - instead I made lists - made lists and tore them up, hundreds of lists: of cavalry leaders and football players and cities, and popular tunes and pitchers, and happy times, and hobbies and houses lived in a how many suits since I left the army and how many pairs of shoes (I didn't count the suit I bought in Sorrento that shrunk, nor the pumps and dress shirt and collar that I carried around for years and never wore, because the pumps got damp and grainy and the shirt and collar got yellow and starch-rotted). And lists of women I'd liked, and of the times I had let myself be snubbed by people who had not been my betters in character or ability.

- And then suddenly, surprisingly, I got better.

- And cracked like an old plate as soon as I heard the news.

That is the real end of the story. What was to be done about it will have to rest in what used to be called the "womb of time." Suffice it to say that after about an hour of solitary pillow-hugging, I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt. What was the small gift of life given back in comparison to that? - when there had once been a pride of direction and a confidence in enduring independence.

I realized that in those two years, in order to preserve something - an inner hush maybe, maybe not-I had weaned myself from all the things I used to love - that every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at dinner had become an effort. I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking, I saw that even my love for those closest to me was become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations - with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech tracks, the dead silence of the country - contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness - hating the night when I couldn't sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day.

There were certain spots, certain faces I could look at. Like most Middle Westerners, I have never had any but the vaguest race prejudices - I had always had a secret yen for the lovely Scandinavian blondes who sat on porches in St. Paul but hadn't emerged enough economically to be part of what was then society. They were too nice to be "chickens" and too quickly off the farmlands to seize a place in the sun, but I remember going round blocks to catch a single glimpse of shining hair - the bright shock of a girl I'd never know. This is urban, unpopular talk. It strays afield from the fact that in these latter days I couldn't stand the sight of Celts, English, Politicians, Strangers, Virginians, Negroes (light or dark), Hunting People, or retail clerks, and middlemen in general, all writers (I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can) - and all the classes as classes and most of them as members of their class...

Trying to cling to something, I liked doctors and girl children up to the age of about thirteen and well-brought-up boy children from about eight years old on. I could have peace and happiness with these few categories of people. I forgot to add that I liked old men - men over 70, sometimes over 60 if their faces looked seasoned. I liked Katherine Hepburn's face on the screen, no matter what was said about her pretentiousness, and Miriam Hopkins' face, and old friends if I only saw them once a year and could remember their ghosts.

All rather inhuman and undernourished, isn't it? Well, that, children, is the true sign of cracking up.

It is not a pretty picture. Inevitably it was carted here and there within its frame and exposed to various critics. One of them can only be described as a person whose life makes other people's lives seem like death - even this time when she was cast in the usually unappealing role of Job's comforter. In spite of the fact that this story is over let me append our conversation as a sort of postscript:

"Instead of being so sorry for yourself, listen -" she said. (She always says "Listen," because she thinks while she talks - really thinks.) So she said: Listen. Suppose this wasn't a crack in you - suppose it was a crack in the Grand Canyon."

"The crack's in me," I said heroically.

"Listen! The world only exists in your eyes - your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you're trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I'd try to make the world crack with me. Listen! The world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it's much better to say that it's not you that's cracked - it's the Grand Canyon."

"Baby et up all her Spinoza?"

"I don't know anything about Spinoza. I know - " She spoke, then, of old woes of her own, that seemed, in the telling, to have been more dolorous than mine, and how she had met them, over-ridden them, beaten them.

I felt a certain reaction to what she said, but I am a slow-thinking man, and it occurred to me simultaneously that of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one. In days when juice came into one as an article without duty, one tried to distribute it - but always without success; to further mix metaphors, vitality never "takes." You have it or you haven't it, like health or brown eyes or honor or a baritone voice. I might have asked some of it from her, neatly wrapped and ready for home cooking and digestion, but I could never have got it - not if I'd waited around for a thousand hours with the tin cup of self-pity. I could walk from her door, holding myself carefully like cracked crockery, and go away into the world of bitterness, where I was making a home with such materials as are found there - and quote to myself after I left her door:

"Ye are the salt of the earth. But if the salt hath lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?" Matthew 5-13.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald ~ Essay: The Crack-Up | American Masters | PBS

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The following is an excerpt from the essay "The Crack-Up," reprinted from The Crack-Up, a compilation of articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published in one book by New Directions Publishing. These articles were written during Fitzgerald's later years, between 1931 and 1937, when he was ill, drunk, in debt, and unable to write commercially.