Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
-11% $15.93$15.93
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
$7.14$7.14
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Four Getz Books
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
The Crack-Up Paperback – February 27, 2009
Purchase options and add-ons
A self-portrait of a great writer 's rise and fall, intensely personal and etched with Fitzgerald's signature blend of romance and realism.
The Crack-Up tells the story of Fitzgerald's sudden descent at the age of thirty-nine from glamorous success to empty despair, and his determined recovery. Compiled and edited by Edmund Wilson shortly after F. Scott Fitzgerald's death, this revealing collection of his essays―as well as letters to and from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos―tells of a man with charm and talent to burn, whose gaiety and genius made him a living symbol of the Jazz Age, and whose recklessness brought him grief and loss. "Fitzgerald's physical and spiritual exhaustion is described brilliantly," noted The New York Review of Books: "the essays are amazing for the candor."- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherNew Directions
- Publication dateFebruary 27, 2009
- Dimensions5.2 x 1 x 8.1 inches
- ISBN-100811218201
- ISBN-13978-0811218207
"Layla" by Colleen Hoover for $7.19
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover comes a novel that explores life after tragedy and the enduring spirit of love. | Learn more
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may deliver to you quickly
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : New Directions; Reprint edition (February 27, 2009)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0811218201
- ISBN-13 : 978-0811218207
- Item Weight : 12.3 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.2 x 1 x 8.1 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #261,231 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #805 in Essays (Books)
- #1,094 in Author Biographies
- #14,691 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota, and went to Princeton University which he left in 1917 to join the army. Fitzgerald was said to have epitomised the Jazz Age, an age inhabited by a generation he defined as 'grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken'.
In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre. Their destructive relationship and her subsequent mental breakdowns became a major influence on his writing. Among his publications were five novels, This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender is the Night and The Love of the Last Tycoon (his last and unfinished work): six volumes of short stories and The Crack-Up, a selection of autobiographical pieces.
Fitzgerald died suddenly in 1940. After his death The New York Times said of him that 'He was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a "generation" ... he might have interpreted them and even guided them, as in their middle years they saw a different and nobler freedom threatened with destruction.'
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
The individual lives within culture and culture lives within the individual. In "The Crack-up" F. Scott Fitzgerald describes in bone clean prose what happens to the individual when culture cracks up; the individual cracks up with it. When it works, culture provides meaning to life, when it cracks up, life becomes meaningless. As Fitzgerald puts it, life becomes "an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness".
This brief work is both sociology and literature of the first order; concise description and artistic revelation. It is far more than (as some reviewers suggest) just the confession of an alcoholic. It has lasting merit for the Liberal Arts, particularly the Humanities and the Social Sciences.
The autobiographical, "The Crack-up," 30 taut pages, is the centerpiece of this edition. It is not fiction, but a brief and unflinching account of the author's breakdown amidst the general breakdown of his era. It was written in 1936, six years after the crack-up of "The Roaring Twenties" (which Fitzgerald termed "The Jazz Age"). Four years after this work was published Fitzgerald, age forty-four, died of a massive heart attack. A year later America entered WWII.
The Roaring Jazz Age is a good description for the glittering, frenzied mania that was life in America closely following WWI. But the "boom" of the 1920's was followed by the"bust" of the 1930's. The glitter soon morphed into The Great Depression and its attendant horror, WWII. Who knew American culture could be so bipolar?
There are five additional briefer autobiographical pieces (in ascending annual sequence starting in 1931) that prefigure the central work, and one short coda published in 1937. Of the earlier pieces two were co-written with Zelda, Fitzgerald's plaintive wife, and are noteworthy for their brilliant satirical expression of disenchantment with places and things that first "glittered" then proved to be dross. In fact, the principal theme of Fitzgerald's life and work can be summed up in the old adage, "all that glitters is not gold."
The bulk of this edition contains Fitzgerald's notebooks. These are brief sketches of ideas and impressions in a scattered fashion that, I think, would be of interest to the specialist, but not the general reader. There are also a few of his letters, mainly to his daughter Frances and his editor, the noted critic Edmund Wilson. Reviewers that mention "short stories" must be referring to a different edition.
This is an extremely well made soft cover edition with sewn sections and resilient pages. Paper brightness and font are excellent. But a lot of the book's content appears to be filler to pad out the title piece, which is the one substantial work. If the reader can find this title in other well made books that have short stories or other noteworthy pieces I would recommend such other collections; if not, this edition is good even with its shortcomings. I rate five stars for the title piece, several other worthwhile selections and the superb quality of the book.
At the time of this writing a big Hollywood production of "The Great Gatsby" has just been released. Perhaps this portends a new interest in the work of Fitzgerald. His themes continue to have relevance to the once again glittering American culture, far more than those of his famous contemporaries, Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner (among others). In any event, virtually all that Fitzgerald has to teach us about life and culture is contained in the accessible yet profound "The Crack up".
The person I got it for likes poetry and essay type books, and he really enjoys this book.