"The Crack-Up"
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1936
Fitzgerald's mid-career breakdown, written with ruined elegance. "In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning." The confessional essay before it was a genre. More honest than any of his fiction.
The case against
When these essays ran in Esquire in 1936, Fitzgerald's friends treated them as a public disgrace; Hemingway mocked him for it, and Dos Passos wrote to ask how he could spend his time on such stuff with the world going to war. It is beautiful self-pity, but it is self-pity, from a man whose ruin was partly a hangover with a prose style. The confessional essay it helped invent has a great deal to answer for.
Essays · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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