Bolte, Henry Intimations of a Crack-Up. 2019. Radford University, Thesis. Radford University Scholars' Repository.
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Abstract
Though to the modern reader he has come to mainly represent the glamor and excess of the Jazz Age in water-logged or ash-ridden symbolism through The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s career remains tantamount with the frenetic rise and tragic fall of the entire decade itself. Mirroring the fallout of the Crash of 1929, Fitzgerald’s career was practically over by the thirties. His alcoholism ravaged his personal life and his debilitating inferiority complex led to bouts of depression and an inability to publish much of anything, other than half-hearted short stories in any magazine willing to publish him. During this period, his beloved wife Zelda had been institutionalized for treatment of schizophrenia, and his daughter, Scottie, was away at boarding school. He comes to expresses his financial frustrations, pains, and inability to write through a striking, three-part essay series, “The Crack-Up,” in Esquire magazine. His literary colleagues were embarrassed by the sudden, pitiful self-expression and rejected the author for it. This thesis traces the intimations of Fitzgerald’s impending crack-up and proves that it should be no surprise that his career came to a close as it did, and that the author even presaged his own demise through the fiction that propelled him there in the first place.
| Item Type: | Thesis |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PS American literature |
| Divisions: | Radford University > College of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences > Department of English |
| Date Deposited: | 02 Mar 2020 20:10 |
| Last Modified: | 20 Apr 2023 12:52 |
| URI: | http://wagner.radford.edu/id/eprint/535 |
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