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"Christ, man!" exploded Dos Passes, "how do you find time ... to worry about all that stuff? . . . We're living in one of the damnedest tragic moments in history — if you want to go to pieces I think it's absolutely O.K. but I think you ought to write a first-rate novel about it . . . instead of spilling it in little pieces." And soon Fitzgerald, with amazing fortitude, set out to do just that. "I never blame failure," he told his daughter Frances, "but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort." In The Last Tycoon he made a last, powerful effort both to create an objective character and to explain his own dilemma — that of a man torn between the "moneyed celebrity" of Hollywood and his ambition to do honest work. He had developed, says Dos Passos, "a real, grand style," and had reached "a firmly anchored ethical standard . . . something that American writing has been struggling towards for half a century." But, halfway through The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald died of a heart ailment.
Edmund Wilson has chosen the pieces for The Crack-Up so carefully that they lead in a straight, chronological line from Fitzgerald's youth and glory to his maturity and misery. Every aspect of his life and work — the brilliant, the second-rate, the real, the illusory — is shown. Readers may differ on the question of Fitzgerald's survival value, but they will respect Author Wescott's statement that Fitzgerald's life and fate mirrored the life and fate of a whole period of American life. "He was our darling, our genius, our fool. ... He lived and he wrote at last like a scapegoat, and now has departed like one."