The Crack-Up (2026)

In 1936, eleven years after the underwhelming publication of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald earned $80 total in book royalties and was buried up to his neck in debt. He would not live long enough to see The Great Gatsby become a success.1 He spent that year living in cheap hotels near Asheville, North Carolina, where Zelda was being treated for mental illness at the Highland Hospital—the same hospital where she would later die in a fire.