THE CRACK-UP, recently reprinted by New Directions, collects F. Scott Fitzgerald's working journals, essays, and letters. There are sketches biographical, as in the eponymous essay, which chronicles his downfall at age thirty-nine, and in his letters (to Eliot, Stein, Wharton). And then there are the sketches literary: snippets of stories and characters and dialogues, which the ever-writing F. Scott kept in working journals alphabetized into unconventional categories. C is for "conversations and things overheard," D is for "descriptions of girls," E is for "epigrams," and F is for "feelings and emotions (without girls)." Collected by Edmund Wilson only just after Fitzgerald's death, this genre-defying work operates on a variety of levels: it provides insight into the novelist's process, relationships, life, and the works-that-could-have-been, but it’s also just the right compromise: flash fiction avant le lettre—and from F. Scott!