"The Crash!": Writing the Great Depression in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited," "Emotional Bankruptcy," and "Crazy Sunday"

Despite popular critical assumptions that F. Scott Fitzgerald was largely untouched by the stock market crash of 1929, he pays marked attention to it in his ledger, suggesting that he saw the 1929 crash as a landmark not only in America, but in his own life. Furthermore, Fitzgerald's short stories in the early years of the Depression, particularly "Babylon Revisited" (1930), "Emotional Bankruptcy" (1931), and "Crazy Sunday" (1932), reflect the way in which he internalized the trauma of the Great Depression, reconstituting its economic rhetoric in the description of emotional and psychological phenomena. All three works echo buzzwords like "spend," "pay," "confidence," and "bankruptcy"; employ pivotal moments of crash or collapse; and illustrate the concept of emotional bankruptcy that became such an integral component in Fitzgerald's ethos. By analyzing these stories in the light of the "Crash!" in Fitzgerald's Ledger, we may begin to understand his literary contributions as the writer not only of the American Jazz Age, but of the Great Depression.