In the mid-1930s, writer F. Scott Fitzgerald left the bright lights of New York and Paris for small town Asheville, N. C. At that time, his life was a far cry from his brilliant, early success, when at age 23 he published This Side of Paradise and gave voice to a generation of disaffected youth. In doing so he invented the Flapper, the Jazz Age, and Flaming Youth. A decade later, the country was in the middle of a Depression and it had nothing on Scott Fitzgerald. He had become a burned-out alcoholic who rarely bothered to separate fact from fiction in his own life. 

He was also a hypochondriac, which led him to western North Carolina. In 1936, he convinced himself he had tuberculosis, and self-prescribed a nice, quiet recuperation in the mountains at the glamorous Grove Park Inn, which advertised itself as “the finest resort hotel in the world.” Later that year, he had his wife Zelda, who suffered from lifelong mental illness, committed to an Asheville hospital.

In an effort to sober up, Fitzgerald switched from gin to beer -- thirty-five glasses a day. His secretary, a local woman who told fortunes for pocket money, wrote, “I haven’t ever, before or since, seen such quantities of beer displayed in such a place. Each trash basket was full of empties. So was the tub in one of the baths. Stacks of cases served as tables for manuscripts, books, supplies of paper.” When she asked what would become of him, he answered sadly, “God knows.”

By November, he was flat broke and suffering from some mighty serious DTs, complete with beetles and pink mice. In order to live within his nonexistent means, he moved to a hovel in nearby Hendersonville, In The Crack-Up, he reported, “Monday and Tuesday I had two tins of potted meat, three oranges and a box of Uneeda [crackers] and two cans of beer. The food totaled 18 cents a day -- and I think of the thousand meals I’ve sent back untasted in the last two years.” 

Straitened circumstances helped his writing, and it was in Hendersonville he created The Crack-Up, a collection of confessional essays about his decline. There was a time not so long ago when getting personal with the public was considered undignified, to say nothing of tacky. Fitzgerald’s literary gamble backfired critically (Ernest Hemingway stated that Scott was “stupid to write that gloomy personal stuff”), but financially it stood him on his feet, and he wasted no time haring back to the Grove Park Inn.

There he began an affair with a married woman. As this demanded a high degree of secrecy, he told anyone who would listen, from the switchboard operators to the bellboys. When the woman’s husband caught up with them, Fitzgerald defended himself against physical attack, aptly armed with a bottle opener.

Another woman called his bluff in a big way. Fitzgerald fancied the lovely Lottie, a high-class prostitute who wandered the lobby with a brace of poodles and an armload of unread books (she met many clients in the hotel book shop). Among other services rendered, Lottie felt compelled to listen to Scott’s rants. None was so relentless as the one about Negroes who didn’t know their place. One afternoon she interrupted to ask if he had ever slept with a black woman. His answer was a sincerely horrified “Never!” Her reply was that he had been intimate with one all summer. Lottie was passing. His response was an escalated meltdown.

In September 1936, the New York Post interviewed him at the Inn and the published result was a painful, self-pitying rant, complete with frequent stumblings to the gin in the bedroom dresser. When Fitzgerald read the piece, he tried to kill himself with an overdose of morphine.

A few months later, having had enough of the quiet mountain life, to say nothing of booze, adultery, and hookers of color, he headed for Hollywood where he died at the age of 44, with all of his work out of print. It was not until a decade later that readers, and at last critics, rediscovered it, vaulting him into the pantheon of American letters. In 1947, his wife Zelda died in Asheville in a fire in the asylum on Montford Street.