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Why do we keep reading the great gatsby , arts & culture.
The art and life of Mark di Suvero
F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1937. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Why do we keep reading The Great Gatsby ? Why do some of us keep taking our time reading it? F. Scott Fitzgerald kept it short. A week is unwarranted. It should be consumed in the course of a day. Two at most. Otherwise, all the mystery seeps away, leaving Jay Gatsby lingering, ethereal but elusive, like cologne somebody else is wearing.
I have read The Great Gatsby four times. Only in this most recent time did I choose to attack it in a single sitting. I’m an authority now. In one day, you can sit with the brutal awfulness of nearly every person in this book—booooo, Jordan; just boo. And Mr. Wolfsheim, shame on you, sir; Gatsby was your friend . In a day, you no longer have to wonder whether Daisy loved Gatsby back or whether “love” aptly describes what Gatsby felt in the first place. After all, The Great Gatsby is a classic of illusions and delusions. In a day, you reach those closing words about the boats, the current, and the past, and rather than allow them to haunt, you simply return to the first page and start all over again. I know of someone—a well-heeled white woman in her midsixties—who reads this book every year. What I don’t know is how long it takes her. What is she hoping to find? Whether Gatsby strikes her as more cynical, naive, romantic, or pitiful? After decades with this book, who emerges more surprised by Nick’s friendship with Gatsby? The reader or Nick?
In this way, The Great Gatsby achieves hypnotic mystery. Who are any of these people—Wilson the mechanic or his lusty, buxom, doomed wife, Myrtle? Which feelings are real? Which lies are actually true? How does a story that begins with such grandiloquence end this luridly? Is it masterfully shallow or an express train to depth? It’s a melodrama, a romance, a kind of tragedy. But mostly it’s a premonition.
Each time, its fineness announces itself on two fronts. First, as writing. Were you to lay this thing out by the sentence, it’d be as close as an array of words could get to strands of pearls. “The cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment-houses”? That line alone is almost enough to make me quit typing for the rest of my life.
The second front entails the book’s heartlessness. It cuts deeper every time I sit down with it. No one cares about anyone else. Not really. Nick’s affection for Gatsby is entirely posthumous. Tragedy tends to need some buildup; Fitzgerald dunks you in it. The tragedy is not that usual stuff about love not being enough or arriving too late to save the day. It’s creepier and profoundly, inexorably true to the spirit of the nation. This is not a book about people, per se. Secretly, it’s a novel of ideas.
Gatsby meets Daisy when he’s a broke soldier and senses that she requires more prosperity, so five years later he returns as almost a parody of it. The tragedy here is the death of the heart, capitalism as an emotion. We might not have been ready to hear that in 1925, even though the literature of industrialization demanded us to notice. The difference between Fitzgerald and, say, Upton Sinclair, who wrote, among other tracts, The Jungle , is that Sinclair was, among many other things, tagged a muckraker and Fitzgerald was a gothic romantic, of sorts. Nonetheless, everybody’s got coins in their eyes.
This is to say that the novel may not make such an indelible first impression. It’s quite a book. But nothing rippled upon its release in 1925. The critics called it a dud! I know what they meant. This was never my novel. It’s too smooth for tragedy, under wrought. Yet I, too, returned, seduced, eager to detect. What— who? —have I missed? Fitzgerald was writing ahead of his time. Makes sense. He’s made time both a character in the novel and an ingredient in the book’s recipe for eternity. And it had other plans. The dazzle of his prose didn’t do for people in 1925 what it’s done for everybody afterward. The gleam seemed flimsy at a time when a reader was still in search of writing that seeped subcutaneously.
The twenties were a drunken, giddy glade between mountainous wars and financial collapse. By 1925, they were midroar. Americans were innovating and exploring. They messed around with personae. Nothing new there. American popular entertainment erupted from that kind of messy disruption of the self the very first time a white guy painted his face black. By the twenties, Black Americans were messing around, too. They were as aware as ever of what it meant to perform versions of oneself—there once were Black people who, in painting their faces black, performed as white people performing them. So this would’ve been an age of high self-regard. It would have been an age in which self-cultivation construes as a delusion of the American dream. You could build a fortune, then afford to build an identity evident to all as distinctly, keenly, robustly, hilariously, terrifyingly, alluringly American. Or the inverse: the identity is a conjurer of fortune.
This is the sort of classic book that you didn’t have to be there for. Certain people were living it. And Fitzgerald had captured that change in the American character: merely being oneself wouldn’t suffice. Americans, some of them, were getting accustomed to the performance of oneself. As Gatsby suffers at Nick’s place during his grand reunion with Daisy, he’s propped himself against the mantle “in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom.” (He’s actually a nervous wreck.) “His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock.” Yes, even the clock is in on the act, giving a performance as a timepiece.
So again: Why this book—for ninety-six years, over and over? Well, the premonition about performance is another part of it, and to grasp that, you probably did have to be there in 1925. Live performance had to compete with the mechanical reproduction of the moving image. You no longer had to pay for one-night-only theater when a couple times a day you could see people on giant screens, acting like people . They expressed, gestured, pantomimed, implied, felt. Because they couldn’t yet use words—nobody talked until 1927 and, really, that was in order to sing—the body spoke instead. Fingers, arms, eyes. The human gist rendered as bioluminescence. Often by people from the middle of nowhere transformed, with surgery, elocution classes, a contract, and a plainer, Waspier name, into someone new. So if you weren’t reinventing yourself, you were likely watching someone who had been reinvented.
The motion picture actually makes scant appearances in this book but it doesn’t have to. Fitzgerald was evidently aware of fame. By the time The Great Gatsby arrived, he himself was famous. And in its way, this novel (his third) knows the trap of celebrity and invents one limb after the next to flirt with its jaws. If you’ve seen enough movies from the silent era or what the scholars call the classical Hollywood of the thirties (the very place where Fitzgerald himself would do a stint), it’s possible to overlook the glamorous phoniness of it all. It didn’t seem phony at all. It was mesmerizing. Daisy mesmerized Gatsby. Gatsby mesmerized strangers. Well, the trappings of his Long Island mansion in East Egg, and the free booze, probably had more to do with that. He had an aura of affluence. And incurs some logical wonder about this fortune: How? Bootlegger would seem to make one only so rich.
A third of the way into the book, Nick admits to keeping track of the party people stuffed into and spread throughout Gatsby’s mansion. And the names themselves constitute a performance: “Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester Meyer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull,” Nick tells us. “Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys.” There’s even poor “Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.” This is a tenth of the acrobatic naming that occurs across a mere two pages, and once Fitzgerald wraps things up, you aren’t at a party so much as a movie-premiere after-party.
Daisy’s not at Gatsby’s this particular night, but she positions herself like a starlet. There’s a hazard to her approximation of brightness and lilt. We know the problem with this particular star: She’s actually a black hole. Her thick, strapping, racist husband, Tom, enjoys playing his role as a boorish cuckold-philanderer. Jordan is the savvy, possibly kooky, best friend, and Nick is the omniscient chum. There’s something about the four and sometimes five of them sitting around in sweltering rooms, bickering and languishing, that predicts hours of the manufactured lassitude we call reality TV. Everybody here is just as concocted, manifested. And Gatsby is more than real—and less. He’s symbolic. Not in quite the mode of one of reality’s most towering edifices, the one who became the country’s forty-fifth president. But another monument, nonetheless, to the peculiar tackiness of certain wealth dreams. I believe it was Fran Lebowitz who called it. Forty-five, she once said, is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person.” And Gatsby is the former James Gatz’s idea of the same.
Maybe we keep reading this book to double-check the mythos, to make sure the chintzy goose on its pages is really the golden god of our memories. It wasn’t until reading it for the third time that I finally was able to replace Robert Redford with the blinkered neurotic that Leonardo DiCaprio made of Gatsby in the Baz Luhrmann movie adaptation of the book. Nick labels Gatsby’s manner punctilious. Otherwise, he’s on edge, this fusion of suavity, shiftiness, and shadiness. Gatsby wavers between decisiveness and its opposite. On a drive with Nick where Gatsby starts tapping himself “indecisively” on the knee. A tic? A tell? Well, there he is about to lie, first about having been “educated at Oxford.” Then a confession of all the rest: nothing but whoppers, and a tease about “the sad thing that happened to me”—self-gossip. Listening to Gatsby’s life story is, for Nick, “like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.”
This is a world where “anything can happen”—like the fancy car full of Black people that Nick spies on the road (“two bucks and a girl,” in his parlance) being driven by a white chauffeur. Anything can happen, “even Gatsby.” (Especially, I’d say.) Except there’s so much nothing. Here is a book whose magnificence culminates in an exposé of waste—of time, of money, of space, of devotion, of life. There is death among the ash heaps in the book’s poor part of town. Jordan Baker is introduced flat out on a sofa “with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall.” It’s as likely to be an actual object as it is the idea of something else: the precarious purity of their monotonous little empire.
We don’t know who James Gatz from North Dakota is before he becomes Jay Gatsby from Nowhere. “Becomes”—ha. Too passive. Gatsby tosses Gatz overboard. For what, though? A girl, he thinks. Daisy. A daisy. A woman to whom most of Fitzgerald’s many uses of the word murmur are applied. But we come back to this book to conclude her intentions, to rediscover whether Gatsby’s standing watch outside her house after a terrible night portends true love and not paranoid obsession. And okay, if it is obsession, is it at least mutual? That’s a question to think about as you start to read this thing, whether for the first or fifty-first time. Daisy is this man’s objective, but she’s the wrong fantasy. It was never her he wanted. Not really. It was America. One that’s never existed. Just a movie of it. America .
Wesley Morris is a critic-at-large at the New York Times and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine , where he writes about popular culture and cohosts, with Jenna Wortham, the podcast Still Processing . For three years, he was a staff writer at Grantland , where he wrote about movies, television, and the role of style in professional sports, and cohosted the podcast Do You Like Prince Movies? , with Alex Pappademas. Before that, he spent eleven years as a film critic at the Boston Globe , where he won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Introduction by Wesley Morris to the Modern Library edition of The Great Gatsby , by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Introduction copyright © 2021 by Wesley Morris. Published by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
The Great Gatsby
By f. scott fitzgerald.
'The Great Gatsby' tells a very human story of wealth, dreams, and failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald takes the reader into the heart of the Jazz Age, in New York City, and into the world of Jay Gatsby.
Article written by Emma Baldwin
B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.
The Great Gatsby tells a very human story of wealth, dreams, and failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald takes the reader into the heart of the Jazz Age , in New York City, and into the world of Jay Gatsby. Through Nick’s narration, readers are exposed to the dangers of caring too much about the wrong thing and devoting themselves to the wrong ideal.
Gatsby’s pursuit of the past central to my understanding of this novel. Fitzgerald created Gatsby as a representative of the American dream , someone who, despite all of his hard work, did not achieve the one thing he wanted most in life.
Wealth and the American Dream
Another part of this novel I found to be integral to my understanding of the time period was the way that wealth and the American dream did not exist alongside one another. The American dream suggests that through hard work and determination, anyone can achieve the dream life they’re looking for.
On the outside, Gatsby does just that. He raises himself out of poverty and makes his fortune (albeit not through entirely legal means). He worked hard and remained focused. For those attending his parties or who have seen his mansion, he is living the best possible life–an embodiment of the American dream. But, he’s missing the one thing he really wanted to achieve–Daisy’s love and commitment. His pursuit of wealth was not for wealth alone. It was for something that, he realized, money can’t buy.
It was impossible for me not to feel moved by the bind Gatsby got himself into. He put Daisy on a pedestal, one that required she fulfill her end of the bargain if he fulfilled his. He got rich and acquired the means to give her the kind of life she wanted. But, Daisy was unwilling to separate herself from her husband, Tom Buchanan, and return to Gatsby. She ended up being more interested in maintaining her social status and staying in the safety of her marriage than living what might’ve been a happy life.
Daisy Buchanan and the Treatment of Women
Her character is often deeply romanticized, with her actions painted as those of a woman torn between what she knows is right and her inability to guide her own life. However, I always return to the strange conversation she shares with Nick, revealing her concerns about raising a daughter. The quote from The Great Gatsby reads:
I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
This quote proved to me that Daisy is well aware of her position in the world, and she turns to the safety of being “a beautiful little fool” when she needs to be. It’s the only way she feels she can survive.
There’s something to be said for the depiction of Daisy as a victim. Still, her callous treatment of Gatsby at the end of the novel, seen through her refusal to attend his funeral and dismissal of the destruction she caused, is hard to empathize with. Daisy may be at Tom’s mercy for a great deal, her livelihood, and her social status, but when she walks away from the death of a man she supposedly loved, it feels as though her true nature is revealed. She’s a survivor more than anything else and didn’t deserve the pedestal that Gatsby put her on. This is part of what makes Gatsby’s story so tragic. He was pure in a way that no other character in the novel was. He had one thing he wanted, and he was determined to do anything to get it. That one thing, Daisy’s love, was what let him down.
I also found it interesting to consider the differences between Jordan’s character and Daisy’s and how they were both treated. Jordan, while certainly no saint, is regarded as a dangerous personality. She sleeps with different men, appears to hold no one’s opinion above her own, and has made an independent career for herself as a golfer (a surely male-dominated world). I continue to ask myself how much of Nick’s depiction of Jordan is based on her pushing the envelope of what a woman “should” do in the 1920s ?
The Great Gatsby and Greatness
One of the novel’s defining moments is when Nick realizes who was truly “great” and why. Gatsby wasn’t “Great” because of his wealth, home, parties, or any other physical item he owned. He was great because of the single-minded pursuit of his dream. His incredible personality and determination made him a one-of-a-kind man in Nick’s world. This realization about who Gatsby was and what he represented was driven home by his death and the lack of attendees at his funeral. No one, aside from Nick, realizes the kind of man he was. Those he might’ve called friends were using him for the money, possession, or social status they might have attained. But, Nick realizes that none of these things made the man “great.”
The Great Gatsby as a Historical Document
Finally, I find myself considering what the novel can tell us about the United States post-World War I and during the financial boom of the roaring twenties. Without didactically detailing historical information, the novel does provide readers with an interesting insight into what the world was like then.
The characters, particularly those who attend Gatsby’s parties, appear to have nothing to lose. They’ve made it through the war, are financially better off than they were before, and are more than willing to throw caution to the wind. Fitzgerald taps into a particular culture, fueled by a new love for jazz music, financial stability, prohibition and speakeasies, and new freedoms for women. The novel evokes this culture throughout each page, transporting readers into a very different time and place.
The novel conveys a feeling of change to me, a realization that the American dream may not be all it’s cut out to be and that the world was never going to be the same again after World War I. It appears that this is part of what was fueling Fitzgerald’s characters in The Great Gatsby and his plot choices.
What did early reviewers think of The Great Gatsby ?
Early reviews of The Great Gatsby were not positive. Reviewers generally dismissed the novel, suggesting that it was not as good as Fitzgerald’s prior novels. It was not until after this death that it was elevated to the status it holds today.
What is the message of The Great Gatsby ?
The message is that the American dream is not real and that wealth does not equal happiness. Plus, optimism might feel and seem noble but when it’s misplaced it can be destructive.
Is Jay Gatsby a good or bad character?
Gatsby is generally considered to be a good character. He did illegal things to gain his fortune but it was with the best intentions–regaining the love of Daisy, the woman he loved in his youth.
Did Daisy actually love Gatsy?
It’s unclear whether or not she loved Gatsby. But, considering her actions, it seems unlikely she loved him during the novel.
What does Nick learn from Gatsby?
Nick learns that the wealth of East and West Egg are a cover for emptiness and moral bankruptcy. The men and women he met are devoid of empathy or love for one another.
The Great Gatsby: Fitzgerald's Enduring Classic of the Jazz Age
Book Title: The Great Gatsby
Book Description: 'The Great Gatsby' is an unforgettable and beautiful novel that explores the nature of dreams and their value in contemporary society.
Book Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Book Edition: First Limited Edition
Book Format: Hardcover
Publisher - Organization: Charles Scribner's Sons
Date published: April 10, 1925
ISBN: 0-14-006229-2
Number Of Pages: 224
- Writing Style
- Lasting Effect on Reader
The Great Gatsby Review
The Great Gatsby is a novel of the Jazz Age. It follows Nick Carraway as he uncovers the truth behind his mysterious neighbor’s wealth and dreams. The novel explores the consequences of wealth and suggests that the American dream is an unrealistic expectation.
- Realistic setting.
- Interesting and provoking dialogue.
- Memorable characters.
- Limited action and emotions.
- Several unlikeable characters.
- Leaves readers with questions.
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About Emma Baldwin
Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.
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Reviews from Broadway and Beyond
The Great Gatsby: All That Glitters, But Short on Depth
By Sandy MacDonald
★★★☆☆ All the fixings – including some snazzy sets and standout stars – don't suffice to hoist this musical into the top rank.
It’s open season for The Great Gatsby , now that the copyright for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s beloved 1925 classic—30 million copies sold!— has expired. We got a rather tacky “immersive” version at the Park Central Hotel last summer. Rachel Chavkin ( The Great Comet of 1812… ) is cooking up a Broadway-bound contender about to premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge (with songs by Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine, and Thomas Bartlett, it looks promising). And meanwhile, we have an ambitious, flashy, but ill-conceived adaptation that has leaped—from all accounts, zhuzhed up a bit—from the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey.
“No one ever walks out of a theater humming the scenery,” Richard Rodgers is alleged to have said. In this instance they very well might: Set designer Paul Tate dePoo III has layered in all sorts of flats and furniture and props and projections that swoop in at the speed of light. The mechanics and special effects are a never-ending marvel. Cue the fireworks—for Gatsby’s over-the-top party designed to impress his never-forgotten flame, Daisy! A voluminous double bed—for the trysting Fitzgerald opted not to spell out so literally! An actual pool—for … well, you know what the pool is for.
The musicalization is off to a disconcerting start. As narrator/observer, Nick Carraway (Noah J. Ricketts), a recent Midwest transplant, is meant to serve as a classic outsider, ill at ease in the rarefied milieu of super-rich Long Island (East Egg for the to-the-manner-born and, across the sound, West Egg for shady parvenus and bootlegging racketeers). In this rendering, Ricketts is called upon to open the play with a surfeit of ambition and spunk, in the form of the song “Roaring On”—as in Roaring ’20s, nicely captured by a mixed-age bunch of actor-dancers costumed by Linda Cho and choreographed by Dominique Kelley.
[ Read David Finkle’s ★★☆☆☆ review here. ]
The crowd scenes, with flappers and gangsters cutting loose, are fun to watch. However, many of the twenty-odd songs (music by Jason Howland, lyrics by Nathan Tysen) have a been-there feel, adding to the over-stuffed gestalt of the show as a whole. As evidenced by the flashy stage effects, the creative team has apparently opted to override the clean lines and striking economy of the original text. A musical must of course be padded out with songs, and for the most part the ones assembled here are smart enough—with one peculiar exception, right at the outset.
It seems downright sadistic to require a fine baritone like Jeremy Jordan (as Gatsby) to hiccup up to a semi-falsetto in his opening paean “For Her”—the “her” being Daisy Buchanan, played to lazy patrician perfection by Eva Noblezada. Jordan survives the vocal trial to sing their duets at full force, and the effect—visual overload swept to dust—is transporting. Gatsby observes at one point in the novel that Daisy’s voice is “full of money,” a quality Noblezada captures effortlessly. Her voice shimmers like candlelight cast across glistening satin.
Oddly, though, the couple’s relationship doesn’t seem visceral—that king-and-then-some mattress notwithstanding. You’ll catch much more fire flashing between Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan (John Zdrojeski, acing the role of an insufferable snob and incorrigible bully), and his ambitious regular squeeze, Myrtle (Sara Chase). The scenes in the whorehouse where they carry out their assignations convey more heat—and humor—than anything going on back at the mansion. Ultimately, in Chase’s rendering, Myrtle’s cri de coeur when she realizes that Tom’s about to ditch her is the emotional spark point of the entire show. The audience, rapt, falls still.
It’s a mistake and a distraction to play up a superfluous romance between Daisy’s best friend, the tennis pro Jordan Baker (a nicely acerbic Samantha Pauly), and the improbably gung-ho Carraway. A modern reading, accelerating in recent decades if not assertively stated at the time of publication, would put them at some remove from the heterosexual midpoint. Forcing these two characters into a bumptious rom-com fling is a step too far, and in the wrong direction.
In any case, we don’t need a third couple providing presumable laughs. We’ve got two sets of tragic dyads to consider, set up by Fitzgerald as antipodes. One pair—Gatsby and Daisy, with Tom as a menacing third wheel—is grossly over-privileged. At the other end of the spectrum huddle Myrtle and her garage-mechanic husband, George (Paul Whitty, a banked fire), who live in an actual ash heap.
Fitzgerald was subject to the prejudices of his era. The text has been flagged for racist, anti-immigration, and antisemitic motifs, and it’s good to see these tendencies mostly suppressed here. At a minimum, he deserves credit for posing, in stark contrast, the advantages that come with “high” birth and the cost which that privilege exacts of those less fortunate.
That message comes through clearly here, despite the production team’s penchant for bells and whistles. If all you’re seeking is a spectacle, you will get one. For some real resonance and depth, though, you may just have to wait a while—or reread the book.
The Great Gatsby opened April 25, 2024, at the Broadway Theatre. Tickets and information: broadwaygatsby.com
About Sandy MacDonald
Sandy MacDonald started as an editor and translator (French, Spanish, Italian) at TDR: The Drama Review in 1969 and went on to help launch the journals Performance and Scripts for Joe Papp at the Public Theater. In 2003, she began covering New England theater for The Boston Globe and TheaterMania. In 2007, she returned to New York, where she has written for The New York Times, TDF Stages, Time Out New York , and other publications and has served four terms as a Drama Desk nominator. Her website is www.sandymacdonald.com .
To Its Earliest Reviewers, Gatsby Was Anything but Great
The canonical novel, published 90 years ago today, was initially deemed "unimportant," "painfully forced," " no more than a glorified anecdote," and "a dud."
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This story is obviously unimportant and, though, as I shall show, it has its place in the Fitzgerald canon, it is certainly not to be put on the same shelf with, say, This Side of Paradise . What ails it, fundamentally, is the plain fact that it is simply a story—that Fitzgerald seems to be far more interested in maintaining its suspense than in getting under the skins of its people.
When This Side of Paradise was published, Mr. Fitzgerald was hailed as a young man of promise, which he certainly appeared to be. But the promise, like so many, seems likely to go unfulfilled. The Roman candle which sent out a few gloriously colored balls at the first lighting seems to be ending in a fizzle of smoke and sparks.
Altogether it seems to us this book is a minor performance. At the moment, its author seems a bit bored and tired and cynical. There is no ebullience here, nor is there any mellowness or profundity. For our part, The Great Gatsby might just as well be called Ten Nights on Long Island .
Book reviews are, at their best, nuanced and complicated things. One corollary to that is that even a bad review can be made, in other contexts, to look like a more positive one by way of selective quotation. The initial ad for Gatsby that ran in many publications of the time—including this one—featured snippets from critics praising Fitzgerald's latest effort. Among them was this: "The sentences roll along smoothly, sparklingly, variously ... It is quite a new Fitzgerald who emerges from this book and the qualities that she shows are dignified and solid."
The ad attributes the praise to H.L. Mencken: the same critic who had dismissed Gatsby , overall , as not just inferior to Fitzgerald's other works, but also as an "obviously unimportant" story in whose telling the author "does not go below the surface." Gatsby himself, Mencken wrote, "genuinely lives and breathes"; he is also, however, a "clown." And his supporting cast of characters, the critic concluded, "are mere marionettes — often astonishingly lifelike, but nevertheless not quite alive."
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COMMENTS
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Of his uncompromising love-his love for Daisy Buchanan-his effort to recapture the past romance-we are explicitly informed. This patient romantic hopefulness against existing conditions symbolizes Gatsby. And like the "Turn of the Screw," "The Great Gatsby" is more a long short story than a novel. Nick Carraway had known Tom Buchanan at New Haven.
It's creepier and profoundly, inexorably true to the spirit of the nation. This is not a book about people, per se. Secretly, it's a novel of ideas. Gatsby meets Daisy when he's a broke soldier and senses that she requires more prosperity, so five years later he returns as almost a parody of it.
A journey to F. Scott Fitzgerald's fictional East and West Eggs, via the Long Island Rail Road and the Great Gatsby Boat Tour. Article on the home believed to be the model for Jay Gatsby's house. Article comparing the wealthy Hamptons of today with Fitzgerald's Long Island, as depicted in "Gatsby.".
Few characters in literature or indeed life embody an era quite so tenaciously as Jay Gatsby does the Jazz Age. Almost a century after he was written into being, F Scott Fitzgerald's doomed ...
It's no wonder that the last "Great Gatsby" revival was in 1974, tied to the release of the movie starring Robert Redford, in a country shaken to its core by the revelations of Watergate. Now "Gatsby" is getting a revival, this time in 3-D, with music by stars like Jay-Z, Beyonce, Jack White and Lana Del Rey, and with at least one ...
That's why Gatsby remains a cipher in the book. For Fitzgerald, it sufficed that Gatsby was rich, the "how" of it the work of a destiny that marked his brow and to which the entire world was ...
The Great Gatsby tells a very human story of wealth, dreams, and failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald takes the reader into the heart of the Jazz Age, in New York City, and into the world of Jay Gatsby. Through Nick's narration, readers are exposed to the dangers of caring too much about the wrong thing and devoting themselves to the wrong ideal.
The book follows his harrowing experiences in World War I and time later spent in New Orleans. Smith first read "Gatsby" when it was assigned to him as a teenager ("I truly didn't get it ...
The Great Gatsby received generally favorable reviews from literary critics of the day. [142] Edwin Clark of The New York Times felt the novel was a mystical and glamorous tale of the Jazz Age. [143] Similarly, Lillian C. Ford of the Los Angeles Times hailed the novel as a revelatory work of art that "leaves the reader in a mood of chastened ...
Eighty-eight years before -- to the day -- the Los Angeles Times ran this review of the original "The Great Gatsby," the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Today, perception of the book's ...
Gatsby, 35 Years Later. he Great Gatsby" is thirty-five years old this spring. It is probably safe now to say that it is a classic of twentieth-century American fiction. There are three editions of it in print, and its text has become a subject of concern to professional bibliographers. It has not always been so, nor has "Gatsby" always sold at ...
In 1925, Edwin Clark reviewed the novel for the Book Review. Below is an excerpt. Of the many new writers that sprang into notice with the advent of the post-war period, Scott Fitzgerald has ...
Sandy MacDonald started as an editor and translator (French, Spanish, Italian) at TDR: The Drama Review in 1969 and went on to help launch the journals Performance and Scripts for Joe Papp at the Public Theater. In 2003, she began covering New England theater for The Boston Globe and TheaterMania. In 2007, she returned to New York, where she has written for The New York Times, TDF Stages, Time ...
Gatsby's initially poor sales were, at least in part, the result of some initially poor reviews.Though at the outset Fitzgerald's novel had its share of fans—the New York Times's Edwin Clark ...
Original Times review of "The Great Gatsby" (1925). Scott Fitzgerald, Author, Dies at 44. The Times's obituary on F. Scott Fitzgerald (1940). Gatsby, 35 Years Later. Article on "the belated fame of 'Gatsby'" (1960). The Best Gatsby. Article on the publication of the handwritten manuscript of the novel (1975).
The Great Gatsby At the Park Central Hotel, Manhattan; immersivegatsby.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. Maya Phillips is a critic at large.
Eighty-eight years before -- to the day -- the Los Angeles Times ran this review of the original "The Great Gatsby," the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Today, perception of the book's ...
The Great Gatsby. Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Drama, Romance. PG-13. 2h 23m. By A.O. Scott. May 9, 2013. The best way to enjoy Baz Luhrmann's big and noisy new version of "The Great Gatsby ...
The book is a cautionary tale that was offered to readers who, at the time, sought no caution. In the retrospective post-Depression view, however, "The Great Gatsby" all made perfect sense ...
100 Best Books of the 21st Century: As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review ...
As books about L.G.B.T.Q. issues, sexual health and race and racism have been targeted for removal, libraries have become a new battleground in a bitter culture war.Sweeping laws that impose ...
In 2019, Ms. Harris, then a senator, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, introduced legislation that would have evaluated environmental rules and laws by how they ...
Best, Worst and Most Surprising Lines From the Presidential Debate. Kamala Harris reminded viewers she owns a gun. Donald Trump repeated a debunked internet rumor about immigrants eating cats.