Robert Beuka American Icon - Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in Critical and Cultural Context

City University of New York.
Robert Beuka has constructed an immensely valuable resource for

teachers, students, and scholars. We have needed a book like this for a
long time; Gatsby criticism seems in little danger of exhaustion anytime
soon, and it becomes extremely difficult for readers to organize extant
criticism simply because its so vast. This book will be read and reread,
annotated and underlined, for many years to come.
Kirk Curnutt, Troy University Montgomery
Cover image: Dust jacket of first edition of The Great Gatsby, published by Charles Scribners Sons in 1925. The
image is Francis Cugats Celestial Eyes. Photo used by kind permission of the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli
Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South
Carolina Libraries.
Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby in Critical and Cultural Context
Beuka
American Icon is a terrific book.... Professor Beuka has made sense

of decades of fragmented insights.
Ronald Berman, University of California, San Diego
American Icon
Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby

in Critical and Cultural Context
Robert Beuka is Professor of English at Bronx Community College,
American Icon
itzgeralds The Great Gatsby is widely seen as the quintessential

great American novel, and the extensive body of criticism on the
work bears out its significance in American letters. American Icon
traces its reception and its canonical status in American literature,
popular culture, and educational experience. It begins by outlining the
novels critical reception from its publication in 1925, to very mixed
reviews, through Fitzgeralds death, when it had been virtually forgotten.
Next, it examines the posthumous revival of Fitzgerald studies in the
1940s and its intensification by the New Critics in the 1950s, focusing
on how and why the novel began to be considered a masterpiece
of American literature. It then traces the growth of the industry of
Gatsby criticism in the ensuing decades, stressing how critics of recent
decades have opened up study of the economic, sexual, racial, and
historical aspects of the text. The final section discusses the larger-thanlife status Gatsby has attained in American education and popular
culture, suggesting not only that it has risen from the critical ash heaps
into which it was initially discarded, but also that it has become part of
the fabric of American culture in a way that few other works have.
Cover design: Frank Gutbrod
Robert Beuka
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American Icon
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Studies in American Literature and Culture:

Literary Criticism in Perspective
Scott Peeples, Series Editor
(Charleston, South Carolina)
About Literary Criticism in Perspective

Books in the series Literary Criticism in Perspective trace literary scholarship and criticism on major and neglected writers
alike, or on a single major work, a group of writers, a literary
school or movement. In so doing the authors authorities
on the topic in question who are also well-versed in the principles and history of literary criticism address a readership
consisting of scholars, students of literature at the graduate
and undergraduate level, and the general reader. One of the
primary purposes of the series is to illuminate the nature of
literary criticism itself, to gauge the influence of social and historic currents on aesthetic judgments once thought objective
and normative.
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American Icon
Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby in
Critical and Cultural Context
Robert Beuka
Rochester, New York
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Copyright 2011 Robert Beuka

All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation,
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2011
by Camden House
Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
www.camden-house.com
and of Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-371-7
ISBN-10: 1-57113-371-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beuka, Robert, 1965
American icon: Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby in critical and cultural
context / Robert Beuka.
p. cm. (Studies in American literature and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-371-7 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
ISBN-10: 1-57113-371-2 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
1.Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 18961940. Great Gatsby. I.Title.
II.Series.
PS3511.I9G8243 2011
813'.52dc22
2011020005
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
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For my mother and father
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Contents
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Preface
ix
1: A Book of the Season Only: Early Reactions to

The Great Gatsby
2: A Green Light: The Fitzgerald Revival and the

Making of a Masterpiece, 194059
22
3: The Gatsby Industry: Tracing Patterns and Pushing

Boundaries in the Criticism of the Sixties and Seventies
57
4: Gatsby, in Theory (and Out): New Paradigms in the

Eighties and Nineties
93
5: Twenty-First-Century G: The Great Gatsby as Cultural Icon
118
Works Cited
143
Index
157
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Preface
of working on this book has been discovering the very wide range of opinion and reaction that Fitzgeralds
classic 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, has generated through the years.
Beyond the expected debate in the scholarly journals, I found through my
research how deep and varied the books influence has been on American
popular culture and discourse as well. In this regard, the study that follows at times diverges somewhat from the strict focus on analyzing trends
and ideas in academic scholarship that is characteristic of the Literary
Criticism in Perspective series. While my primary object of study is indeed
the formal scholarship on Gatsby, to do justice to the profound cultural
impact of this novel, I found it necessary and rather enjoyable! to
look occasionally beyond the realm of scholarly books and journals, into
the world of popular culture. From the coverage it has received in newspapers and magazines to adaptations, reworkings, and other assorted tips
of the cap in fiction, film, theater, and music, The Great Gatsby has been
a part of the larger cultural conversation in the United States over the
past several decades, notably so in recent years. One of my goals in this
study, then, is to attempt to account for the seemingly perpetual cultural
relevance of a novel that, on its publication, was criticized for being too
tied to its own historical moment to have any real shot at lasting appeal.
The main concern in the pages that follow, though, is to trace the
scholarly reaction to the book through the years in a sense, to tell a story
about how and why Gatsby came to be considered a classic of American
literature, while also accounting for the changing modes of interpretation
that have affected our understanding of the novel. I look at not only what
the evolution in critical perspectives says about the book itself, but also what
it says about the changing interests, values, and methodologies in American literary criticism. If, as various critics have suggested, The Great Gatsby
serves as a sort of mirror to both the ideals and the anxieties of American
culture, it also might be said to reflect much the same about the critics who
interpret its meaning. While this could be said of most classic literary texts,
Gatsby, with its intricate formal construction and established reputation as a
national classic, has provided a particularly compelling field of play for various critical approaches, as I hope to demonstrate.
My interest in the issues explored in this book began about a dozen
years ago, when I presented a conference paper on Gatsby and first met
the members of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, many of whom have
NE OF THE GREAT PLEASURES
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PREFACE
since become valued friends and colleagues. Their influence on this

book is greater than they probably know. I wish to thank Kirk Curnutt,
Ronald Berman, Peter Hays, James L.W. West III, and Bryant Mangum
for their advice and timely words of encouragement along the way. I
also would like to thank Jackson Bryer, whose superb bibliographic
work on Fitzgerald made my job of analyzing the early critical reaction
to the novel so much easier than it could have been. A special thanks
goes out to my friend Ruth Prigozy, executive director of the Fitzgerald
Society and my coeditor at the Fitzgerald Society Newsletter, for her
enthusiastic support of this project, and for always having an answer to
my hectic email inquiries.
I am indebted as well to the good people at Camden House, who have
been unfailingly gracious and supportive. Scott Peeples was kind enough to
offer me the opportunity to take on this project, and his careful readings
and reactions to early sections of the manuscript helped me greatly. Jim
Walker, editorial director at Camden House, has guided the project along,
not only with his keen critical eye but also with a collegiality and patience
above and beyond the call of duty. Thank you, gentlemen.
A portion of chapter 5 appeared previously in the volume Approaches
to Teaching Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby, edited by Jackson Bryer and
Nancy VanArsdale, published by MLA Press in 2009. I thank the press for
their permission to reprint this material here.
My fondest thank-you I have saved for last: My wife, Nadine, and
our children, Malcolm, Juliet, and Delia, have been both inspiration and
guardian angels throughout the time it took to write this book. Their
love and forbearance are a big part of these pages, too.
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1: A Book of the Season Only: Early

Reactions to The Great Gatsby
A Mixed Bag: The Initial Reviews
GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL: What does this phrase signify? Is there

such a thing, and if so, what is it? In the roughly one and a half centuries in which Americans have produced novels equipped to stand the
test of time, few could be said to have the qualities to elevate them into
such rarefied air. Critical consensus would put F. Scott Fitzgeralds The
Great Gatsby on the short list of candidates for the title of Great American Novel alongside such works as Melvilles Moby Dick, Twains The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter. It certainly seems safe to say that no other American novel has become a part of
our cultural lexicon so fully as Fitzgeralds masterpiece. The novels aura
of glamour, its modern romanticism, and its questioning of core American
values have made it, in the eyes of many, the quintessential American novel.
The consensus view of Gatsby as an American masterpiece is continually
reinforced by, among other things, its presence in the classroom: Taught in
high school English classes, undergraduate surveys of American literature,
and graduate seminars, The Great Gatsby remains perpetually part of our
cultural conversation. Partly as a result of its omnipresence in the educational system, the book also puts up remarkable sales numbers each year.
As recently as 2002, a half-million paperback copies of the novel were sold
in a single year (Goldstein). The paperback also tends to hover within the
top 150 of online bookseller Amazon.coms best sellers, and this for a novel
published over eighty years ago. The Modern Librarys famous list, from
back in 1998, of the 100 Best Novels written in English in the twentieth
century ranked The Great Gatsby as number two, behind only James Joyces
Ulysses. And no less a cultural barometer than the search engine Google
makes Gatsbys ongoing relevance clear: Google Gatsby, and you will
bring upwards of ten million hits.
Given its great critical and popular success, it may be difficult for the
reader of today to imagine a time when The Great Gatsby was not a best
seller, or a time when the novel earned indifference and even scorn, as
well as praise, from the critics. And yet this is entirely the case: Upon its
publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby met with mixed reaction from critics in the major newspapers and literary journals. No doubt even more
HE
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A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY
disheartening to its author was the reception by the buying public: The
Great Gatsby went through only two Scribners printings in Fitzgeralds
lifetime, totaling only 23,870 copies, some of which remained unsold at
the time of Fitzgeralds death (Bruccoli, Reference, 175). Sales of The
Great Gatsby during Fitzgeralds lifetime were less than half of those of
both his sensational, if uneven, debut novel of five years earlier, This Side
of Paradise, and his sophomore effort, the largely forgotten The Beautiful
and Damned (1922), topping only the poor showing of his last completed novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).1 It is one of the central ironies
of Fitzgeralds life and writing career that the novel that would eventually secure him a spot in Americas literary pantheon was, during his own
lifetime, something of a flop. In fact, after years of disappointing sales
following its initial publication, The Great Gatsby would eventually disappear from bookshops and the public consciousness. Though Fitzgerald would ask his publishing house, Scribners, repeatedly over the years
to issue an inexpensive paperback edition of the novel, with the hope of
improving sales and generating a revival of sorts for the book, Scribners
refused. Fitzgeralds business sense may actually have exceeded that of his
publisher on this question. Subsequent paperback editions of the novel,
issued years and decades after Fitzgeralds death, would be instrumental
in prompting the novels comeback, as well as its eventual rise to the status of American classic. Nonetheless, that acclaim and success came posthumously. At the time of Fitzgeralds death in 1940, The Great Gatsby
was long gone and forgotten.
Something seems not quite right with this story. It is true that any
student of literature can call to mind examples of authors and texts whose
reputations have risen and fallen over the years, and indeed some examples can be rather dramatic. Melvilles Moby Dick (1851), another book
on that rather small shelf of the Great American Novels, also failed during
the authors lifetime and waited far longer for its renaissance than The
Great Gatsby a century in the wasteland compared to Gatsbys mere
two or three decades. Or consider Kate Chopins 1899 work The Awakening, which is now considered a core American novel but which caused
such controversy at the time of its release that it was dropped by its publisher after only one initial printing. Still, the extremes to which the pendulum has swung for Fitzgeralds great work seem surprising. The reader
of today, approaching the novel as not merely as an established classic,
but indeed a cultural icon, could be forgiven for wondering how it could
ever have been seen otherwise. Its author was bemused as well. Scott
Fitzgerald had big plans for The Great Gatsby and sensed that the novel
marked a major breakthrough for him. In an excited letter to his editor
at Scribners, Maxwell Perkins, written when he was nearing completion
of the manuscript, Fitzgerald remarked, I think my novel is about the
best American novel ever written (in Bruccoli, Reference, 135). As such
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a bold (if, ultimately, accurate) statement implies, Fitzgerald was also an

author acutely concerned with his place in American letters, and particularly
with his posterity. In his Authors Apology included in the third printing of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), Fitzgerald famously
remarked, My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence: An
author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of
the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward (Apology). Given his
awareness of the importance of future critics and scholars assessments,
Fitzgerald had to be particularly disappointed by the reaction of the many
contemporary critics who viewed The Great Gatsby as an exciting diversion,
but not a great novel that would stand the test of time.
Consider, for example, a review by Isabel Paterson published in the
New York Herald Tribune shortly after the April 10, 1925, release of the
novel; a perceptive critique of the novel, the review nonetheless predicts
its short shelf life, in the phrase that supplies the title for this chapter.
Paterson praises Fitzgeralds keen attention to detail and contemporary
style In reproducing surfaces his virtuosity is amazing. He gets the
exact tone, the note, the shade of the season and place he is working
on; he is more contemporary than any newspaper before going on
to conclude that this ability to capture the spirit of the age would also
prove to be the books fatal flaw: But he has not, yet, gone below that
glittering surface except by a kind of happy accident, and then he is rather
bewildered by the results of his own intuition. . . . What has never been
alive cannot very well go on living; so this is a book of the season only,
but so peculiarly of the season, that it is in its own small way unique
(202).2 The reader of today might surmise that Paterson gets the story
partially right, as one unmistakable feature of the novel is its authors ability to capture the glittering surface of high society life in the twenties; however, this critique, written in the midst of the season Patterson
describes, is unable to account for the enduring appeal of this historical
era in American life. Nonetheless, Paterson was not the only critic to fault
Fitzgerald for getting the surface right at the expense of real depth: No
less a literary lion of the age than H.L. Mencken, in a generally positive,
but still mixed review of The Great Gatsby for the Baltimore Evening Sun,
complained that the novel is in form no more than a glorified anecdote,
and not too probable at that (211). Despite praising Fitzgeralds technical achievements in the book, Mencken concludes that the story is obviously unimportant (211), citing its basic triviality (212).
Menckens indictment of the novels triviality was shared by other
contemporary reviewers in the newspapers as well. Fitzgerald scholar
Matthew Bruccoli reminds us that leading newspapers of the day, especially those based in New York, were key shapers of literary opinion.3
(Reference, 188) Consider the case of the New York World, which Bruccoli lists among the most influential periodicals and opinion-makers
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(188): An unsigned review in this paper, published just two days after
the novels release, complains that there is no important development
of the protagonist, a flaw indicative of the overall shallowness of the narrative: The Great Gatsby is another one of the thousands of modern
novels which must be approached with the point of view of the average
tired person toward the movie-around-the-corner, a deadened intellect, a
thankful resigning of the attention, and an aftermath of wonder that such
things are produced (in Bryer, 195). Perhaps banking on their status as
literary tastemaker, the publishers of the New York World seem to have
been intent on getting this brief, utterly negative review out early; it is
among the first reviews of The Great Gatsby to appear in print. Interestingly, the World would subsequently print another review of the novel,
this time by the writer Laurence Stallings, only ten days later; this one
would precisely contradict the points made in the first, unsigned review.
In praising Fitzgeralds accomplishments in the novel, Stallings argues,
The Great Gatsby evidences an interest in the color and sweep of prose,
in the design and integrity of the novel, in the development of character,
like nothing else he has attempted. If you are interested in the American
novel this is a book for your list (203).
The stark contrast between the two New York World reviews offers
an instructive, and particularly acute, example of a split in the perceptions
of contemporary critics regarding Fitzgeralds literary merits. Almost no
critical assessment of this (or really any) Fitzgerald work doubted the
authors way with words, or his ability to create exciting stories appealing
to a contemporary audience; typically, the Fitzgerald debate concerned
whether or not his writing had the weight to carry it forward to future
generations, or whether he was an all-style, no-substance flash-in-the-pan
doomed to a short literary shelf life. As with any rule, there are exceptions in this case as well, and one unsigned review in The Independent
found the novel to be lifeless, complaining that the book has the flavor
of skimmed milk (in Bryer, 216). Nonetheless, most critical appraisals of
The Great Gatsby that appeared in 1925 praised Fitzgeralds facility with
language, while grappling with the question of the novels literariness.
Ironically, after Fitzgeralds death, the Gatsby revival would be sparked
by critics who saw the novels ultra-modern tone as a characteristic that
would help it to endure. In a seminal essay on Fitzgerald (first published
in 1945 in the Nation, and five years later collected in The Liberal Imagination), Lionel Trilling made this argument, seeing Gatsbys timeliness as
part and parcel of its potential timelessness. The Great Gatsby . . . after a
quarter-century is still as fresh as when it first appeared; it has even gained
in weight and relevance, which can be said of very few American books
of its time (251). Trilling cites Fitzgeralds deep understanding of his
historical moment as his rationale for this assessment of the novels lasting value: The Great Gatsby has its interest as a record of contemporary
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manners, but this might only have served to date it, did not Fitzgerald
take the given moment of history as something more than a mere circumstance, did he not . . . seize the given moment as a moral fact (251). In
direct contrast to critics of Fitzgeralds own age, like Paterson, who saw
in the novels modern tone its fatal flaw, subsequent critics and scholars,
following Trillings lead, often noted Fitzgeralds incisive portrayal of his
contemporary scene as a distinguishing literary feature of the novel.
Trillings thoughts on the novel and its author would in fact be influential in helping to restore Fitzgeralds critical reputation in the years
following the authors death. By contrast, at the time of the novels
publication, no critical consensus had yet been reached on the value of
Fitzgeralds style. Indeed, some reviewers of his work found Fitzgeralds
ultra-modern tone, with its allusions to current fashions and styles, and
its liberal use of contemporary slang, to be not merely superficial, but
offensive. John McClure, for example, in his review of the novel for the
New Orleans Times-Picayune, derides Fitzgerald as one of the Wednesday-and-Thursday boys. His books are the cleverest of the week, sometimes of the month or the year (232). McClure argues that Fitzgerald, in
The Great Gatsby, is so addicted to the use of Wednesday-and-Thursday
terms . . . new words that everybody is using . . . that the style is raw. . . .
Unless they are used with consummate skill they are as objectionable as
new paint, slick, shiny, crude and glaring. They grate on the nerves. Mr.
Fitzgerald, in using an up-to-the-minute vocabulary, pays the penalty of
crudeness (232). Fitzgerald, for his part, was acutely aware of the allure
of 1920s style; he not only coined the phrase the Jazz Age, providing
the era with its unofficial moniker, but he also made a living, at least early
in his career, through fresh, often glossy portrayals of the young women
and men of the era, its flappers and philosophers, and their willingness to flout conventional morality and social standards.4 Unlike some of
his critics, Fitzgerald seemed to understand, before the point was elucidated by Trilling and others, that his time and place would continue to
captivate readers of future generations as well.
One strain of negative criticism directed toward The Great Gatsby
upon its publication focused on a particular aspect of the books modern
nature: Fitzgeralds depiction of a reckless, fast-living youthful set. Some
reviewers criticized the lack of virtuous characters, and in a larger sense
bemoaned what they saw as the novels moral relativism. The reviewer
for the Raleigh News and Observer offers a representative example of that
assessment: The book is more or less exhilarating as read, but after it is
all read and we look back at what Mr. Fitzgerald has given us, we have a
wistful feeling that we wish there had been somebody good in the book
(in Bryer, 217). Another unnamed reviewer, in the Kansas City Star, takes
a similarly offended tone, arguing that the immoral nature of the story
and its characters makes it essentially not worth reading: Mr. Fitzgerald
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is a clever writer, but in The Great Gatsby his chosen field is so sordid
and depressing that if the cleverness is there it is obscured by the details of
his story (in Bryer, 221).
One of the more scalding attacks on the novel along these lines
comes from Harvey Eagleton, in his review of Gatsby for the Dallas Morning News. In a fiery review, Eagleton launches into a broadside against
not only the sordid material of the novel, but also of the character of
its author, claiming that Fitzgerald had been both a sensationalist and
a pseudo-reformer lacking any real ideas for reform in his first novels.
Through such strategies, Eagleton argues, he managed to play one generation of readers off of the other and profit from the controversy, but
Eagleton feels he has seen through this sham to the essential emptiness
beneath, discussing Fitzgeralds fundamental lack of imagination: in
spite of all his cleverness, and his wit, he has no creative faculty. He has a
photographic mind. He can not create beyond himself nor imagine experience very different from his own. He is continuously autobiographic.
His heroine, as I have said, is his wife, and his hero is himself (223).
In The Great Gatsby, Eagleton feels that Fitzgerald tried to strike out in
a new direction, sensing a generation of imitators massing around him,
but the result is an abject failure: The book is highly sensational, loud,
blatant, ugly, pointless. There seems to be no reason for its existence
(224). Eagleton concludes his review by pronouncing his postmortem on
Fitzgerald: One finishes The Great Gatsby with a feeling of regret, not
for the fate of the people in the book, but for Mr. Fitzgerald. 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 (224).
Eagletons concluding thought that The Great Gatsby represents
the petering out of Fitzgeralds career as an author may strike admirers
of the novel today as rather humorous, not merely for its all-but-perfect
misjudgment of the books place in his oeuvre (Gatsby is certainly Fitzgeralds best novel), but also for its strikingly confident tone in declaring
Fitzgerald washed up at that point in his career. Nonetheless, it is true that
Fitzgerald never fully recovered from the modest sales and mixed reception earned by The Great Gatsby, which he seemed also to see as his best
work. Though he would publish another fine novel in Tender Is the Night
(1934), as well as a number of important and accomplished short stories,
and leave another novel (The Last Tycoon)5 unfinished at the time of his
death in 1940, Fitzgerald would never regain the stature he enjoyed in
the first five years of his writing career. Eagletons pompous pronouncement is not all that far off after all: Post-Gatsby, Fitzgeralds fizzle had,
in fact, begun. What may be more interesting about Eagletons review,
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however, and what aligns him with a wider cross-section of critics of the
time, is his tendency to view Gatsby through the lens of Fitzgeralds earlier work. Time and again in contemporary reviews of The Great Gatsby,
critics held the novel up against the reputation Fitzgerald had carved
out for himself in the early part of his career. And while this seems only
the logical thing to do considering a novel in relation to the authors
larger body of work in Fitzgeralds case such comparisons invoked not
only the literary merits of the authors oeuvre, but also the sensation he
created upon publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920.
Indeed, it is not an overstatement to argue that Fitzgerald would for the
remainder of his life be measured against the image and reputation of
the precocious young rule-breaker of a novelist who shocked the literary
world with the publication of his scandalous first book at the tender age
of twenty three. Because This Side of Paradise cast such a large shadow
over Fitzgeralds future work, including The Great Gatsby, its reputation
and reception are worth considering briefly.
The Perils of Precociousness:

Fitzgeralds Early Reputation, and Its Shadow
Critics and the reading public alike were fairly astounded by Fitzgeralds
first novel. A thoroughly modern bildungsroman, This Side of Paradise
tells the story of young Amory Blaine, a protagonist Fitzgerald drew from
his own life experiences. Driven by his conception of himself as a romantic figure (Fitzgeralds original title for an earlier version of the novel was
The Romantic Egotist), Amory leaves behind his midwestern roots for an
eastern prep school and eventually life among the Ivy League elites at
Princeton. Through the course of his adventures in the narrative, Amory
experiences a number of romances, a flirtation with the Catholic religion,
riotous times at Princeton and in New York City clubs, war, and eventually a severe bout of disillusionment over both the hypocrisies of
his society and his larger lack of purpose or direction in life. Fitzgeralds
depiction of social standards and modern manners shocked a reading
public unaccustomed to such direct representations of contemporary life.
His descriptions of the romantic escapades and petting parties of teenagers and young adults were particularly eye-opening, as was his vision of
the college life in the elite Ivy League as a playground for fashionable dilettantes, would-be philosophers, and drunken revelers. The critics praised
Fitzgeralds colorful take on college life; Harry Hansen, writing for the
Chicago Daily News, states simply, I cannot conceive of a college man
who wont read this book and say, Its real (2). The college men concurred: R.F. McPartlin, for The Dartmouth, argues that the novel is true
to life and fulfills the demands of readers who know undergraduate life
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at first-hand (16); David W. Bailey, for the Harvard Crimson, describes

the book as a truly American novel, bewildering, brilliant (19); and
an unsigned review in the New York Times congratulates Fitzgerald on
capturing the essence of modern collegiate life: As a picture of the daily
existence of what we call loosely college men, this book is as nearly perfect as such a work could be (in Bryer, 21).
But perhaps more compelling than the critical response to the content of Fitzgeralds debut novel and more relevant to a discussion of
his future reputation was the manner in which reviewers responded to
Fitzgeralds style. It is fair to say that the freshness of This Side of Paradise
caught the publishing world quite by surprise. Though the 1920s would
usher in a great age of experimentation in fictional forms, at the outset
of the decade, American fiction was in something of a holding pattern,
with major writers of established reputations, like Wharton, Dreiser, and
Cather, at the top of the literary food chain, and no shortage of unspectacular popular writers putting out predictable works to keep the reading
public happy and buying books. In the midst of this staid literary world,
Fitzgerald released a novel so cheekily experimental that it seemed its
author was intentionally trying to see how many literary conventions he
could flout in one work and get away with it. Though in essence a coming-of-age novel, a traditional enough form, This Side of Paradise features
repeated forays into different genres altogether. Passages of verse, as well
as sections of chapters written in dramatic form, appear every now and
again to disrupt the flow of the linear narrative. The effect of this playfulness is a very noticeable authorial presence, as well as a narrative that feels
as if it is constantly being reinvented as it proceeds.
While one might expect a mixed reaction to such tactics from the
literary establishment, instead the young author had the critics eating
out of his hand. The reaction to This Side of Paradise is crucial to understanding Fitzgeralds later critical reputation, because the bar was set so
very high from the start. H.L. Mencken, in his review in The Smart Set,
lavishes praise on the young Fitzgerald, contrasting him favorably to the
typical young American novelist, whom Mencken characterizes as a
nave, sentimental and somewhat disgusting ignoramus. Of the book,
Mencken argues that it is a truly amazing first novel original in structure, extremely sophisticated in manner, and adorned with a brilliancy that
is . . . rare in American writing (in Bryer, 28). Mencken, who concludes
his review by suggesting that Fitzgerald is the most exciting American
author to emerge since Frank Norris, was not unique in his sentiments.
Burton Rascoe, in the Chicago Daily Tribune, takes this line of thinking a
step further: If you have not already done so, make a note of the name,
F.Scott Fitzgerald. It is borne by a 23 year old novelist who will, unless
I am mistaken, be much heard of hereafter. His first novel . . . bears the
impress, it seems to me, of genius (3). Rascoe was by no means the only
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critic to invoke the g-word. Robert Benchley, for the New York Morning
World, states, I should be inclined to hail as a genius any twenty-threeyear-old author who can think up something new and say it in a new
way so that it will be interesting to a great many people (14). Edwin
Francis Edgett, in the Boston Evening Transcript, describes the novel as a
boisterous exhibition of youthful though somewhat unregulated genius
(Young, 22). Across the board, the adjectives rolled in for the young
author and his debut work: brilliant, perfect, fascinating, and beautiful,
the experts said.
Aside from the praise of the work itself, the other common theme
uniting the reviews of This Side of Paradise is the sense among critics that
they are discussing a writer at the outset of a great career. Recognizing
Fitzgerald as a writer with an uncanny knack for creating engrossing, stylized narratives, many of the critics of the day spent a good deal of their
reviews looking forward, predicting great things from the young writer in
the future. An unsigned review in the Philadelphia North American sums
up this perspective on the young author: A youth which has so much
of steely insight and elastic strength as Fitzgeralds, combined with his
artistry and originality . . . will grow to a maturity that will stamp itself
on the palimpsest of American letters (in Bryer, 6). As in this review,
the expectation among critics, time and again, is that the great work is
yet ahead of Fitzgerald. John Black, writing for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle,
sums up this viewpoint in describing This Side of Paradise as merely a
presage of much greater things on the part of Mr. Fitzgerald (9). The
call from the critics turned out to be accurate: The notion that the precocious young author would, once he focused more keenly on form, produce a work of enduring quality was exactly right. Though Fitzgerald
made his splash as a maverick writer, one whose narrative playfulness and
trickery in some ways anticipated the experimentalism of the modernists
who would shock the literary world in the twenties, he made his lasting
contribution to literary history with the more traditional narrative form
of The Great Gatsby, written five years after This Side of Paradise. To be
sure, Gatsby features plenty of narrative experimentation, particularly in
the handling of time frames, but the gimmicky shifts into verse and drama
that helped make This Side of Paradise a sensation had been replaced with
a more subtle testing of the boundaries of linear narrative.
For Fitzgerald, the popular and critical smash success of his first novel
was of course most welcome. Never known as a retiring wallflower, the
young Fitzgerald had set off on his writing career with the brash goal of
becoming a literary celebrity, and had, on his first real try, done exactly
that. Shortly after the publication of the novel, the newly famous young
man married Zelda Sayre of Montgomery, Alabama, and the couple
became fixtures on the New York social scene. At the same time, Fitzgerald continued to pursue his craft, regularly publishing short stories in
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magazines ranging from those geared toward more literary tastes, like
Menckens The Smart Set, to glossier, mass-market magazines like The
Saturday Evening Post. Some of the early Smart Set stories, like Benediction and May Day, both published in 1920, are among Fitzgeralds
best, while the material he published in the Post and other wide-circulation magazines, such as the 1920 Post stories The Camels Back and
The Offshore Pirate, tended to be well-written but lightweight entertainments. Fitzgerald collected the best of these early stories for his next
book, the short story collection Flappers and Philosophers, published later
in 1920. While still enjoying the first flush of critical and commercial
success, even at this early point of his career, Fitzgerald was beginning
to establish a pattern to which he would adhere throughout his writing
life: the alternation between serious works the novels, and the better short stories and the commercial short stories that paid the bills
and for which, at least in the early 1920s, there seemed to be unlimited
demand from the glossy magazines.
For a writer keenly aware of his own reputation, the problem posed
by this bifurcated writerly identity equal parts literary artist and commercial scribe would be clear enough. Publishing too many fluff pieces
in the glossy magazines would be sure to compromise his status as a writer
of serious literature. By the time The Great Gatsby was published in 1925,
this sort of critical backlash against Fitzgerald as merely a purveyor of facile commercial fiction informed one strain of critical reception, as we have
already seen. Indeed, as early as Fitzgeralds second novel, The Beautiful
and Damned (1922), we can see how the author could be hamstrung by
his critical reputation. As would later be the case with Gatsby, with The
Beautiful and Damned Fitzgerald had to fight against a critical reputation
that preceded him. This novel failed, in the eyes of most critics, to live up
the high standards set by This Side of Paradise. Hence, the glowing reception by critics at the outset of Fitzgeralds career may have in some sense
worked against the author as well, setting up an impossible set of expectations. After initially being praised up and down by the critics as a literary
wunderkind, Fitzgerald would never again be able to live up to the hype
surrounding his explosion onto the literary scene.
Perhaps in an attempt to distance himself from his lightweight commercial short stories (as well as the negative critical reaction that he would
be likely to meet if he stayed in that vein), Fitzgerald seems clearly to have
tried very hard to make The Beautiful and Damned a serious, weighty
novel. He wrote the novel during a period when he was becoming interested in the hard-edged realism of writers of the naturalist school championed by H.L. Mencken, like Theodore Dreiser and one of Fitzgeralds
favorite writers of the day, Frank Norris. The influence shows: Like Dreiser and Norris, who fashioned deterministic narratives about characters
unable to transcend entrapping and often brutal environments and lives,
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Fitzgerald, in The Beautiful and Damned, eschewed his more characteristic blend of romanticism, lyricism, and humor in favor of an unremittingly
bleak portrayal of a couples fall from high society living to the depths of
penury and despair. The novel tells the story of Anthony Patch, an effete
heir-in-waiting to a massive family fortune who whiles away his days in
New York City, waiting for his grandfather to die and his inheritance to
arrive. The largely unlikable protagonist occupies himself in pretentious
banter with his friends, various aesthetic contemplations, and rounds of
increasingly habitual and heavy drinking. Anthonys love interest and
eventual wife, Gloria Gilbert, is a dazzling beauty who shares Anthonys
disdain for convention, as well as his taste for the high life. Anthony and
Glorias dissipation worsens as the novel progresses, leading them inexorably toward their ruin, as Anthonys pious grandfather, sickened by the
couples exploits, cuts them out of his will. Though a coda to the narrative informs us that Anthony eventually wins his inheritance through a
lawsuit, the damage has already been done; the two are ruined as a couple, and Anthony seems to have suffered permanent damage as a result of
his unchecked appetites.
Though it received a decidedly mixed appraisal overall, critics of the
novel were nearly unanimous in recognizing The Beautiful and Damned
as a more carefully constructed and more traditionally plotted novel than
the striking but flighty This Side of Paradise. Perhaps the most important
endorsement came from Mencken, who admired not only the execution
of the book but also what he hailed as a growing seriousness of purpose
in the author. This reaction is not surprising, given Menckens preference
for literary works that explored the stark realities of modern life. Matthew
Bruccoli points out that Mencken may have been the strongest influence
on Fitzgeralds attempt to write a deterministic novel (Some Sort, 164),
and there is no doubt that Fitzgeralds respect for Mencken the only
man in America for whom he had complete admiration (138) shaped
his work in this novel and beyond. While the impact of Menckens influence was not discussed by critics of the day (indeed, it perhaps has not
yet been fully explored), Fitzgeralds new attention to form that accompanied his shift to the more starkly realistic mode certainly was a focus
for critics. Henry Seidel Canby, for example, in his review for the New
York Evening Post, argues that if This Side of Paradise showed in certain
passages and in the essential energy of the whole that [Fitzgerald] had
glimpses of a genius for sheer writing, this book proves that he has the
artists conscience and enough intellect to learn to control the life that
fascinates him. However, not all critics had the enthusiasm for the book
expressed by Canby, who saw it as an almost uncompromising tragedy
that exposed the bleak fate awaiting a rudderless society steering gayly for
nowhere (63). Thomas Caldecott Chubb, in his review for the Yale Literary Magazine, strikes about as different a chord as could be imagined, flatly
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pronouncing, The Beautiful and Damned is a tedious, dull book with

hardly an illuminating flash in all of its 400 odd pages (62). Chubb was
hardly alone in his assessment of the novels dullness: Most reviewers felt
that Fitzgeralds notable advancements in formal structure in The Beautiful and Damned had come at the cost of a loss of the exuberance that had
characterized his earlier writing.
And there was another relationship to Fitzgeralds earlier reputation that was mentioned, time and again, in the reviews of The Beautiful
and Damned, as would later be the case with reviews of Gatsby. Critics
seemed intent on discussing not only the respective literary merits of the
two works, but also the growth and development of young Scott Fitzgerald, celebrity author. Because he had come out of nowhere with his first
novel, and because he had cut such a figure as the precocious young rulebreaker of a writer, Fitzgerald would find himself judged by the critics
not only as a writer but also as a personage, a celebrity. More accurately,
his reputation and celebrity status became intertwined with aesthetic concerns, at least in the eyes of critics. Most commonly, reviewers of The
Beautiful and Damned began to express annoyance over the same brash,
youthful quality that they had praised in Fitzgeralds writing only two
years earlier. Already an established spokesman of a rebellious younger
generation, following the success of This Side of Paradise and the story
collection Flappers and Philosophers, Fitzgerald now began to face critics
tiring of not only his stylistic tricks, but also his celebrity. Edwin Francis Edgett, reviewing The Beautiful and Damned for the Boston Evening
Transcript, offers a representative example of this type of critique, stating,
It is apparent from The Beautiful and Damned, as it was from This
Side of Paradise, that the devious ways of fiction are preferred by Mr.
Fitzgerald to the straight and narrow path. Youth is something glorious
to have in our possession, but unhappily it sometimes runs riot in our
lives and ambitions, and we thereby proclaim our juvenility too vociferously (Beautiful, 81). If Edgett sounds like someone perhaps missing his own youth too much, it is worth noting that he was not alone in
this sort of reaction against Fitzgerald. Edward N. Teall, in the Worcester
Gazette, follows a similar line, referring to Fitzgerald as the Boy Wonder
who started with a Best Seller, before arguing that the juvenility of The
Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgeralds newest literary prank . . . makes it
seem as though . . . Mr. Fitzgerald were reversing the natural order and
growing younger (79).
Other critics also latched onto Fitzgeralds youth as a focal point of
their critiques. Phil Kinsley, in the Philadelphia Record, wonders aloud
whether Fitzgerald is a new beacon pointing the way to emancipation
from the old method of literary adventuring or a babbling babe, a
jester who is more a fool than a philosopher. Kinsley extends the insulting metaphor, likening the author to a wild child dashing aimlessly
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about his nursery, smashing toys and breaking windows, before concluding, Some day the child will outgrow the nursery (87). While Kinsleys
attack, followed by a prediction of better, more mature things to come
may sound rather odd, in fact it was a common approach in Fitzgerald
criticism by this point. Even Fitzgeralds good friend John Peale Bishop,
in a very perceptive review of The Beautiful and Damned for the New
York Herald, called attention to Fitzgeralds immaturity, while still praising the depths of his talent: His ideas are too often treated like paper
crackers, things to make a gay and pretty noise with and then be cast
aside; he is frequently at the mercy of words with which he has only a
nodding acquaintance; his aesthetics are faulty; his literary taste is at times
extremely bad. . . . But these are flaws of vulgarity in one who is awkward with his own vigor (74). The common thread uniting the reviews
of Fitzgeralds second novel an impatience with a carelessly youthful
style, coupled with a prediction of more mature work to come is best
summed up in E.W. Osborns New York World review, in which he not
only anticipates the achievement of Gatsby, but even seems to anticipate
some of the language of its memorable closing passage; Osborn writes
that The Beautiful and Damned confirms in us the idea that some day,
when he has outgrown the temptation to be flippant, Mr. Fitzgerald will
sit up and write a book that will give us a long breath of wonder (78).
It was my material: Gatsbys Literary

Reputation during Fitzgeralds Lifetime
However, by the time Fitzgerald had written the book that ought to have
been commensurate to his critics capacity for wonder, he was dismayed
to see that his youthful reputation and all the baggage that came along
with it still seemed to precede him. Some of the first reviews to come
out, in the daily newspapers, employed the established approach of attacking the authors maturity, at the expense of any real substantive discussion
of the novel. Ruth Hale, who published one of the first reviews, in the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, took such a line: Find me one chemical trace of
magic, life, irony, romance or mysticism in all of The Great Gatsby and
I will bind myself to read one Scott Fitzgerald book a week for the rest of
my life. The boy is simply puttering around. . . . Why he should be called
an author, or why any of us should behave as if he were, has never been
explained satisfactorily to me (197). Another early reviewer, Ruth Snyder, writing for the New York Evening World, accused Fitzgerald of crafting a cynical novel, written in a style that is painfully forced (195).
After briefly and accurately summarizing the plot but otherwise offering no other commentary on the novel whatsoever, Snyder concludes
her review by stating, We are quite convinced after reading The Great
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Gatsby that Mr. Fitzgerald is not one of the great American writers of today (196). The pattern seen in reviews such as these bold attacks on
the authors stature and even character, based on only the most superficial
reading of the work would be bound to agitate the author; indeed,
Fitzgerald was disturbed by this trend, as he wrote to Max Perkins after
reading some early reviews in the papers: Most of the reviewers floundered around in a piece of work that obviously they completely failed to
understand and tried to give it reviews that committed them neither pro
or con until some one of the culture had spoken (in Bruccoli, Reference, 160). He would later repeat this idea in a letter to his good friend,
the writer and critic Edmund Wilson, claiming that of all the reviews,
even the most entheusiastic [sic], not one had the slightest idea what the
book was about (178).6 Indeed, the first early reviews stung Fitzgerald
so badly that they seemed to have him contemplating a career change, as
he commented to Perkins, in a letter written from France just after the
release of the novel:
In all events I have a book of good stories for this fall. Now I shall
write some cheap ones until Ive accumulated enough for my next
novel. When that is finished and published Ill wait and see. If it will
support me with no more intervals of trash Ill go on as a novelist. If
not Im going to quit, come home, go to Hollywood and learn the
movie business. I cant reduce our scale of living and I cant stand
this financial insecurity. Anyhow theres no point in trying to be an
artist if you cant do your best. I had my chance back in 1920 to
start my life on a sensible scale and I lost it and so Ill have to pay
the penalty. Then perhaps at 40 I can start writing again without this
constant worry and interruption. (In Bruccoli, Reference, 158)
Fitzgeralds complaints about the critics sensibility, as well as his

concerns over the novels financial prospects, no doubt reveal something
of a wounded pride, but his line of thinking regarding the newspaper
reviews has merit as well. The appraisals that eventually appeared from
more prominent literary reviewers did take the work more seriously, and
generally offered a more rounded, and more appreciative view of Fitzgeralds achievement than the reviews offered by the newspaper scribes. Still,
the critiques of the cultural heavyweights were not without problematic
moments, either. Take the case of H. L. Mencken, who had practically
hailed the twenty-three-year-old Fitzgerald as a genius in his review of the
debut novel, This Side of Paradise. By contrast, his Baltimore Sun review
of Gatsby is more of a mixed affair. He insists throughout his brief review
that the book is unimportant, even trivial, while at the same time hailing the technical accomplishments of its author. What gives the story
distinction is . . . the charm and beauty of the writing, Mencken wrote.
The story, for all its basic triviality, has a fine texture, a careful and
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brilliant finish. The obvious phrase is simply not in it. The sentences roll
along smoothly, sparklingly, variously. There is evidence in every line of
hard and intelligent effort (212). For an author hoping by this point
in his life to live down his boisterous public image and be recognized as
an artist more than just a celebrity, Fitzgerald must have been pleased by
Menckens recognition of the consciousness of the novels artistry. At the
same time, Menckens assessment of Gatsbys merit relative to Fitzgeralds
larger body of work had to rankle: This story is obviously unimportant,
and though . . . 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 (212).
While Menckens conclusion may seem absurd from todays perspective (This Side of Paradise, nowadays, is for all of its inventiveness and
originality lucky to find a spot on the shelf at all), it demonstrates the
kind of shadow cast by the debut novel. Mencken was not alone in this
opinion. Ralph Coghlan, writing for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, argues
that The Great Gatsby lacks power, because it is missing the ebullience, mellowness, profundity, and old abandon of Fitzgeralds
earlier writing. While Coghlan clearly favors Fitzgeralds early style, even
going so far as to praise the poetic outbursts of the earlier fiction, and
those chapters in which he was wont to divert the straightaway prose
into dramatic form, he like Mencken does draw attention to the
improvements in structure and form evident in Gatsby: What he has lost
in effusiveness, in buoyancy, he has gained in cleaner workmanship. Just
at the moment we are inclined to think that the exchange represents a net
loss (206). Other critics, though, congratulated Fitzgerald on moving
beyond his early gimmickry and finding a more mature voice and structure in this novel. Walter Yust, in the New York Evening Post Literary
Review, congratulates Fitzgerald for growing up, claiming that in the
new novel, from the opening page to the last, he has held successfully to
one tone, to one vision (214); for Yust, this results in a novel with the
power to throw a spell over the reader (215). The reviewer for the Literary Digest International Book Review also complimented Fitzgerald for
a newfound maturity in the novel, singling out a new awareness of values in his attitude (in Bryer, 209). Fitzgeralds hometown paper, the St.
Paul Pioneer Press, agreed, calling Gatsby far the best of his novels, and
refuting reviewers who had objected to the novel on moral grounds by
drawing a distinction between action and sensationalism in the narrative:
There are enough homicides, murders, suicides and illicit relationships
to equip a moving picture, yet the book is not typical movie stuff. Back
of it is intelligence and a growing perception of values (in Bryer, 203).
In a brief but interesting review for the Chicago Daily Tribune,
Fanny Butcher picks up on a similar point as that made by the St. Paul
reviewer, saying of the novel, It is bizarre. It is melodramatic. It is, at
moments, dime novelish. But it is, despite its faults, a book which is not
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negligible as any ones work, and vastly important as Scott Fitzgeralds

work (197). Butchers thesis runs directly counter to Mencken and others who lamented the loss of the cheeky experimentalism of This Side of
Paradise. While agreeing that Paradise captured the vibrancy of a new
generation and the secret eagerness and spoken cynicism of the modern twenty-year-old, Butcher points out in her review, It was inevitable
that he should lose that quality in his work (197). In contrast to the
depressing, self-conscious attempt at naturalistic fiction in The Beautiful and Damned, for Butcher Gatsby represented a great leap forward.
Hunter Stagg, in his review for the Baltimore Evening Sun, expressed a
similar statement, claiming, Scott Fitzgeralds first novel was probably
one of the worst pieces of writing that ever got into print. But it had one
virtue which none could deny it. The book was alive. The second novel,
although more accomplished, was dead (198). For Stagg, The Great
Gatsby combines the virtues of the first two and eliminates their vices
(198). For an early newspaper review, Staggs critique seems more significant than many, in that he anticipates lines of analysis that would appear
in later, more in-depth discussions of the book. He praises Fitzgeralds
unique blend of idealism and irony, correctly noting how these seemingly
contradictory traits animate the enigmatic title character. He also draws
attention to matters of form: Striking a similar tone to Menckens, Stagg
says of the novel that it is written with the apparent effortlessness and
spontaneity which is a sure indication of a great deal of very hard work,
careful planning and earnest thinking (198). While critics for years had
been writing off Fitzgeralds way with words as a matter of mere felicity, reviewers of Gatsby even those who offered mixed reviews, like
Mencken tended to take note of the artistry and formal strength of
the novel. Formalistic approaches, which would eventually constitute one
main branch of Gatsby criticism, were just beginning to surface in some
of the major reviews of The Great Gatsby that appeared in the spring and
summer of 1925.
One of the reviews that recognized both the formal and the thematic richness of the novel was that of William Bent, from the Saturday
Review of Literature. As with many other early reviewers, Bent draws a
distinction between the youthful, fluffy Fitzgerald, the sensation of the
first novel and early stories, and the writer of Gatsby, who for Bent shows
a great leap forward in maturity, work ethic, and thematic depth. What
distinguishes Gatsby in Bents view is the authors ability to correct the
fatal flaw of his earlier work, its lack of depth: But brilliant, irrefutably
brilliant as were certain passages of the novels and tales of which the boy
wonder of our time was so lavish . . . there remained in general, glamour, glamour everywhere, and, after the glamour faded, little for the
mind to hold except an impression of this kinetic glamour (220). In
contrast, The Great Gatsby reveals thoroughly matured craftsmanship. It
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has structure. It has high occasions of felicitous, almost magic, phrase

(220). Bent anticipates the appraisals of New Critics in the 1950s who
would single out portions of the novel for their formal excellence, claiming that there are parts of the book, notably the second chapter, that,
in our opinion, could not have been better written. There are astonishing feats that no one but Fitzgerald could have brought off, notably the
catalogue of guests in Chapter IV (221). Bents critique also breaks
from those reviewers who had seen the characters of the novel only as
two-dimensional, as types, rather than as what would seem like real, living beings. (Indeed, Fitzgerald himself, along with editor Maxwell Perkins, privately expressed a good bit of concern over the roundedness of
his characters, particularly the shadowy, mysterious Gatsby.) In contrast,
Bent says of the characters, They are actual, rich and poor, cultivated
and uncultivated, seen for a moment or two only or followed throughout
the story. They are memorable individuals of today not types (221).
Another perceptive early review, from Edwin Clark in the New York
Times Book Review, explores similar ideas. Clark focuses in his review
on the Long Island setting that gave rise to the novel, claiming that the
glamorous life lived there expresses one phase of the great grotesque
spectacle of our American scene. It is humor, irony, ribaldry, pathos and
loveliness. In contrast to critics who had assailed Fitzgerald for a vulgar
or sensationalized depiction of modern metropolitan life, Clark sees in
the novels tension between a racy plot and a searching, idealistic undercurrent a conflict of spirituality caught fast in the web of our commercial
life. Both boisterous and tragic, it animates this . . . novel . . . with whimsical magic and simple pathos that is realized with economy and restraint
(199). Clarks perceptive understanding of Fitzgeralds key theme of
modernity as a spiritual wasteland would find much support in explications of the novel written twenty and thirty years later. In his own day,
he had company, too: William Curtis, writing for Town & Country, went
so far as to say, In The Great Gatsby Mr. Fitzgerald . . . has produced
something which approaches perilously near a masterpiece (227). The
reason Curtis is willing to elevate the book to such heights is its success in
a form of social realism in which he has found American writers, almost
without exception, sorely wanting: It is one of the very special qualities
of Mr. Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby that, while proceeding in the calm
manner of sophistication and taste, with no trace of the moral reformer or
apologist, he has given us a picture which is, to us at least, as terrifying as
any tragedy Aristotle could have wished for (227).
If words like sophistication, taste, economy, and restraint
were to this point unheard-of terms in the lexicon of Fitzgerald criticism,
the phrasing of critics like Clark and Curtis does point the way toward a
sea-change of sorts in Fitzgeralds aesthetics at this point in his career. And
if those terms seem more appropriate in a discussion of a Henry James
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than of a Scott Fitzgerald, this was precisely a connection that several contemporary reviewers made. Herbert S. Gorman, writing in the New York
Sun, argues, In telling his story Mr. Fitzgerald has adopted a style that
is slightly oblique. Indeed, in certain aspects it is Jamesian the building up of a figure through the observations of a participator in the action
and the adornment of this figure through meditative analysis (210). He
is quite right: The shift away from the intrusive third-person narrative
perspective Fitzgerald used in This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and
Damned is crucial to the aesthetic achievement of The Great Gatsby. In
Gatsby, Fitzgerald employed a first-person participant-observer mode, or
what James liked to call the central fine intelligence a character in
the story whose fine sensibilities allow him to relay the story to the reader
with subtlety, as well as psychological and emotional depth. Other reviewers picked up on the connection: Clark compared Gatsby to The Turn of
the Screw; poet Conrad Aiken likened it to The Awkward Age; Gilbert Seldes suggested that Fitzgerald picked up his new narrative method from
Henry James through Mrs. Wharton (Spring, 240); and Fitzgeralds
fellow novelist Carl Van Vechten saw the closest parallel being to Daisy
Miller. Van Vechtens appraisal is helpful, in that it indicates what these
critics were driving at in noting the Jamesian connections not so much
a suggestion of an imitative quality to the work, as a recognition of the
authors maturation in terms of both technique and aesthetic sensibility.
Van Vechten says, of Jay Gatsby:
This character, and the theme of the book in general, would have
appealed to Henry James. In fact, it did appeal to Henry James. In
one way or another this motif is woven into the tapestry of a score
or more of his stories. In Daisy Miller you may find it complete. It
is the theme of a soiled or rather cheap personality transfigured and
rendered pathetically appealing through the possession of a passionate idealism. Although the comparison may be still further stressed,
owing to the fact that Mr. Fitzgerald has chosen, as James so frequently chose, to see his story through the eyes of a spectator, it will
be readily apparent that what he has done he has done in his own
way, and that seems to me, in this instance, to be a particularly good
way. (230)
From being called loud, blatant, ugly [and] pointless to being

linked to no less a literary master than Henry James, from being described
as having the flavor of skimmed milk to being hailed as something
perilously near a masterpiece, The Great Gatsby elicited a wide range
of critical perspectives in the weeks and months immediately following
its publication. The last review of the season may have been the strongest, and in that sense may have presaged the fuller appreciation the novel
would eventually receive, years and decades down the road. After the
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early reviewers had had their say, Gilbert Seldes published his review in
The Dial in August 1925. His opening paragraph leaves little doubt about
the argument he will make for the significance of the novel:
There has never been any question of the talents of F.Scott Fitzgerald; there has been, justifiably until the publication of The Great
Gatsby, a grave question as to what he was going to do with his gifts.
The question has been answered in one of the finest of contemporary novels. Fitzgerald has more than matured; he has mastered his
talents and gone soaring in a beautiful flight, leaving behind him
everything dubious and tricky in his earlier work, and leaving even
farther behind all the men of his own generation and most of his
elders. (Spring, 239)
Seldes goes on to praise Fitzgeralds effortless precision and technical virtuosity, as well as his irony and pity and consuming passion (239). He closes the review by praising the author for maturing
beyond his status as the white-headed boy of The Saturday Evening
Post and for recognizing both his capacities and his obligations as a
novelist (241).
By the end of 1925, the critics had pretty much had their say over
the work that Isabel Paterson had called a book of the season only.
There were, however, some further rumblings in the press in the following year. 1926 saw an edition of the novel published in London, as well
as a stage adaptation, by Owen Davis, enjoying a successful run in New
York. The success of the stage play spawned a subsequent silent film version, directed by Herbert Brenon, and starring Warner Baxter and Lois
Wilson, which was released by Paramount in late 1926. Each of these
releases kept the novel and Fitzgerald in the press and to some extent in
the public eye, but they did not spur the sort of groundswell of interest
that might have altered the fate of the novel during Fitzgeralds lifetime.
Scribners gave the Modern Library permission to publish a hardcover
version of Gatsby in 1934, and Fitzgerald seized the opportunity, in his
preface to the new edition, to defend his great novel, which he felt never
got a fair shake from the critics:
Now that this book is being reissued, the author would like to say that
never before did one try to keep his artistic conscience as pure as during the ten months put into doing it. Reading it over one can see how
it could have been improved yet without feeling guilty of any discrepancy from the truth, as far as I saw it; truth or rather the equivalent of truth, the attempt at honesty of imagination. . . . I had recently
been kidded half haywire by critics who felt that my material was such
as to preclude all dealing with mature persons in a mature world. But,
my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.
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20
What I cut out of it both physically and emotionally would make

another novel! ....
If there is a clear conscience, a book can survive at least in
ones feelings about it. . . . In addition, if one is young and willing to
learn, almost all reviews have a value, even the ones that seem unfair.
(Introduction, 15657)
Notwithstanding the hint of optimism that can be found amidst the

defensive tone of the preface to the Modern Library edition, it was only
through the publication of inexpensive versions of the novel following
Fitzgeralds death precisely the sort of marketing strategy he had proposed to Scribners, without success that the novel finally started to
reach a mass audience. The first of these posthumous reissues was Scribners
release in 1941 of a volume edited by Edmund Wilson, which contained
Wilsons edited text of Fitzgeralds unfinished Hollywood novel, which
Wilson gave the title The Last Tycoon, along with The Great Gatsby and five
of Fitzgeralds best stories. A second important step was the Armed Services
Editions printing, which provided 150,000 free copies of The Great Gatsby
to American soldiers. After this, inexpensive editions followed throughout
the reminder of the 1940s (Bruccoli, Reference, 217). Affordable editions
of the novel helped in providing a spark for the eventual revival of interest in Fitzgerald and his masterpiece both, at the time of Fitzgeralds
untimely death of heart failure in 1940, largely forgotten.
Notes
1
Matthew Bruccoli, in his definitive Fitzgerald biography, Some Sort of Epic

Grandeur, notes that This Side of Paradise required twelve printings, totaling over
49,000 copies, in the first two years following publication; it would prove to be
Fitzgeralds most popular book (137); The Beautiful and Damned went through
three printings totaling 50,000 copies, while Tender Is the Night went through
three printings, totaling just over 15,000 copies.
Patersons review, as well as all of the other newspaper reviews cited in this chapter, can be found in the collection edited by Jackson R. Bryer, F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical Reception (1978). Bryers collection is invaluable to anyone who
wishes to research the contemporary critical reactions to Fitzgeralds books. A
chapter is devoted to each of Fitzgeralds books; each chapter features a wide
selection of contemporary reviews, reprinted in their entirety.
Like Jackson Bryer, Matthew Bruccoli has contributed immeasurably to our

understanding of Fitzgeralds writing and its context. His F. Scott Fitzgeralds
The Great Gatsby: A Literary Reference (2000) is another reference work that
supplies contemporary critical reactions and other contextual materials to assist
the reader in understanding the history of the novels reception.
As Bruccoli points out, Fitzgeralds decision to name his second collection of

stories Tales of the Jazz Age was not without risk; he chose the title against the
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advice of the Scribners salesemen . . . after convincing himself that it would not
damage his reputation as a serious novelist. Fitzgerald claimed the phrase jazz
age as his contribution to the language (Some Sort, 171).
5
This is the generally agreed upon title for the book, though Fitzgerald had not
selected an official title for the work-in-progress before his death. The book was
first published in 1941, the year after Fitzgeralds death, under the title The Last
Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel. The Last Tycoon was chosen as the title by Edmund
Wilson, who edited the manuscript for publication. Generally, subsequent editions of the book carry this title. However, Matthew Bruccoli, who edited and
prepared the manuscript for publication as part of the definitive Fitzgerald Edition, selected for the books 1993 publication the alternate title The Love of the
Last Tycoon: A Western. According to Bruccoli, Wilsons choice of title, back in
1941, was suspect and based on insufficient evidence that the author would have
wanted the book to have this name: It is characteristic of Wilsons editorial policy
that no source is provided for the title allowing the reader to assume that The
Last Tycoon was Fitzgeralds final choice. Yet Fitzgerald never referred to his novel
by title in his correspondence. The only title page that survives with the draft
material names the work STAHR/A Romance (Fitzgerald, Love, xiv). Bruccoli
goes on to note that on a list of what appear to be potential titles for the book
(Fitzgerald headed the list with the word Title, written in crayon), the only candidate not crossed out is The Love of the Last Tycoon/A Western, which has a
check mark next to it (Love, xiv). Based on the evidence, Bruccoli concludes, No
good case for the title The Last Tycoon can be made on the basis of the surviving Fitzgerald documents. The choice is between Stahr: A Romance and The
Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western. The latter is preferable because it is close
to the title by which the novel has been known and because it has the Fitzgerald
bouquet. Fitzgerald was in fact writing a western a novel about the last American frontier, where immigrants and sons of immigrants pursued and defined the
American dream. It is appropriate that these tycoons made movie westerns: they
too were pioneers (Love, xvii).
A case could be made that there is a certain irony in Fitzgeralds confiding in

Wilson about critics who failed to take him seriously. Bruccoli has argued that
Wilson set the tone for future dismissals of Fitzgeralds intelligence and artistic integrity in a 1922 Bookman essay. For Bruccoli, Wilsons condescending
assessment of Fitzgeralds literary intelligence that he was a natural, but not
an artist influenced the authors critical standing for the next thirty years
(Some Sort, 165).
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2: A Green Light: The Fitzgerald

Revival and the Making of a
Masterpiece, 194059
The Forties: Curtain up on the Second Act
F. SCOTT FITZGERALDS more famous and oft-quoted statements is an observation he jotted down amidst the working notes
for his final, unfinished novel: There are no second acts in American
lives. This observation is regularly exhumed and reused in our own day,
by everyone from journalists to sportswriters to pop-culture bloggers,
typically as a preamble to a story about some ephemeral newsmaker who
has, after a period of obscurity, reemerged into the limelight. Some observation along the lines of, Fitzgerald got it wrong! will invariably be
the cheeky rejoinder that then leads in to a tale of some nearly forgotten
figure who, after his or her period lost in the wilderness, has returned
to notoriety and credibility. This familiar story replays with consistency
in our popular culture (see, for example, A&Es Biography and every
episode of VH1s Behind the Music), perhaps as much because of its
ratification of our culture of acceptance and forgiveness as for the reassuring familiarity of its glory-ruin-restoration narrative formula. There is a
certain irony in Fitzgeralds involvement in such stories, not only because
he was an early example of a national pop-culture celebrity, even superstar, but also because he never quite did get to see the second act of his
own life and career.
Indeed, this thought about no second acts is particularly apropos
of Fitzgeralds own life, if in a darkly ironic sense. The authors meteoric
ascent to literary stardom in the 1920s was followed, in the Depression
years and in Fitzgeralds own thirties and early forties, by an extended
period of frustration, futility, and failure. After releasing three major novels, as well as many of his best short stories, between the ages of twentyfour and twenty-nine (culminating in the publication of The Great Gatsby
in 1925), Fitzgerald would publish only one more completed novel (Tender Is the Night, 1934) in the final fifteen years of his life; additionally,
the quality of some of his stronger stories and essays from this period
was undercut by the large quantity of hastily written commercial stories
he published in order to generate income. When one considers as well
Fitzgeralds mounting personal problems throughout the decade of the
NE OF
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A GREEN LIGHT
23
1930s, including his alcoholism, his wife Zeldas deteriorating mental

state, and the erosion of their relationship (all of which have been well
documented by Fitzgerald biographers), it is tempting to conclude that
the author was discussing his own life when crafting this theatrical metaphor about no second acts.
The irony lies in the fact that there would be a second act for Fitzgerald, and a grand one at that, but that it would only come after his death.
In fact, one could argue that the second act could only have come posthumously, as Fitzgeralds death seems to have been something of a precondition, or at the least a precipitating cause, of his reevaluation and
ultimate lionization by critics, scholars, the literary establishment, and the
reading public. At the heart of the posthumous turnaround in Fitzgeralds
fortunes is, of course, his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. But the story of
how this book came, eventually, to be regarded as an American masterwork perhaps the greatest in our national literature is a circuitous
tale involving changing personal and critical reputations, nostalgia for a
lost era, and the emergence of a new wave of American literary scholars
seeking to define and codify a national literary tradition by establishing
a canon of classic American literature. The springboard for the ascent of
The Great Gatsby into this literary pantheon was the so-called Fitzgerald
revival of the forties and fifties. The roots of this revival go back to the
years immediately following Fitzgeralds death when publication and
reissuing of his work sparked a renewed critical interest.
The Great Gatsby itself had not been entirely forgotten by critics in
the later years of Fitzgeralds life. Reviews of his final completed novel,
Tender Is the Night, and of the last story collection he published during his lifetime, Taps at Reveille (1935), both made references to Gatsby,
often citing it as the authors best work. A common note in much of the
critical appraisal of Tender Is the Night upon its release is an assessment
of a less consistent technical mastery in this novel. Some critics trotted
out the old hobby horse of Fitzgeralds immaturity as the explanation
for what they saw as formal flaws in the work; in an otherwise perceptive
analysis of Tender, Malcolm Cowley, one of Fitzgeralds staunchest supporters who would later be a key factor in the Fitzgerald revival, seems
unable in his review for the New Republic to resist referring to Fitzgerald
as a romantic but hard-headed little boy (Breakdown, 324), while
Gertrude Diamant, in the American Mercury, sniffs that Fitzgerald is, fifteen years into his career, still little more than a precocious child (328)
whose fictional technique is that of the child-writer (329). To a writer
nearing forty years of age, these must have seemed fairly insulting assessments or perhaps examples of old critical habits dying hard. They are, in
fact, both. Still, the issue of formal mastery elicited a great number of
references to The Great Gatsby, and typically quite positive ones. Horace Gregory, in the New York Herald Tribune, compares Gatsby favorably
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A GREEN LIGHT
to Tender, referring to the earlier novel as a remarkable performance

(306); John Chamberlain, in his review of Tender Is the Night for the New
York Times, calls Gatsby perfect in its feeling and its symbolism, such a
magnificent evocation of the spirit of a whole decade (294); and Fitzgeralds friend and admirer Gilbert Seldes notes in his review of Tender for
the New York Evening Journal that Gatsby was the turning point in his
career, the first novel which indicated that he could control all his powers (True, 292).
As always with Fitzgerald, there was no shortage of naysayers in
the crowd, as well. In general, the decade of the 1930s was not kind
to Fitzgeralds reputation, for a number of reasons. As has often been
pointed out, Fitzgeralds personal and artistic fortunes seemed to parallel
the trajectory of the nation itself over the two decades of the twenties and
thirties. The boom-bust cycle of the postwar insouciance of the twenties
(the decade Fitzgerald himself dubbed the greatest, gaudiest spree in
history) followed by the despair and desperation of the Great Depression in the thirties was mirrored by Fitzgeralds own tale of meteoric rise
to prominence and celebrity in the twenties, followed by a long, painful
and public slide into obscurity in the next decade. Artistically, Fitzgeralds
work, redolent with images of rich boys and rich girls negotiating high
society life, fell out of favor with critics of the 1930s who were concerned
with the plight of the suffering masses, as well as the ascent of a more
proletarian strain in the national literature. Leftist journals such as New
Masses, which rose to prominence under the editorship of Mike Gold in
the late twenties and thirties, championed a brand of socially engaged
writing about the plight of the common man, rejecting what they saw
as increasingly irrelevant bourgeois literature. Golds 1929 New Masses
editorial, Go Left, Young Writers! is often credited as starting in earnest
the proletarian literature movement in the United States. The landscape
would never be quite the same for Fitzgerald: As Azar Nafisi succinctly
puts it in her recent, popular memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Gold
and his followers took over. . . . In the thirties people like Fitzgerald
were pushed out by this new breed (88).
Part of the critical problem for Fitzgerald lay in the rapidly increasing
remoteness of the world he described. The reviewer for the New York Sun
makes this case in a review of Taps at Reveille: It is hard, in these days of
the depression, to be fair to Mr. Fitzgerald. The children of all ages from
13 to 30 that decorate his pages seem as remote today as the Neanderthal man (in Bryer, 346). Nafisi, with the benefit of historical perspective,
expands upon the problem and puts it in the context of Fitzgeralds career
trajectory: The Great Gatsby was published in 1925 and Tender Is the Night
in 1934. In between the publication of these two great novels, many things
happened in the United States and Europe that . . . diminished Fitzgeralds
importance, making him almost irrelevant to the social and literary scene.
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A GREEN LIGHT
25
There was the Depression, the increasing threat of fascism and the growing
influence of Soviet Marxism (107).The Marxist critic Philip Rahv, in his
review of Tender for the Daily Worker, felt little sympathy for its authors
plight. Engaging in a little armchair psychologizing, Rahv begins his review
by diagnosing the hidden malady lurking behind Fitzgeralds artistic successes of the 1920s, like The Great Gatsby: He himself was swept away
by the waste and extravagance of the people he described, and he identified himself with them (316). Rahv concludes that Fitzgerald had become
hopelessly out of step with the hard realities of the time, and he closes
the essay with a prophetic admonition that has gone down in the annals
of Fitzgerald lore: Dear Mr. Fitzgerald, you cant hide from a hurricane
under a beach umbrella (317).
While one could quibble with Rahvs self-righteous proclamation Fitzgerald hardly spent the decade of the thirties hanging out
under a beach umbrella his suggestion of bleak times to come could
not have been more accurate. The period of the middle 1930s, which
Fitzgerald described in his series of confessional Esquire essays of 1936
that would be posthumously collected and published in The Crack-Up,
was marked by physical illness (in part spurred by his debilitating alcoholism) and severe personal and professional misfortunes.1 While Zelda
Fitzgerald began her stays in sanitariums in the early thirties and would
remain under psychiatric care for the rest of her life, Fitzgerald struggled,
after the publication of Tender Is the Night, to find the means to pay for
her hospital care and the education of their daughter, Scottie. No longer
the commercial success he once was as a short story writer, he moved
to Los Angeles in 1937 and took up work as a Hollywood screenwriter
to pay the bills and get out of debt. Though he had long felt an affinity
for the movies, and had twice earlier tried his luck in Hollywood, in fact
Fitzgerald found little success in his screenwriting efforts in the latter part
of his life, though he would remain in Hollywood from 1937 until his
death in 1940. He was credited as a writer on only one film, Three Comrades for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, in 1938. Fitzgerald expressed
on many occasions that both the commercial short stories and the work
on film scripts amounted to hack writing that diluted his artistic credibility, but his seemingly unending financial crises made such work a necessity. Though he had made significant progress on a promising fifth novel,
the story of a Hollywood producer that would eventually be published,
posthumously, as The Last Tycoon in 1941, this work would remain unfinished. Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in Los Angeles, on December 21,
1940. He was forty-four years old. The reappraisal of his literary reputation would begin almost immediately, first playing out in the obituary
sections of the nations daily newspapers.
Most of the newspaper obituaries were, if not dismissive, less than
enthusiastic regarding the question of Fitzgeralds literary merit. Typical
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A GREEN LIGHT
in this regard was the obituary in the New York Times, which stated simply, The promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled. While this
obituary does go on to single out Gatsby as Fitzgeralds finest work, it
does so in superficial fashion: The best of his books, the critics said, was
The Great Gatsby. When it was published in 1925 this ironic tale of
life on Long Island at a time when gin was the national drink and sex
the national obsession (according to the exponents of Mr. Fitzgeralds
school of writers), it received little acclaim (Scott Fitzgerald, 23). An
anonymous follow-up the next day in the Times elaborated on the idea
of unfulfilled artistic promise, speculating that in recent years, Fitzgerald, and others of his time, were really lost that they could not adjust
themselves to the swift and brutal changes of these times. It is a pity,
for here was real talent which never fully bloomed (Not Wholly Lost,
10). In this article we see an ambivalent opinion toward The Great Gatsby,
which clearly had not yet begun its ascent into the canon of American
literature: It was not a book for the ages, but it caught superbly the spirit
of a decade (10). Some newspapers took a harsher angle on Fitzgeralds literary legacy, resurrecting the argument seen in early criticism of
Gatsby and other works that Fitzgerald was more personality than artist. We see this in the tone of the obituary in the New York Herald Tribune, wherein praise for his technical merit is offset with disdain for what
he seemed to represent: F.Scott Fitzgerald is said to have invented the
so-called younger generation of two decades ago. At any rate, he was
the most articulate writer about the rich, young set which was also variously referred to as the lost generation and the post-war generation,
and as such he acquired a reputation far out of proportion to his works
(F.Scott Fitzgerald Dies, 4).
Without question, the most negative, even offensive, appraisal of
Fitzgerald in the days following his death came from the syndicated column of the conservative newspaper writer, Westbrook Pegler. In his column of December 26, 1940 (ironically titled Fair Enough), Pegler uses
Fitzgeralds death as the occasion for bashing the disillusioned youth of
the 1920s lost generation: The death of Scott Fitzgerald recalls memories of a queer brand of undisciplined and self-indulgent brats who were
determined not to pull their weight in the boat and wanted the world to
drop everything and sit down and bawl with them. A kick in the pants and
a clout over the scalp were more like their needing (15). Throughout
this strange essay, Pegler delivers just such a rhetorical kick in the pants
to both Fitzgerald and his cohort, berating the sensitive young things of
whom Mr. Fitzgerald wrote . . . because he could exploit them as material
for profit in print (15). The indelicacy of such a column needs no comment, but it should be noted that Peglers vicious depiction of Fitzgerald demonstrates the extent to which the author was still linked, in the
popular imagination, to the world of the flappers he depicted two decades
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A GREEN LIGHT
27
earlier. Peglers apoplexy over the prospect of the popular press lionizing
someone he seemed to see as a sort of figurehead of dissipation not only
shows Fitzgeralds enduring link to the era of the twenties, but also suggests a growing resurgence of interest in the era. And, indeed, a revival of
interest in the Roaring Twenties was related to the Fitzgerald revival that
would begin to take shape in the years following his death. Pegler, in his
disgust over a glorification of the Jazz Age, seems more than a tad Tom
Buchanan-esque in his shrill defense of civilized behavior; he closes the
essay by comparing the directionless youth of the twenties with the morally sound young people of his own day, whom he praises for preserving
their self-respect by minding their business (15).
The irony of Peglers tasteless column lay in the fact that his target
was not, at least initially, being celebrated much at all by others in the
popular press. Writing for the Nation two months after Fitzgeralds death,
Margaret Marshall offers an apt summary of the depth to which his reputation had sunk by the outset of the 1940s: In the weeks since the death
of Scott Fitzgerald I have read or reread each of the nine books he published. It has been on the whole a depressing experience partly because
one must agree with the glib epitaph assigned to him in the newspaper
obituaries: a man of talent who did not fulfill his early promise (159).
While Marshall concedes that Gatsby and a few short stories . . . will continue to be relevant because they caught and crystallized the underlying
values of a period, she concludes that it is easy to overrate Fitzgeralds
powers, and that, ultimately, his was a fair-weather talent which was not
adequate to the stormy age into which it happened, ironically, to emerge
(159). However, Marshall would be making this pronouncement at just
about the moment when Fitzgeralds literary reputation would be beginning its return from oblivion. Fitzgeralds friend Edmund Wilson, whom
the author had referred to as his intellectual conscience, arranged for a
series of commemorative essays on Fitzgerald to run in the New Republic
in early 1941. Angered by the treatment Fitzgerald had received in the
popular press from the likes of Pegler and others, Wilson and his contributors friends and contemporaries of the author set out to save
his reputation. Nearly all of the essays in the New Republic tribute specifically attack Peglers reproachful column, and more generally they all
seek to correct the impression that Fitzgerald was a writer (to use Isabel Patersons phrase) of the season only. Glenway Westcott discusses
Gatsby in this regard, claiming, Its very timeliness, as of 1925, gave it
a touch of the old-fashioned a few years later; but I have reread it this
week and found it all right; pleasure and compassion on every page. A
masterpiece often seems a period-piece for a while; then it comes down
out of the attic, to function anew and to last (214). John Dos Passos
approached the same issue from a more general perspective: Its the
quality of detaching itself from its period while embodying its period that
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A GREEN LIGHT
marks a piece of work as good (213). After the others had their say, Malcolm Cowley reflected on these ruminations in his brief summary essay,
Of Clocks and Calendars, in which he sought to reconcile the critics
concern over the period quality of his work with what he saw as one of
the greatest strengths of Fitzgeralds artistry:
He was haunted by time, as if he wrote in a room full of clocks and
calendars. . . . He worked hard and patiently to find the exact color
of a season that would never be repeated.
And isnt that a virtue inherent in his writing, rather than a weakness falsely imputed to it by the critics? . . . And it seems to me that
if Fitzgeralds best books succeeded in detaching themselves from
his decade as Dos Passos says they did it is precisely and paradoxically because he immersed himself in it, plunging deep into the
river of time until he ended by glimpsing the landscape of the rivers
bed. (376)
As Cowley points out in his essay The Fitzgerald Revival, 1941

1953, Wilsons decision to arrange for the New Republic tribute to
Fitzgerald was only the beginning of his influence in the restoration of
the authors image. Cowley credits Wilson as the driving force behind
the initial renewal of interest in Fitzgerald, as his editing and publishing
of two posthumous Fitzgerald volumes had a major impact. The first of
these efforts was his preparation and publication of Fitzgeralds unfinished final novel, The Last Tycoon, in 1941. By packaging the novel in a
volume that also contained The Great Gatsby and five of Fitzgeralds best
stories, Wilson made both a wise business move and a step in renewing
the reputation of Gatsby. There would be numerous reissuings of Gatsby
in the ensuing years, including, among others, a reprinting from Scribners (1942); Vikings volume The Portable F.Scott Fitzgerald (1945); a
free edition given out to World War II servicemen; a 1946 printing from
New Directions Press with an introduction by Lionel Trilling, part of their
New Classics series; and a twenty-five-cent edition from Bantam books,
which first appeared in 1945 and was reprinted numerous times throughout the decade and into the 1950s.2 The second important Fitzgerald
publication that Wilson would oversee was the 1945 collection of essays,
letters, and miscellany entitled The Crack-Up. Featuring the series of
confessional essays that Fitzgerald had published in Esquire magazine in
1936, this book sparked fresh public interest in the private life of Fitzgerald. As Cowley notes, The Crack-Up aroused very wide interest and the
Fitzgerald revival was under way (Revival, 11). Indeed, between the
popularity of The Crack-Up and the continual reprintings of Gatsby, there
was fodder for a good deal of chatter about Fitzgerald in the popular
press by the middle forties, perhaps the most ink devoted to him in two
decades. As Charles Poore wrote in the New York Times, in opening his
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September 1945 review of The Portable F.Scott Fitzgerald, There is no

end to the requiems on the work of Scott Fitzgerald. Someone is always
blowing taps over his books (19).
If a popular revival was under way by the middle forties, it is fair
to say that serious scholarly reevaluation was still a few years off at that
point. In a College English essay from 1951, the literary critic Granville
Hicks would remark on the stunning turnaround in Fitzgeralds reputation in the post-World War II years, contrasting the near total critical
neglect at the time immediately after his death to something that might
be called a Fitzgerald cult (190) that had influenced not just readers, but
scholars as well, by the dawn of the fifties. One of the handful of serious
critical articles from the years between his death and the first stirrings of a
revival of scholarly interest in Fitzgerald in the second half of the 1940s,
reveals a lingering disdain for the period to which Fitzgerald seemed tethered for good:
The work of F. Scott Fitzgerald reveals with extraordinary sharpness
the essential differences between the major writer and the minor
writer. He will no doubt be remembered in the years to come as
the chronicler of the jazz age. . . . Today, in the year 1944, nothing seems deader or more dated. The jazz age, the flapper and her
circle, the sensual anarchism of the early 1920s, appear to us to be
so many exhibits in a sociological waxworks, so many well-illumined
signposts of an irretrievable past. (Gurko, 372)
The authors of this article, Leo and Miriam Gurko, go to some

lengths to hem Fitzgerald into their tailor-made definition of a minor
writer; central to their argument is the notion that Fitzgerald had never
been able to transcend the trappings of his own time and place. In a sense,
this argument recalls Isabel Patersons 1925 review of Gatsby, in which
she had written the novel off as a book of the season only. The Gurkos
push the argument further, implying that in the end Fitzgerald would
remain a writer of the season only: It is a curious and significant phenomenon of literary history that the minor writer is always associated
with his period, the major writer with himself. . . . Lewis, Hemingway,
and Dos Passos, the major novelists of the 1920s, reveal to a greater or
lesser degree signs of breaking out of the time limits of their age, limits
within which Fitzgerald curls and snuggles in supercomfort (37273).
As with most early Fitzgerald criticism, we eventually see ambivalence on
the part of the critics, and one senses a desire by the end of this brief
essay to break Fitzgerald out of the confines of minor writerdom. The
Gurkos conclude the essay by claiming that one senses within him the
seeds of greatness which . . . would have required only the proper combination of time and social climate to be brought to full harvest (376).
This final observation, ironically, has some merit to it, though not in the
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A GREEN LIGHT
way the critics had seemingly intended. While they imply that Fitzgeralds
talent might have ripened given the proper combination of time and
social climate, in fact it was the evaluation of his talent that changed
with the changing times and social climate. Less than ten years after this
confident assessment of Fitzgerald as a minor talent, the inferior of Dos
Passos, Lewis, and other contemporaries, he would be celebrated as one
of the defining literary voices of his age; within twenty years, it would be
a commonplace assumption among literary critics that The Great Gatsby
was one of a small handful of American literary masterpieces.
Indeed, within a year of that College English article, we can see the
beginnings of this critical turn. Charles Weir, Jr.s essay from the Winter, 1944 Virginia Quarterly Review, An Invite with Gilded Edges,
lays some groundwork for a critical reevaluation. While arguing, along
the lines of Leo and Miriam Gurko, that Fitzgeralds greatest weakness,
ironically,was that he was so completely of his time and of his country
(134), Weir also seems to sense that Fitzgeralds superior ability in capturing his moment would give his best work a value more lasting than that
of his contemporaries. He argues, for example, that Fitzgeralds natural
eye for time and place makes, by comparison, the careful reconstructions
of Dos Passos seem mechanical and artificial (134). The most significant
contribution of this essay, particularly as it relates to future criticism of
Gatsby, is Weirs interpretation of Fitzgeralds treatment of wealth in his
novels and stories. Weir argues:
His preoccupation with the rich has generally been considered a
rather snobbish peculiarity. A more careful reading of his work can
open up several new lines of inquiry for the critic. All of Fitzgeralds
major work is tragic. All of it recounts aspiration, struggle, and failure. The characters and setting chosen to embody this theme are
indeed limited, but no more so than the characters and setting of
Faulkner, Wolfe, or Hemingway. The immediate problem is essentially twofold: why did Fitzgerald see and express life in such terms;
and did he provide an adequate expression? (138)
Weir provides a double-edged answer to his own question; in arguing

that the dominating idea in his life was that of success (138), Weir is
able to demonstrate in the essay how Fitzgeralds preoccupation with the
tragic underside of success makes his best work far more than merely the
glossy portrait of American high society life it was often taken to be. In
fact, Weir argues that in The Great Gatsby and elsewhere, Fitzgerald was
presenting a unique perspective on the question of American wealth:
Money drew him with a golden spell; there is in American literature
no more penetrating investigation of certain aspects of its power.
Not that Fitzgerald was ever very concerned with how money was
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made. The analyses of a Dreiser, a Norris, or an Upton Sinclair were

not for him. Most of his characters have made their million before
they appear in his pages in railroads, in mines, in oil it really
does not matter. But there is no naivet in this summary dismissal of
origins. Fitzgerald was under no illusions as to the means by which
a fortune is generally acquired. His interest lay in another direction:
the fortune being made, what could be done with it, what was done
with it? Wealth meant power, magnificence; and it was the only road
to power....
Still, Fitzgerald went far beyond adoration of power merely as
power. . . . It was the tragedy of a capitalist society that Fitzgerald
attempted to write, a tragedy in which the kings and commanders
have been replaced by millionaires. (14041)
While any reader of The Great Gatsby from a critic reviewing the novel
at the time of its publication on through a high-school student reading it
today could tell you that in one sense the book is fundamentally about
money, what Weir offers in at least skeletal form here is an avenue for pushing the discussion of wealth in the novel in new directions. The claim that
Fitzgerald was interested in presenting the tragedy of a capitalist society is
one that would be restated, explored, and debated in critical interpretations
of The Great Gatsby in the coming decades. For Weirs part, ultimately he
concludes that Fitzgerald did not fully realize his tragic vision, because he
failed to achieve sufficient distance between his own aspirations and those
of his fictional counterparts: For Fitzgerald, personally entwined with the
subjects of his work as he was, every failure was in a sense tragic, yet the
reader cannot be expected to feel so. . . . Essentially symbolic like most art,
tragedy cannot succeed if its symbols are not understood or are rejected.
Too often Fitzgerald will meet with rejection (144). Ironically, it was the
dense symbolic patterning of the novel that would keep academic critics
busy with interpretive forays for some time to come, and setting in motion
the critical Gatsby industry of the later 1950s and onward.
Still, Weirs claim of a too-close personal connection between author
and material would continue to surface in other critical analyses of the
mid-forties. Though critics had long noted, fairly, Fitzgeralds tendency
to project himself into his fictional characters, at no point was this critical tendency to dig deep into autobiographical and psychological connections more apparent than in the middle 1940s. Nineteen forty-five would
see publication of Wilsons edited volume The Crack-Up and in turn a
spate of review essays that reassessed Fitzgerald in light of his confessional
essays. Given the introspective nature of that collection of essays, some
commentators seemed drawn to ponder how Fitzgeralds own internal
conflicts and divided perspective on his material played out in his fiction. At times the parallels drawn between Fitzgerald and his characters
were so direct and oversimplified as to be unintentionally comic, as in
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Alfred Kazins claim, of Fitzgerald, that In fact, he was Gatsby. It was for
him . . . that the green light burned at the end of the dock. . . . It was he
who wanted Daisy. . . . He could create Gatsby only at the price of never
admitting that he was Gatsby (178). While Fitzgerald had referred to his
books and their protagonists as his brothers and had once noted in a
letter to his friend John Peale Bishop that Jay Gatsby started out as one
man I knew and then changed into myself (in Crack-Up, 271), a critical
insistence on such a direct identification between author and protagonist
seems overstated at best, if not somewhat beside the point.
A more nuanced take on Fitzgeralds connection to the character of
Jay Gatsby can be found in Andrews Wannings essay Fitzgerald and His
Brethren, published in 1945 in the Partisan Review. Wanning plumbs
the Crack-Up essays for some explanation of the ongoing conflict seen
in both Fitzgeralds life and his fiction between the clear-eyed sensibility of a moralist and fatalist (164), on the one hand, and the undying
attraction to a world of glittering material success, on the other. For Wanning, it is Fitzgeralds youthful experiences as an outsider among his more
wealthy friends his position as part of the genteel poor (162) that
help to shape the indelible conflict that marks so much of his best writing, the simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from the world of the
rich. Wanning sees this conflict play out not only on the thematic level,
but also on a stylistic level, as Fitzgeralds luminous language adorns what
are often, at heart, moralistic tales: His style keeps reminding you . . . of
his sense of the enormous beauty of which life, suitably ornamented, is
capable; and at the same time of his judgment as to the worthlessness of
the ornament and the corruptibility of the beauty (165). The conflicts
Wanning describes play out most clearly in The Great Gatsby, and in his
discussion of the novel Wanning notes the connection between author
and protagonist, but he goes on to suggest far broader connections, ones
that would be picked up and discussed by subsequent critics:
The Great Gatsby is Fitzgeralds best novel because here the congruity of story and style and attitude is closest and most meaningful.
Here he had a story whose central character not only symbolized his
own conflicts and confusions, but made a moving commentary on a
period and a country as well. . . . But if the feeling of the novel owes
a good deal to its authors identity with his subject, its impact owes
a lot too to its range; to the fact that Gatsby is not merely a disguise
for Fitzgerald. . . . The tragedy of Gatsby was a fable for his America;
it is not, I should say, by any means dead yet. (16566)
Wanning was not the only critic at this time looking at Gatsby as an
American fable or symbol, nor was he the only one to be predicting its
second life. One of the first important scholarly essays of the Fitzgerald
revival also appeared in the wake of publication of The Crack-Up: William
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Troys Scott Fitzgerald the Authority of Failure, which appeared in

the Autumn 1945 issue of Accent. From the opening sentence of the essay,
Troy makes clear the writing on which Fitzgeralds chance for a lasting literary legacy will rely: Of course, in any absolute sense, Scott Fitzgerald
was not a failure at all; he has left one short novel, passages in several
others, and a handful of short stories which stand as much chance of survival as anything of their kind produced in this country during the same
period (56). The short novel he mentions here is of course The Great
Gatsby, and indeed one of the reasons that he singles Gatsby out is for the
full enunciation of the theme of failure that Troy finds running throughout the better stories, and even the lesser novels as well. But in order to
put his argument in context, it may be helpful to note that this essay came
out shortly after the initial critiques of The Crack-Up had appeared in the
periodicals. If Wilson had sought with the book to generate a compassionate reevaluation of Fitzgerald, Troy suggests, with obvious disdain,
that this goal was not immediately met: Upon the appearance of The
Crack-Up . . . it was notable that all the emptiest and most venal elements
in New York journalism united to crow amiably about his literary corpse
to this same tune of insufficient production (56). It is in the wake of this
renewed dredging up of the argument concerning Fitzgeralds wasted
potential that Troy sought out, in this essay, to provide a deeper examination of what failure meant for Fitzgerald.
Troy quotes a line from Fitzgeralds notebooks, in which he ruminates on his problems with Ernest Hemingway: I talk with the authority
of failure. . . . Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit
across the same table again (60). In his defense of Fitzgeralds character,
Troy argues that this failure that Fitzgerald perceived in himself was
akin to Jay Gatsbys inability to live up to his Platonic conception of himself. His aspirations not merely commercially, but artistically were
so high that he was fated to fail to meet them. His failure was the defect
of his virtues, Troy writes, And this is perhaps the greatest meaning
of his career to the younger generation of writers. . . . The stakes for
which he played were of a kind more difficult and more unattainable than
Ernest or any of his contemporaries could have even imagined. And his
only strength is in the consciousness of this fact (60). Troys most convincing case for Fitzgerald comes in his discussion of The Great Gatsby, in
which he lays out several ideas that would help to spur scholarly discussion of both the author and the novel in the ensuing decade. The first
of these notions has to do with Fitzgeralds dividing his own sensibility
in the novel between the characters of Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby.
For Troy, this allows the author to examine the theme of failure the
consistent theme of his work from first to last (56) in a more complex
light than in earlier work. He lays out this key idea of the essay in a dense
paragraph worth quoting here in its entirety:
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Here is a remarkable instance of the manner in which adoption of a

special form or technique can profoundly modify and define a writers whole attitude toward his world. In the earlier books author and
hero tended to melt into one because there was no internal principle
of differentiation by which they might be separated; they respired
in the same climate, emotional and moral; they were tarred with
the same brush. But in Gatsby is achieved a dissociation, by which
Fitzgerald was able to isolate one part of himself, the spectatorial
or aesthetic, and also the more intelligent and responsible, in the
person of the ordinary but quite sensible narrator, from another part
of himself, the dream-ridden romantic adolescent from St. Paul and
Princeton, in the person of the legendary Jay Gatsby. It is this which
makes the latter one of the few truly mythological creations in our
recent literature for what is mythology but this same process of
projected wish-fulfillment carried out on a larger scale and by the
whole consciousness of a race? Indeed, before we are quite through
with him, Gatsby becomes much more than a mere exorcizing of
whatever false elements of the American dream Fitzgerald felt within
himself: he becomes a symbol of America itself, dedicated to the
service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. (57)
While Troy was not the first critic to notice that Fitzgerald had
achieved some level of narrative distance in the novel even many early
reviewers praised Fitzgerald for finding a way to reduce his authorial
intrusions in this book his discussion of a splitting, or dissociation
of the authors own sensibility between the two primary characters would
give future scholars something to chew on for a good many years to come.
The key here is Troys linking of the divided perspective and the notion
of Gatsby as a figure of projected wish-fulfillment, since it is this mechanism, in Troys view, that allows Gatsby to become a mythical figure,
an embodiment of America itself. Clearly, this latter notion, echoed at
around the same time by Lionel Trilling in his introduction to the 1945
New Directions edition of Gatsby, introduced a primary thematic concern
of critics who would follow in the scholarly revival of the coming years.
Indeed, as early as 1947, Maxwell Geismar, in The Last of the Provincials:
The American Novel, 19151925, would discuss Fitzgeralds geographic
imagination, his tendency to project the romantic and moral dilemmas
of his fiction onto the national map. Geismar also alludes to the mythic
national dimensions of The Great Gatsby when he identifies Jay Gatsby as
a cousin, say, of Huck Finn (320). Like Twains protagonist, Gatsby,
for Geismar, represents the American outsider (318), whose story is set
to the rhythm and words of an American myth (320).
Also occasioned by the publication of The Crack-Up, Malcolm Cowleys New Yorker essay from 1945, Third Act and Epilogue, works
away in a manner related to that of Weir, Wanning, and Troy at
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establishing both the connections and dissociations between Fitzgerald and

what Wanning had called his fictional brethren. Cowley, though, pushes
this discussion further by invoking the optical metaphor of double vision,
a trope that seems particularly appropriate in explaining the repeated patterns of doubleness, or divided perspective, that characterize so much of
Fitzgeralds fiction. As Cowley explains, this doubleness goes beyond the
tension between identification with and judgment of his protagonists:
He cultivated a sort of double vision. He was continually trying
to present the glitter of life in the Princeton eating clubs, on the
Riviera, on the North Shore of Long Island, and in the Hollywood
studios; he surrounded his characters with a mist of admiration and
simultaneously he drove the mist away. . . . It was as if all his novels
described a big dance to which he had taken, as he once wrote, the
prettiest girl . . . and as if at the same time he stood outside the ballroom, a little Midwestern boy with his nose to the glass, wondering
how much the tickets cost and who paid for the music. He regarded
himself as a pauper living among millionaires . . . and he said that his
point of vantage was the dividing line between two generations,
prewar and postwar. It was this habit of keeping a double point of
view that distinguished his work. There were popular and serious
novelists in his time, but there was something of a gulf between
them; Fitzgerald was one of the very few popular writers who were
also serious artists. There were realists and romantics; Fitzgerald was
among the wildest of the romantics, but he was also among the few
Americans who tried, like Stendhal in France, to make the romance
real by showing its causes and its consequences. (15051)
The closing couple of oppositions Cowley includes here the tensions

between popular and serious fiction, and between romance and realism are particularly relevant to the enduring appeal of Gatsby. Like its
partner on the list of most loved and greatest of American novels, Twains
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby is that rarest of
birds: a literary classic that everyday people actually enjoy reading. And
this may have more than a bit to do with the quality shared by both
of these works of blending romance and realism, presenting a mythic
vision of American experience filtered through a vivid, realistic, and
socially astute portrait of a specific time and place. Though Cowley does
not discuss The Great Gatsby in any particular detail in this brief essay,
his notion of Fitzgeralds double vision would prove useful in years to
come for scholars working to unpack the seemingly inexhaustible series of
contrasts and oppositions that animate that novel.
Indeed, in two essays that appeared in the following year, 1946, we
can see other notable critics working through the conflicts and doubleness that characterize Fitzgeralds major work, and Gatsby in particular. John
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Berryman, in his brief but thought-provoking Kenyon Review essay of

1946, titled simply F. Scott Fitzgerald, identifies in The Great Gatsby
what he calls the permanent theme of Fitzgeralds serious fiction (105),
which he sees as the conflicted portrayal of a protagonists beautiful and
intense attachment toward an object that is inaccessible or, in Berrymans apt phrase, toward a hopeless error (106). There is helpless
irony in the mounting of such a theme, Berryman argues, owing to
an incongruity between what the hero is made to be obsessed by, his
impersonal devotion and confidence, and what the author knows, his own
despair. But this irony is not tragic in Fitzgerald; it is as unhappy and tender as a farewell (106). Berrymans analysis possesses the advantage of
seeing this conflicted or divided perspective as a conscious artistic achievement, rather than a happy accident befalling an author not particularly
aware of what he was doing or fully in control of his own powers. He also
astutely points out that the more profitable comparison between author
and fictional counterpart is between Fitzgerald and Nick Carraway, not
Jay Gatsby. While Fitzgerald himself had remarked on his connection
to the character of Gatsby, in critical terms there is little to be made of
the resemblance between the two that can rise above the level of platitudes and poor psychologizing; however, the Fitzgerald/Carraway relationship presents a critical goldmine that was, at this point at the very
beginnings of the Fitzgerald revival, wholly untapped. Though Berryman moves briefly through this idea (correctly noting that the history
of [Carraways] disenchantment during one summer [104] provides the
heart of the novel), he takes care to underscore Fitzgeralds achievement
in crafting the figure of the narrator: Carraway stands with less distortion for the author himself than, probably, any other character he created the initiated but detached Middle-westerner, the moralist; and
the closeness with which Fitzgeralds cleaves to his narrators perception
partly accounts for the great difference in control (104) between Gatsby
and his other novels.
Perhaps we can see here the tide of Fitzgerald criticism beginning
to turn a bit, at least, away from the evaluative mode and toward the
scholarly and analytic. Certainly Berryman has no qualms about dispensing with the need for evaluative argument; at the outset of the essay he
makes plain his goal of pushing readers and critics beyond thinking of
Gatsby as only Fitzgeralds best novel: An impression less widespread,
which I wish to encourage, is that it is a masterpiece (103). Perhaps taking a cue from Eliots famous remark, from his personal letter to Fitzgerald, that The Great Gatsby marked the first step that American fiction has
taken since Henry James (in Kazin, 93), Berryman claims that Gatsby
meets the criteria of a literary masterpiece better than any other American work of fiction since The Golden Bowl (104). In praising the novels
superb construction (Not a page could be lost from it without disturbance
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to Fitzgeralds achievement [104]) and elucidating the disillusion or

disenchantment theme, with its concomitant atmosphere of desperate
or ecstatic nostalgia (107), Berryman provided, if in miniature, a good
store of material for future scholarly explorations.
A final essay from the mid-1940s worth consideration is Arthur Mizeners 1946 Scott Fitzgerald and the Imaginative Possession of American
Life. This essay in revised form3 combines biography with critical assessment; in the ensuing years Mizener published a number of such articles,
leading up to the publication of his popular 1951 Fitzgerald biography,
The Far Side of Paradise. In this 1946 essay, Mizener praises Fitzgerald for
having realized in completely American terms the developed romantic
attitude (Imaginative, 66), an approach born of his acute sense of
the irrevocable passage of everything into the past (67). In a sense echoing Cowleys claims about Fitzgeralds unique ability to bridge the realms
of romance and realism, Mizener delves into the pastness of the past
as it is presented in Fitzgeralds best fiction, arguing that the author had
a unique ability for conveying at turns an almost historical objectivity
and a Proustian minuteness of recollection of the feelings and attitudes
which made up the experience as it was lived (67).
For Mizener, Gatsby is the novel in which he found his theme and
its fable (68), and in the discussion of the book he offers two claims that
would be discussed at some length during the critical resurgence of the
1950s. The first is that during the time leading up to The Great Gatsby,
Fitzgerald had been reading Conrad and as a result adopted the modified
first-person form which suited his purposes so well (77). Mizener does
not go into specific detail regarding Fitzgeralds debt to Conrad, instead
simply praising the narrative approach in The Great Gatsby over what had
come before it in Fitzgeralds career, which Mizener characterizes, fairly
enough, as relatively unplanned narrative structures disrupted by the
constant interference of the authors own person (77). In criticism of
the 1950s and 1960s, as we shall see, the nature and extent of Fitzgeralds
connection to Conrad would become a source of great critical exploration
and debate. The other significant contribution of Mizeners essay is the
attention he pays to the contrast of the eastern and western settings of the
novel. Citing the English critic William Empsons pioneering work on the
pastoral mode in literature, Mizener labels The Great Gatsby an example of Mr. Empsons tragic pastoral, with the east the exemplar of urban
sophistication and corruption, and the west, the bored sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, the exemplar of simple virtue (78).4 Mizener argues that Fitzgeralds symbolic geography is key to understanding
the central insights of the novel; just as Nick Carraway comes to understand the moral corruption that underlies life in the sophisticated east
and long for the moral order of his native middle-west, so too does
the contrast between the moral cowardice of Tom and Daisy Buchanan
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and the incorruptibility at the heart of Gatsbys corruption (79) become

apparent to both the narrator and the reader of the novel. Mizener closes
his discussion of The Great Gatsby in this essay by contrasting this formal
excellence with what he sees as a potential shortcoming: While arguing that
the art of his book, in the narrow sense, is nearly perfect (79), Mizener
worries that Fitzgerald commits too fully to his protagonists romanticism
and may himself have failed to perceive some fundamental inadequacy in
Gatsbys attitude (79). Mizener would continue to stoke public and critical interest in Fitzgerald in the following years, particularly with his 1951
biography; already in this 1946 essay he introduces certain ideas regarding the nature of Fitzgeralds romanticism, and the tragic pastoral mode
at work in Gatsby that would be debated in the years to come.
The Fifties: From Popular Revival

to Scholarly Resurgence
The turn of the decade from the forties to the fifties was a key period of
momentum for the Fitzgerald revival. The emergence of three works in
rapid succession kept Fitzgeralds name in the popular press and exposed
the author to an ever-growing audience: the Paramount Pictures film
The Great Gatsby, in 1949 (the second film adaptation of the novel);
Budd Schulbergs novel The Disenchanted (1950), a fictional account of
Schulbergs working relationship with Fitzgerald; and Arthur Mizeners
Fitzgerald biography, The Far Side of Paradise (1951). The 1949 film
adaptation received mixed notices. Bosley Crowther, reviewing the film
for the New York Times, cited a weak script in arguing that most of the
tragic implications and bitter ironies of Mr. Fitzgeralds work have gone
by the board (20) in the film version. Manny Farber, in the Nation,
referred to the film as a limp translation of the novel, but suggested
that it captures just enough of the original to make it worth your while
and rekindle admiration for a wonderful book (245). Irrespective of its
cinematic merits, the very appearance of a second film version, coming at
the end of a decade that saw numerous new editions and reprintings of
the novel, indicates the extent to which The Great Gatsby had by this time
reentered the public consciousness.
Undoubtedly more influential in the resurgence of public interest in
Fitzgerald, however, was Hollywood writer Budd Schulbergs hit 1950
novel, The Disenchanted. As a young screenwriter Schulberg was assigned
in 1939 to work with Fitzgerald on the screenplay for the collegiate
romantic comedy Winter Carnival; their trip to the films location, Dartmouth College, turned into a disastrous drunken escapade that resulted
in Fitzgeralds removal from the project. (The extent to which this story
has passed into the realm of pop culture legends can be measured by the
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fact that it was featured prominently, seventy years down the line, in the
recent obituaries of Schulberg, who died in 2009 at the age of 95.) Schulberg would offer a fictionalized account of this experience in The Disenchanted, with the Fitzgerald character renamed Manley Halliday. While
a gripping novel in its own right, The Disenchanted poses a problem for
fans of Fitzgerald in its depiction of Halliday as a sad, washed-up alcoholic who sees the futility of his longing to recapture past glory. As one
contemporary reviewer noted, Manley Halliday is a magnificent portrait
of the wreck of a brilliant man. . . . That such a man should fall so low
induces in the reader a painful combination of pity, embarrassment, and
revulsion. . . . One shrinks from any more of this invasion of privacy
(Prescott, 25). While Schulberg maintained in interviews over the years
that Halliday was more a composite portrait of the formerly great writer
slumming it in Hollywood than a depiction of Scott Fitzgerald in particular, the direct biographical connection belies this argument. Scholars
have debated the effect the portrayal had on Fitzgeralds reputation, but
one thing is certain: The popularity of this novel, as well as its appearance immediately before Mizeners biography, The Far Side of Paradise
(1951), contributed greatly to a renewed public interest in Fitzgerald, in
turn adding more fuel to the Fitzgerald revival at the dawn of the 1950s.
As for Mizeners The Far Side of Paradise, it is difficult to overstate
the books importance in terms of Fitzgeralds return to prominence. It
is the first, and still considered by many the most readable, biography; at
the same time, the book features valuable critical insights as well. The section devoted to The Great Gatsby contains much of the material from the
Sewanee Review essay, featuring his observations about the tragic pastoral mode in the novel and about the structural and thematic centrality of
Nick Carraway and his evolving sensibilities. The situating of this textual
analysis within a larger biographical sketch ensured its reaching a much
wider audience and furthering discourse on Gatsby. Indeed, the popular appeal of both Schulbergs novel and Mizeners biography (the latter
more surprising than the former) bespoke as much a rising interest in
Fitzgerald the personage, the public figure, as it did an interest in the literary artist. As one reviewer noted, The life of F.Scott Fitzgerald was so
intrinsically dramatic, so colored with the extravagance of romance, that
it is a question whether Mr. Schulbergs novel is any more unlikely than
Professor Mizeners biography. . . . One is tempted to predict that despite
the excellence of The Great Gatsby and a handful of short stories Fitzgeralds reputation will be centered around the very real interest in his personality (Notes and Queries, 7778). And while this may have been
true of the Fitzgerald revival among the reading public, in the academic
world a critical revival was dawning, and at its heart was The Great Gatsby.
In addition to Mizener, another critic who can be thought of as doing
work that in a sense legitimized scholarly interest in Fitzgerald was Lionel
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Trilling. Trilling revised and combined two of his previous pieces on

Fitzgerald for an essay he included in his major 1950 work, The Liberal
Imagination a volume that had wide-ranging appeal among the reading public. If Trillings aim was, broadly speaking, to explore the moral
values of the American tradition of social and intellectual liberalism, then
Fitzgerald may have at first struck some readers of the time as an odd
choice of subject matter. He had, after all, secured the dubious distinction
of being the poster child for the riotous twenties, the would-be great one
brought down by his own frivolousness and dissipation. And as for his
connection to any sort of American intellectual tradition, even his admirers had always treated Fitzgerald as something of a knucklehead, someone
born with the gift for language but woefully unschooled in his own artistic and intellectual heritage. In contrast to this image of Fitzgerald, Trilling presents a view of a heroic (243) person and a writer with a strong
connection with tradition (253), a moralist to the core whose writing was motivated and enlivened by his power of love (244). He singles out for praise The Great Gatsby, arguing that its ingenious formal
structure derives from what he calls radical foreshortening (252). Trilling expands on this Jamesian phrase, explaining that Fitzgerald employs
a series of what he calls ideographs, densely symbolic objects, settings,
and even characters, to convey the larger meanings of the work. Hence,
through the associations he builds between depictions of the eyes of Dr.
Eckleburg, the valley of ashes, and the Washington Heights apartment,
for example, Fitzgerald builds a kind of symbolic economy in the work
that, for Trilling, gives the novel an affinity (252) with T.S. Eliots The
Waste Land.
Trillings brief survey of the symbolic field of the novel prefigures
ideas that would be explored in some of the major essays of the 1950s.
His reference to Eliots The Waste Land also suggests a rich connection critics would explicate later on, as does his passing mention of the
vaguely homosexual Jordan Baker hint of a subtext of the novel that
would eventually be explored by critics of another generation. Perhaps
the most lasting contribution to later criticism, however, is the specific
connection Trilling builds between the narrative of the novel and the
larger national narrative:
Gatsby is said by some to be not quite credible, but the question of
any literal credibility he may or may not have becomes trivial before
the large significance he implies. For Gatsby, divided between power
and dream, comes inevitably to stand for America itself. Ours is the
only nation that prides itself upon a dream and gives its name to one,
the American dream . . . Clearly it is Fitzgeralds intention that our
mind should turn to the thought of the nation that has sprung up
from its Platonic conception of itself. To the world it is anomalous
in America, just as in the novel it is anomalous in Gatsby, that so much
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raw power should be haunted by envisioned romance. Yet in that

anomaly lies, for good and bad, much of the truth of our national life,
as, at the present moment, we think about it. (25152)
Notwithstanding Professor Trillings penchant for sweeping statements

and fondness for the royal we, this claim is one that helps to define the
terms by which the novel would be discussed for generations to come.
Trilling was not the first to suggest that The Great Gatsby holds up a mirror to the larger American experience; however, he may have put it most
forcefully, in the process arguing for a special place for this book in our
literary canon while suggesting its lasting, if not perpetual, cultural relevance. The influence of this critical stance persists, and this is not merely
a matter of rarefied scholarly discourse: Each time a high-school English
teacher or college professor poses to a class a question what exactly
is Fitzgerald saying about the nature of the American dream? (it will
happen thousands of times this year, in classrooms across the land and,
indeed, around the world) the discussion that ensues will, whether the
participants know it or not, be picking up on this point made by Trilling
so many years ago.
Thanks to the groundbreaking work of writers like Trilling and Mizener, the stage was set by the outset of the 1950s for a critical revival of
Fitzgerald and Gatsby, to match the ongoing popular revival. Evidence
that a more scholarly interest in Fitzgerald and his legacy had emerged
by this point can be found in articles such as Henry Dan Pipers 1951
American Quarterly essay, Fitzgeralds Cult of Disillusion and Leslie
Fiedlers 1951 New Leader essay, Some Notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald
(republished in his 1955 book, An End to Innocence). Piper, who would
go on to make significant contributions to Fitzgerald studies in the form
of a reference work on the background and critical reception of The Great
Gatsby and a scholarly monograph on Fitzgeralds work, in this early essay
discusses a widespread culture of disillusion prevalent in the first quarter
of the twentieth century, and credits Fitzgeralds early writing, specifically
This Side of Paradise, for giving the first widespread popular expression
to that post-World War I disillusion that is now recognized as one of
the twenties most characteristic notes (Cult, 69). Piper seems fairly
ambivalent about Fitzgeralds achievements, in a sense crediting him for
tapping into the zeitgeist of his moment, but at the same time dismissing
the young author for being ignorant of the full contours of the American
intellectual and literary traditions. Similarly, Fiedler who would later
offer a compelling analysis of The Great Gatsby in his major work of 1960,
Love and Death in the American Novel here offers a mixed assessment
of Fitzgeralds literary legacy. While he worries over the exuberance of
the revival, claiming that Fitzgeralds compelling life story makes him
particularly amenable to sentimental idealization (Innocence, 174),
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Fiedler does examine Fitzgeralds treatment of class issues in a compelling fashion. He builds a contrast between Fitzgeralds depiction of the
rich and the exaggerated form of class-consciousness that characterized
the proletarian fiction of the 1930s, the very writing that had superseded
Fitzgeralds romantic realism in popularity during the years of the Great
Depression. Unlike the nasty rich in proletarian novels, Fiedler argues,
Fitzgeralds rich are myths rather than platitudes, viable to the imagination (18182). In both essays, one gets the sense of a nascent effort to
place Fitzgerald within the prevailing literary and intellectual climate of
his times, and this sort of reassessment would gain momentum as the
Fitzgerald revival developed.
Readers familiar with Fiedlers critical writing, with its emphasis on
analysis of psychological and sexual themes, would imagine that in an
essay on Fitzgerald, he would find more to discuss than merely the depiction of the wealthy class, and indeed this is the case. His brief 1951 essay
also includes a number of pointed references to Fitzgeralds fluid depiction of gender, points that he would leave largely undeveloped but that
would be taken up decades later, as critical interest in Gatsby from feminist
and queer theorists would offer new angles for discussion of the work.
He also argues that almost all (178) of Fitzgeralds main characters are
projections of himself, and their emotional and sexual conflicts reflect
back on the authors own internal conflicts. While Fiedler never develops
his psychoanalytic claims with serious textual analysis, and while this theoretical model would lay dormant for some time in Fitzgerald studies, it is
worth noting the appearance of another psychoanalytic take on Fitzgerald
and Gatsby shortly after Fiedlers. In the Autumn, 1952 Arizona Quarterly, D.S. Savage published The Significance of F.Scott Fitzgerald, an
article that dives headlong into the psychoanalytic funhouse that Fiedler
had opened, arguing that what emerges most patently from Fitzgeralds
biography is his character as a mothers boy, and that the incest motive
is in fact central to all of Fitzgeralds novels (206). Say what one will
about Savages talents as a psychoanalyst I would say he lives up to
his name in his vicious depiction of Zelda and Scott in the article it
is in his discussion of Gatsby that Savage, like Fiedler, draws near some
potentially interesting interpretive avenues, only to back away from them
entirely. He suggests that Gatsbys parable of Innocence and Experience (208) can be read not only in terms of a conflict between morality
and corruption, but also psychoanalytically, as the playing out of the conflict between what Freud called the reality principle and the pleasure
principle. Gatsby, Carraway, and other of Fitzgeralds major characters,
according to Savage, are romantics in contradiction with themselves, in
that they wish to make of experience a means to the renewal of innocence (208). Savage analyzes how this contradiction relates to the overt
incest theme of Tender Is the Night and seems just on the verge of doing
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the same sort of work on Gatsby before, apparently, deciding not to:
It is precisely the same incestuous regression which, in fact, determines
the unconscious symbolism of The Great Gatsby a symbolism, however,
which I lack space to elucidate in the present article (205). His psychoanalytic mystery would remain well kept in the years to come, as this early
foray into psychosexual readings of Gatsby offered by Fiedler and Savage
would represent a potentially compelling approach, but one largely unexplored until a couple of decades later.
If Freudian readings of Gatsby saw an early bloom and quick wilt,
we might say the same about interpretations from a Marxian perspective.
While examinations of Fitzgeralds class-consciousness and his portrayal
of the life of the rich have been absolute mainstays of Gatsby criticism
all along, more properly radical treatments of his work have not. Richard Greenleafs 1952 essay, The Social Thinking of F. Scott Fitzgerald, makes an interesting effort to argue for an evolution in Fitzgeralds
sensibility, over the course of his writing career, toward a more Marxian standpoint by the end of his life. Greenleaf takes umbrage at leading
voices in the Fitzgerald revival, like Trilling and Piper, for focusing only
on aesthetic qualities in the work and not seeing Fitzgerald as a writer
responding to the class issues of his day. Though Greenleaf claims that
Fitzgeralds ironic treatment of the rich attained its full sharpness in
The Great Gatsby (109), he has surprisingly little to say about this ironic
treatment and ultimately seems disappointed that Fitzgeralds denouement was not more radical: The hypocrisies of the rich Buchanans lead
to their near-destruction; by a final nefarious maneuver they turn it into
the destruction of Gatsby (109). John W. Bicknell, in his 1954 essay
The Waste Land of F.Scott Fitzgerald, perhaps sorts out the frustration seemingly apparent in Greenleafs discussion of Gatsby. Also arguing from a Marxian perspective, Bicknell praises Fitzgeralds achievement
of an atmosphere of foreboding and doom in the novel. He focuses in
on the deterministic trajectory of the plot, examining the demise of the
pathetic (559) George and Myrtle Wilson, who are unaware of the
forces pressing (560) on them, and the perverted version of the selfmade man (560), Gatsby, who also dies ignorant of the forces that
preyed upon him (561). Unlike Greenleaf, however, Bicknell does not
see Fitzgerald as a writer committed to class struggle. Key to this argument is Bicknells distinction between tragedy and mere pessimism; he
assigns Gatsby and, indeed, all of Fitzgeralds novels to the pessimistic camp as they offer, for Bicknell, bleakness without struggle,
a sense of declining fates about which nothing can be done. For critics
devoted to the necessity of struggle (566), Bicknell argues, Fitzgeralds
literary achievement falls short of tragedy (571).
If these early forays into Marxist and psychoanalytic readings of
Gatsby proved to be a bit ahead of their time, we can identify other
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patterns or trends in the emergent Gatsby criticism of the 1950s that

were very much of the moment. Given the vogue of the school of New
Criticism in the American academy, with its focus on the formal patterns
and aesthetic qualities of the literary work, Gatsby quickly proved to be a
favorite among scholars. The novels dense symbolic patterning, as well
as its particularly strong marriage of form and content, with Nick Carraways involved-yet-detached, participant/observer narration giving
shape to the theme of American dream and disillusionment, provided a
rich mine of material for scholarly discussion and debate. Three overlapping areas one could identify as mainstays in the criticism of this period
would be influence studies, the examination of narrative perspective in
the novel, and explorations of symbolic patterns and their relationship to
the larger American themes of the book. Across the span of the decade,
critical conversations begin to emerge along the lines of intersection
between these various approaches. For example, influence studies, which
most commonly pointed back to Joseph Conrad, as well as the lessons of
Henry James, typically come at some point to focus in on the central role
of the first-person narrator, Carraway; the question of Nick Carraways
impact on the meanings of the novel has proven inexhaustible to this day,
and it already had taken off as a critical discussion in the 1950s, as we shall
see. Similarly, essays centering on Nicks ambivalent role share concerns
with those that examine what seems to be Fitzgeralds larger ambivalence
toward the American scene he depicts. Though the specific terms of the
critical discourse around the novel would shift markedly in the ensuing
decades, the basic elements of the critical conversation surrounding The
Great Gatsby would emerge in a series of compelling essays in the 1950s.
Essays tracing sources and influences on The Great Gatsby ranged
widely from the classical to the contemporary. Paul MacKendrick, in a
1950 essay in The Classical Journal, traces the parallels between Jay Gatsby
and Trimalchio, the vulgar, ostentatious party host from the Satyricon
of Petronius. Among Fitzgeralds working titles for the novel had been
Trimalchio in West Egg, and, simply, Trimalchio. MacKendrick examines
not merely parallels in the presentations of the two characters, but also
the purposes to which they were put, arguing that the gaudy milieux of
both characters was part of their respective authors efforts at describing
their age as they see it: socially, intellectually, politically corrupt (314).5
Richard Schoenwald, in his 1957 essay Scott Fitzgerald as John Keats,
looks to the more recent past in tracing what he sees as a key source of
Fitzgeralds lyric romanticism. Though Schoenwald is certainly correct in
his discussion of Keatss profound influence on Fitzgerald, unfortunately
only scant connections to Gatsby are made in the essay.6
Such is not the case with Philip Youngs 1956 essay Scott Fitzgeralds Waste Land, in which Young examines the structural and thematic
parallels between The Great Gatsby and poet T. S. Eliots modernist
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masterpiece, The Waste Land. Eliots praising of the novel in a letter to

Fitzgerald sparked a friendship between the two, one based on mutual
admiration. Surely Eliot must have noticed Fitzgeralds direct references
to The Waste Land in Gatsby: Nick Carraway once refers to the desolate
Valley of Ashes as a waste land (GG, 22), and on another occasion
describes the throbbing taxi cabs (47) lining the darkened streets of
New York City, borrowing an image from Eliots Tiresias, who waits at
the violet hour, when the eyes and back / Turn upward from the desk,
when the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting (ll. 215
17). Young, in this solid essay, does more than merely note such similarities, instead demonstrating how both works follow a similar pattern in
building toward their grand ruminations on the spiritual sterility of the
contemporary world (224). While he focuses this provocative discussion
on the waste land setting of the valley of ashes, the dead center of the
book (225), Young argues that the rot at the center of the ash valley
permeates throughout the varied landscapes and societies of the novel:
As in the earlier waste land, one telling symptom of general chaos in
Gatsby is that most traditions are broken or lost. There is no religious
faith; Gods functions are taken over by an advertisement for eyeglasses.
Tom, a decayed survival of what may once have been a competent aristocracy, is reduced to corruption and the vicious ignorant speeches he
makes (226). Youngs reading of the famous ending passages of the
book again connect back to Eliot; just as the protagonist of The Waste
Land gathers, perhaps futilely, the fragments I have shored against my
ruins (l. 431), so too does Nick Carraway look beyond the waste land of
the East in seeking solace in more enduring values: Nick Carraway finds
himself (like the protagonist of Eliots poem) brooding on the superiority
of the past, and appealing to certain traditions of an earlier era (227).
As for the influence of contemporary novelists, several cases were
made in the journals. Henry Dan Piper argued that Frank Norris was
the most influential (Norris, 393) of the naturalists on Fitzgerald,
while Eric Solomon, building on a point made earlier by Maxwell Geismar, argued that Theodore Dreisers 1919 short story Vanity, Vanity,
Saith the Preacher was a direct influence on The Great Gatsby.7 Solomon traces a number of specific parallels shaping the two tales of the
innocent who is destroyed by the same decadent society he sought to
dominate (187). The most frequently made connection among contemporary novelists, however, was certainly to Joseph Conrad. Conrad,
who had employed Jamesian principles regarding narrative perspective,
particularly in his use of the participant-observer narrator, clearly influenced Fitzgeralds approach to writing Gatsby and Fitzgerald himself
said as much on more than one occasion. Robert Wooster Stallman, in
his 1955 essay Conrad and The Great Gatsby, makes more explicit the
connection to Conrad that had been discussed previously by other critics.
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Stallman most thoroughly examines the influence of Conrads 1902 novel

Heart of Darkness on The Great Gatsby, but also makes connections to the
major Conrad novels Nostromo (1904) and Lord Jim (1900). For Stallman, what Fitzgerald learned from Conrad includes not only the device
of the perplexed narrator and turns of phrasing, but also themes and
plot-situations, ambivalence of symbolism, etc. in fact, the craft of the
novel, including a theory of its construction (Conrad, 5). The most
specific link Stallman examines is the resemblance between Nick Carraway
and Marlow, the narrator of both Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, a point
that leads us directly to a series of studies on Nick and the central issue of
narrative perspective in the novel.
Indeed, one of the articles that directly references Stallmans argument
here is Jerome Thales 1957 essay The Narrator as Hero, which takes up
the point of the remarkable similarities (69) between Gatsby and Conrads Heart of Darkness and goes on to make the argument that the works
respective narrators, Carraway and Marlow, are in fact the central characters and heroes: Nick and Marlow, then, are not simply the voices necessary for telling stories like these. They are too much engaged and they
react too strongly, to be mere fictional conveniences. . . . Nick is the hero
of the novel, and Gatsby is a fact, the fact, in his development (71). If, as
many critics of the decade would claim, the novel is essentially moralistic
in nature, then Thales point is logical and seemingly irrefutable; after all,
Gatsby in the course of the novel is essentially a simple and static (70)
character, whereas the development of moral perspective occurs entirely
within Nick, occasioned by his experiences in New York and Long Island
in the summer of 1922. But is the case really this simple? Not so fast. Cue,
once again, Robert Stallman, who argues in one of the most interesting
and audacious essays of the decade, Gatsby and the Hole in Time, that
Nick Carraway is morally ambivalent, a hypocrite (4) who lacks faith
in humanity and . . . life itself and suffers from spiritual bankruptcy (7).
This hardly seems the description of a hero, much less the kind of guy in
whom one would entrust the moral weight of the Great American Novel.
Stallmans point is echoed by W.M. Frohock, who argues in his 1955
essay Morals, Manners, and Scott Fitzgerald that Nick is short on
moral perspective (227), but vigorously refuted by Thomas Hanzo, who
argues in The Theme and Narrator of The Great Gatsby that it is imperative to accept Nicks sensibility and intelligence as the recognizable
determinants which inform the story with its meaning (184). Indeed, for
Hanzo, even more so than for Thale, Nicks sensibility is the meaning of
the story; he concludes his essay by describing the novel as: the personal
history of a young American provincial whose moral intelligence is the
proper source of our understanding and whose career, in the passage from
innocence to revaluation, dramatizes the possibility and mode of a moral
sanction in contemporary America (190). If the stakes of this debate
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seem rather high and dramatic, perhaps that reveals the extent to which
Gatsby was becoming, by the mid-fifties, a central document in American
literature. In any case, there really is no winner to an argument like this;
instead, the divergence of views between Thale and Hanzo, on one hand,
and Stallman and Frohock on the other, points to a central fact about
this novel, one that does derive directly from Fitzgeralds decision, following the lead of Conrad-via-James, to tell the story from a first-person,
participant-observer perspective: The way one relates as a reader to Nick
Carraway as a believer, or as a skeptic will profoundly influence the
way one interprets the novel and its insights. The questions about Nicks
character, credibility, and reliability do not go away; they have kept critics
and teachers busy since this debate first surfaced in the 1950s.
If the debate about Nick Carraway provided one avenue for scholars
to take apart the novel and examine its messages and how they are conveyed, certainly another point of entry into the text for scholars of the
age in fact, the source of the most influential and canonical essays on
Gatsby from this period was the vision presented in the narrative of
America itself. Most of the major essays from the fifties approach, from
one angle or another, the nature of Fitzgeralds commentary on America
and the American dream in the novel. Published in 1952, Tom Burnams
The Eyes of Dr. Eckleburg: A Re-Examination of The Great Gatsby is
an early example of a scholarly analysis of the connection between the
American themes of the novel, particularly its social criticism, and its
formal or structural properties. Burnam argues that the novel features a
duality of symbolic structure (10) in which a primary theme regarding aspiration and disillusionment (as symbolized by the green light on
Daisys dock) runs concurrently with, and at times counter to, a subtheme concerning larger questions of chaos and social decay (as symbolized by the omniscient yet artificial billboard eyes of Dr. Eckleburg). He
compliments Fitzgerald on the structure of the book, but does so in a
curious manner, arguing that Fitzgerald may not have entirely realized
what he was doing (8) in his complex layering of symbols and themes.
(Apparently Burnam did not share Trillings view of Fitzgeralds craftsmanship and keen intellect.) At the crux of the matter, for Burnham, is
the manner in which Fitzgerald splits his perspective between his fictional
surrogate or counterpart, Nick Carraway, and his own authorial presence
in the book. Burnam, in a formalistic reading, analyzes how Fitzgerald
unwittingly creates a narrative that functions on two contrasting levels,
due to the tension between the themes associated with the narrator, Carraway concerning Gatsbys dream and downfall and those associated
with the author, Fitzgerald concerning larger questions of morality
and order. Ultimately, Burnam argues, the authors concerns take over
the narrative, and this secondary, Fitzgerald theme (8) becomes the
point toward which the novels intricate form leads:
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But F. Scott Fitzgerald is the one who introduces, I think unconsciously, a fascinating examination of certain values only peripherally related to Gatsbys rise, his dream, and his physical downfall.
And, if we turn to this other area, this non-Carraway thematic possibility, we see at once that The Great Gatsby is not, like Lord Jim,
a study of illusion and integrity, but of carelessness. Our second
theme perhaps the more important regardless of Fitzgeralds
original intention becomes a commentary on the nature and values, or lack of them, of the reckless ones. (9)
Two keys to Burnams reading are particularly worth noting. The

first is his focus on two narrative voices coexisting in the novel: Fitzgerald-as-Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald-as-Carraway, the gleeman of the Gatsby
saga, are not the same, though both appear alternately throughout the
novel, intertwining like threads in a fabric (8). In this regard, Burnams
argument seems to pick up on Walker Gibsons suggestion, made two
years earlier, that Nick is a sort of mock speaker, shadowed by another
speaker somewhere (268) in the narrative. As we shall see, Nicks function as narrator, and the Nick-Fitzgerald relationship, would remain subjects of critical scrutiny for decades to come. The second key aspect of
Burnams essay is his understanding of Fitzgerald as a moralist, and of
The Great Gatsby as a work of social criticism from an author addressing
the prospect of social decay. This is of course a marked departure from
the vision of both the author and the novel found in the criticism of the
twenties and thirties. Indeed, one of the common complaints registered
against the book in early newspaper criticism centered on the apparent
immorality of a tale filled with booze, illicit love affairs, gaudy parties,
car crashes, violence, and murder. But where some of the more genteel
early critics saw distasteful characters engaging in scandalous behavior
devoid of redeeming social value, Burnam in this essay sees the characters and events of the novel as all part of a carefully constructed work of
not only romantic lyricism, but also serious social criticism. He nods to
Lionel Trillings assertion that Jay Gatsby stands for America itself, but
diverges from Trillings focus on a larger, mythic vision of Americanness
in the novel. Burnams take is more specific, and he suggests at the close
of his essay that the target of Fitzgeralds social message is nothing less
than the moral anomie of modern life in the United States:
The cause of the horror is, in The Great Gatsby, the terrifying contrast between the Buchanans, Jordan Baker, the obscene barflies
who descend in formless swarms on Gatsbys house, all symbolized
by the gritty disorganized ash-heaps with their crumbling men, and
the solid ordered structure so paradoxically built on sand (or ashes)
which Gatsbys great dream lends to his life. And over it all brood
the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg. . . . Do not the eyes in spite of everything
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they survey, perhaps even because of it, serve both as a focus and an
undeviating base, a single point of reference in the midst of monstrous disorder? (12)8
Only a couple of months after Burnams article, Edwin Fussell published one of the major early scholarly essays on Fitzgerald. Fitzgeralds Brave New World, which appeared in December 1952, took much
further the notion of Fitzgerald as a moral critic of American culture.
Though the essay spans the breadth of Fitzgeralds career, a good portion of it is devoted to The Great Gatsby, and Fussell makes plain from his
opening sentence that that novel is the foundation for Fitzgeralds literary reputation: Ultimately, Fitzgeralds literary stature derives from his
ability to apply the sensibilities implied by the phrase romantic wonder
to American civilization, and to gain from the conjunction a moral critique of that civilization (291). Implicitly arguing for Fitzgeralds place
in the ranks of major American writers, Fussell suggests that Fitzgeralds contribution is his own twist on the American theme that had,
in one guise or another, occupied most of his great predecessors in the
national literature: Fitzgeralds story, roughly, is of the New World, or,
more exactly, of the work of the imagination in the New World. It has
two predominant patterns, quest and seduction. The quest is the search
for romantic wonder, in the terms which contemporary America offers
for such a search; the seduction represents capitulation to these terms
(291). Fussell builds on the assertions made by Troy and Trilling that
Gatsby stands as a kind of mythical symbol of the nation, alluding to the
vast back-drop of American civilization against which Gatsbys gestures
must be interpreted (295). In other words, Gatsby represents the inherent contradiction in the American dream, with its idealism seemingly
ever undercut by the irresistible lure of material success. Fussell argues,
rightly, that Gatsby shares the values of the odious Buchanans and points
out Fitzgeralds critique of his compromised dream extends outward to
the American mythos; central to this larger critique is Fitzgeralds invocation of Founding Father Benjamin Franklins famous plan for moral
perfection, which is mimicked in young Jimmy Gatzs list of General
Resolves (GG, 135), written on the back flyleaf of his boyhood copy of
Hopalong Cassidy:
Gatsby is meant to be a very representative American in the intensity
of his yearning for success, as well as in the symbols which he equates
with it. Gatsby performs contemporary variations on an old American pattern, the rags-to-riches story exalted by American legend. . . .
But the saga is primarily that of a legendary Benjamin Franklin. . . .
Grounding his parody in Franklins Autobiography gave Fitzgeralds
critique a historical density and a breadth of implication that one
associates only with major fiction. (29697)
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Floyd Watkins would second Fussells view in a 1954 essay, claiming

that Fitzgerald had specifically invoked Franklin in order to give concreteness to the historical tradition of Gatsby and to make Gatsby . . . a
personification of the national dream as it had been corrupted (252).
Marius Bewley, in his major essay of 1954, Scott Fitzgeralds Criticism of America, would go further than this, citing the novel as an
expos of the deficiencies inherent in contemporary manifestations
of the American vision itself (24546). For Bewley, Gatsbys inability
to see through the sham of the society that surrounds him makes
him representative of a people that have lost their bearings and come
to replace more elemental values (belief in the goodness of nature and
man [223]) with blind desire for material advancement. Bewley argues
that this incisive critique of the national mythology is what makes the
book an American masterpiece: The Great Gatsby offers some of the
severest and closest criticism of the American dream that our literature
affords. Read in this way, Fitzgeralds masterpiece ceases to be a pastoral
documentary of the Jazz Age and takes its distinguished place among
those great national novels whose profound corrective insights into the
nature of American experience are not separable from the artistic form
of the novel itself. . . . The theme of The Great Gatsby is the withering of
the American dream (223).
Not all critics would agree with this view. Robert Ornsteins 1956
essay, Scott Fitzgeralds Fable of East and West, is a quite direct rebuttal to the arguments made by Fussell and Bewley; in contrast to their
readings, Ornstein argues that the novel is little concerned with twentieth century materialism and moral anarchy, for its theme is the unending quest of the romantic dream, which is forever betrayed in fact and
yet redeemed in mens minds (139). Ornstein worries that interpretations like Fussells and Bewleys are too critical of America as a corrupt
society and in fact seems to see such readings as attacks on the novel,
referring to them as negative interpretations (139). Ornstein argues in
contrast that Fitzgerald, in his reversal of the mythic American east-towest journey to the frontier portrays a profound displacement of the
American dream (141) by depicting the lure of the East to his western
characters. He refutes the notion of a contrast between eastern corruption and traditional western values (made by Mizener and others), arguing instead that Jay Gatsbys eastward journey was at least a journey of
life and hope (143). That is, though his efforts may be futile, Gatsby
symbolizes, for Ornstein, the undying idealism of the American, his nave
belief in illusion still representing something vastly preferable to a hardened cynicism. Scott Fitzgeralds fable of East and West, for Ornstein,
does not lament the decline of American civilization (143). Ornsteins
argument indicates the extent to which critical discourse on Gatsby was
coming to see the novel as a commentary on the contemporary American
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experience. Other critics would continue to examine the American theme

in the novel, couching discussions of the books contemporary relevance
with analyses of its mythic overtones.
John Henry Raleigh, writing in 1957, offers one such discussion
that approaches the American themes on both realistic and mythic levels. Raleigh begins with the thesis that the novel addresses a fundamental tension in the American experience between the contrasting values of
mercantilism and idealism. At either end of American history, and all
the way through, the two impulses have a way of being both radically
exclusive and mutually confusing, the one melting into the other: the
human faculty of wonder, on the one hand, and the power and beauty of
things, on the other (55). For Raleigh, the great power of the novel lies
in its ability to dramatize the interplay of these contrasting pulls. While he
sees this tension played out throughout the novel, he focuses in particular
on what he dubs the two ecstatic moments in the novel the first,
when Gatsby gazes upon and then kisses Daisy on the sidewalk in Louisville, and the second, the closing of the novel in which Nick imagines the
Dutch sailors first laying eyes upon the fresh, green breast of the new
world (GG, 140). The two passages embody the connections between
the material and ideal worlds, as in both cases, according to Raleigh, we
see the boundless imagination trying to transfigure . . . the endlessly
beautiful object (55). By thus connecting the glamorous, materialistic
sheen of the book to larger impulses in American life, Raleigh counters
the early critique of Gatsby that it was too glossy, too of-the-moment.
Rather than a superficial novel of manners, Raleigh sees The Great Gatsby,
with its haunting enactment of a fundamental American contradiction, as
being transcendent. He echoes Maxwell Perkins, who had once written to
Fitzgerald about the novels sense of eternity, by claiming that it deals
with the permanent realities of existence (57). Ultimately, Raleigh hails
Fitzgerald for transmuting the fleeting ephemera of his day into something lasting: The genius of the novel consists precisely in the fact that,
while using only the stuff, one might better say the froth and flotsam of
its own limited time and place, it has managed to suggest, as Perkins said,
a sense of eternity (58).
Raleighs analysis suggests that The Great Gatsby functions as both
a realistic novel and a sort of mythic romance, a point taken up by other
critics of the day as well. Richard Chase, who discusses Gatsby in his 1957
book The American Novel and Its Tradition, sees the work as more than a
typically realistic novel of manners. Instead, he echoes Mizeners and Fussells reading of the mythic elements and pastoral tone of the work, arguing that the character of Gatsby is of the company of Natty Bumppo,
Huck Finn, and Melvilles Ishmael. For although he is treated with more
irony than they, as befits a later worldliness, he shares their ideal of innocence, escape, and the purely personal code of conduct. Like them he
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derives his values not from the way of the world but from an earlier pastoral ideal (165). However, Gatsby is, for Chase, unlike these characters as well, for he serves a function in a modern novel also characterized
by biting social criticism; inasmuch as he dares to make an assault on
a plutocracy that has settled into a position of power and prestige . . .
Gatsby . . . becomes what his predecessors never were: a tragicomic figure
in a social comedy (166). John Kuehl, in his 1959 essay Scott Fitzgerald: Romantic and Realist, echoes Chases take on the novel, arguing
that The Great Gatsby is not only romance. It is also a realistic study of
a nations values and their effect on an individual (415). He, too, likens the novel to Twains Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for its mythical
romantic vision of America, while also remarking on Fitzgeralds interweaving of pastoral nostalgia and cultural history, a pairing that undergirds the romance with social realism (416). Like John Aldridge, who
at the beginning of the decade had read Gatsbys story as a parody of the
Great American Success Dream (50), Kuehl concludes that his mythic
quest must also be read as social criticism: To the extent that American
concepts deceive Gatsby by making him believe that he can really buy his
way into a higher class and that this class, the rich, is superior to ordinary
humanity, the novel is the tragedy of the middle-class American under the
democratic-capitalistic system (416).
With the essays of Raleigh and Kuehl synthesizing the twin strains of
romance and realism, of mythic undertones and pointed social criticism,
two of the main areas of critique from this key decade seem fairly well
mapped out. But before departing the criticism of the fifties, it is important to note a couple other important contributions that fall outside the
parameters so far discussed. The first of these is the study of Fitzgeralds
craftsmanship and language use. The artistry of the novel would be much
explored in criticism of the coming decades, and two early works that
broke important ground, both from 1957, are W. J. Harveys Theme
and Texture in The Great Gatsby, and James E. Miller, Jr.s The Fictional
Technique of F.Scott Fitzgerald. Harvey calls attention to a matter he feels
has been neglected by critics: the extreme density of texture (13) that
results from Fitzgeralds careful, patterned use of language. In a detailed
and interesting discussion, Harvey demonstrates how Fitzgerald repeats
certain key phrases, images, and metaphors he centers his discussion
around the nautical imagery apparent from the very beginning of the
novel and the repeated mentioning of restlessness, and how both patterns come together in another repeated key-word (18) of the text,
drifting. Harvey deftly points out how this use of language and image
patterns, particularly as it relates to the protagonist, prepares the reader
for the resounding ironies of the novels close: We remember Gatsby not
as drifting but as voyaging to some end and it is this sense, hinted at all
the way through the book, which gives impetus to that imaginative leap
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53
whereby we encompass the ironic contrast between Gatsby and Columbus or those Dutch sailors (20). Harvey closes his discussion by pointing
out he has hardly exhausted the study of patterning in the book, arguing
that any one of a dozen other starting points might have been taken
(20). Those dozen, and then some, would soon be explored in the critical
essays of the sixties and seventies.
Like Harvey, Miller whose Fictional Technique has the distinction of being the first book-length critical study of Fitzgeralds writing is concerned primarily with the craft of the novel, as opposed
to thematic interpretation. His study commences from the idea that
Fitzgeralds style evolved over the course of his writing career, as he
shifted allegiances between what Miller identifies as the two contrasting indeed, competing modes of fiction prevalent at the time: the
novel of saturation, championed by H. G. Wells, and the novel of
selection, favored by Henry James. As Miller points out, Wells was a
favorite author and a model for the young Fitzgerald of This Side of
Paradise. A champion of what he called a discursive approach, Wells
envisioned the novel as a life-like panorama of a particular social scene,
often messy and crowded, like life itself. James, in contrast, favored a
selective approach to included detail and a minimum of authorial intrusion, believing that acute narrative focus leads to the greater art. Miller
sums up the contrast in a manner that reflects on the difference between
the early novel, This Side of Paradise, and the mature work, The Great
Gatsby: In the novel of saturation, irrelevance is a virtue because it
makes the novel more life-like; it lends credibility to the slice of life.
In the novel of selection, relevance is a virtue, because it emphasizes the
pointed intention or centre of interest (Technique, 9). Miller notes
that we see the clear Jamesian influence on Gatsby, with its taut narrative
constructed of carefully patterned imagery and manipulated timeframe,
all presented by a sensitive, participant-observer narrator. His detailed
discussion of the text, and particularly his analysis of the use of flashback, emphasize Fitzgeralds artistry. There is an artistic order in the
disorder (97) of the narratives shifting temporal schemes, evidence
of Fitzgeralds newfound ability, in this novel, to craft a narrative form
equal to the power of the ideas and themes contained within.9
But where Miller and Harvey found order, Stallman, in an essay
briefly mentioned earlier, finds nothing but holes, lacunae. In Gatsby
and the Hole in Time Stallman argues that just about all of the big names
who have confidently read the book as a comment on the withering of
the American dream (Troy and Bewley) or a tragic pastoral (Mizener) are
guilty of oversimplification (2). Indeed, from Stallmans perspective,
any narrowly focused reading of the novel is bound to amount to an oversimplification, since at the heart of the text, for Stallman, is an extremely
careful patterning that leads not to seamless order, but to chaos, at least
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in a temporal sense. With its constant tension between dreams of the past
and visions of the future, the novel seems to inhabit a space outside of a
knowable time-frame, an In between time (GG, 75), in the words of a
tune played in the novel:
While Gatsby woos Daisy, Ewing Klipspringer pounds out on the
keyboard the popular hits entitled The Love Nest and Aint We
Got Fun? The whole novel gets its time-theme summed up in the
words of the latter: In the mean-time/In between time . What
is defined here is a hole in time. It is this empty in-between time that
Fitzgerald renders in The Great Gatsby, that void of the corrupted
present canceled out by the corrupted past Americas as well as
Gatsbys. (34)
To say that Stallman finds an absence at the heart of the text might be
to push the terminology of his discussion some three decades into the
future, into the glory days of poststructuralist analysis, but certainly in
many ways this is the direction he is heading. Not merely the disjointed
time-scheme, but also the lack of any sort of moral authority leaves the
text decentered. As mentioned earlier, Stallman does not buy the notion
of Nick as a moral authority, and he minces no words about it:
That Nick is to be seen as the moral center of the book . . . is a
notion possible only to the duped reader who has been beguiled by
the deceptive flow of Nicks words to take them at their face-value.
At the center of the book what is there but a moral and temporal
hole? Not Nick but Time is the true moralist. Fitzgerald has contrived that first page of The Great Gatsby as a front to the whole
book. Here is Nick as arch-prig all dressed up in a morally hardboiled starched shirt of provincial squeamishness and boasted tolerance, the hypocrite! His boasted tolerance, as we come to see
through his protective mask, is in fact intolerance, and his rugged
morality but polished manners. His proposal to regiment the world
amounts to a negation of faith in humanity and of faith in life itself,
and it masks his own spiritual bankruptcy. No moral vision can radiate from Nicks closed heart. (7)
The essay is filled with energetic arguing such as this, and it features several catalogues of textual detail nearly Whitmanesque in their
breadth and ambition that amply and vibrantly explicate his points
about the hole in time, about mistaken identities and divided selfhoods,
and about the resultant moral anomie. At times Stallman overreaches; his
dismantling of Mizeners assertion that the text amounts to a tragic pastoral, wherein the western setting embodies moral virtue, succeeds in demonstrating that Fitzgerald presents not a single character to exemplify
(5) this claim, but then stretches into a larger discourse on geography in
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the novel that falls victim to its own hubris. But the essay as a whole is
vitally important to the history of the novels scholarly reception because
of its insistently questioning tone. Stallmans skewering of Nick is primarily responsible for creating a decades-long debate over the narrators credibility, and his linking of the text to the writing of German philosopher
Oswald Spengler opened another line of discussion that would persist for
decades to come. Perhaps the strongest contribution of the essay, though,
comes in one of its simplest statements. In assessing Fitzgeralds achievement in this novel, Stallman concludes that its greatest virtue lies not in
a sense of organic wholeness, but in something quite the opposite: The
moralist Fitzgerald strikes out against the fragmented morality of his age
by rendering it thus: confused and fragmentary (11).
There really could be no other essay with which to conclude the discussion of Gatsbys amazing ascent into the American literary canon in
the 1950s than Stallmans Gatsby and the Hole in Time. This is not
because the essay neatly sums up the main trends of the influential scholarship on the novel during this period; quite to the contrary, like a punch
in the gut, Stallmans essay undercuts just about everything that had been
so confidently pronounced about the book thus far. In this sense, he does
not at all sum up the work of his peers in the fifties, but he certainly anticipates the work of his colleagues in the decades to come.
Notes
1
The essays, The Crack-Up, Pasting It Together, and Handle with Care,
appeared in February, March, and April issues of Esquire, respectively, in 1936.
For a concise overview of these versions of the novel that appeared in the 1940s,
see Nicolas Tredell, F.Scott Fitzgerald (1997), 42. For a complete list of posthumously published editions of The Great Gatsby, from 1941 through the end of the
twentieth century, see Bruccoli, Reference, 25059.
Mizeners revision appeared under the title F. Scott Fitzgerald 18961940:

The Poet of Borrowed Time, in Willard Thorps collection Lives of Eighteen from
Princeton (1946) and again as the lead essay in Alfred Kazins 1951 collection
F.Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work.
See William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, originally published in 1935.
James L. W. West, III published Fitzgeralds original Trimalchio draft in 2000,

part of Cambridge University Presss Fitzgerald Edition. See West, Trimalchio.
For a fuller look at the Keatsian echoes in The Great Gatsby, consult Tristram P.
Coffins Gatsbys Fairy Lover, Dan McCalls The Self-Same Song that Found
a Path, George Monteiros James Gatz and John Keats, Joseph B. Wagners
Gatsby and John Keats, and Lauren Rule-Maxwells The New Emperors
Clothes.
Geismar originally made the point in a chapter on Theodore Dreiser in Rebels

and Ancestors (1953).
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Milton Hindus, in The Mysterious Eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, goes further

than this in his discussion of the symbolic meaning of the billboard eyes. While
Burnam seems more concerned with secular disorder, Hindus reads the eyes as
an ironic symbol of spiritual yearning. An ambivalent symbol, the eyes are both
a mockery (30) of conventional religion and also the most potent suggestion
of Gods presence in Fitzgeralds imaginary universe (30). Hindus believes that
Fitzgerald uses this symbol to communicate to us his innermost belief that man
may not be alone in an empty, nihilistic universe but that, however absurd the
hypothesis may be at first glance, his actions are under continual critical scrutiny
from above (31).
Millers thesis about Fitzgeralds conversion to a Jamesian method has not been
universally accepted. Robert Roulston, in his 1980 essay Traces of Tono-Bungay
in The Great Gatsby, humorously characterizes Millers approach to Fitzgeralds
influences as a literary morality play in which the fledgling author had to discard
the artistic vices he had acquired from Wells . . . in order to achieve the Jamesian compactness, allusiveness, stylistic polish and moral perspicacity of The Great
Gatsby (68). Roulston, by contrast, sees numerous parallels to Wellss 1909 novel
in terms of both theme and narrative perspective.
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3: The Gatsby Industry: Tracing Patterns

and Pushing Boundaries in the
Criticism of the Sixties and Seventies
Pattern and Perspective:
The Focus on Form Intensifies
S WE HAVE SEEN,
during the span of time from F. Scott Fitzgeralds

death to the end of the 1950s, The Great Gatsby went from being
a largely forgotten novel one remembered, if at all, as a period piece
of the Roaring Twenties to an established classic of American literature. Following the popular revival of interest in Fitzgeralds life and writings, the scholarly revival led to the firm entrenchment of Gatsby in the
national canon. Discussion and debate over the novel in the literary journals had taken, by the end of the decade, a fairly predictable shape, with
most critical attention divided between issues regarding narrative perspective and form, source and influence studies, and analyses of the symbolic,
thematic, and mythic resonances of the book. Though an essay like Stallmans Gatsby and the Hole in Time threatened to upset the apple cart,
for the most part the terms of discussion were stable and well established
at this point. The early part of the 1960s saw further exploration of several of these issues: The debate about Nick Carraways function, reliability, and character would continue unabated; a number of essays would
push the discussion of symbolic patterning in the novel in interesting new
directions; and hypotheses about Fitzgeralds literary influences would
remain a mainstay. A series of book-length studies of Fitzgeralds work
would appear over the course of the decade of the sixties, further cementing his place in the canon.
With the political turmoil and civil rights struggles of the later sixties and seventies, interesting things started to happen in the world of
Gatsby criticism. Long understood by this point as a novel that reflected
the American experience, The Great Gatsby would, with the changing
times, come to be analyzed from a whole new range of approaches and
perspectives. Scholars writing in an age of civil unrest found new corollaries to modern unease in the novels political subtext; critics examined
the racial, ethnic, and sexual politics of the novel in ways that had been
entirely unaddressed in criticism of the previous generation; feminist
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critics scrutinized the gender dynamics of the narrative, in the process

calling into questions tacit assumptions concerning character and theme
made by previous scholars; and other scholars approached the novel
from a religious perspective, looking deeper into the spiritual subtext
and Catholic imagery of the novel. Moving from familiar beginnings
into entirely new territories, the criticism of the sixties and seventies
pushed the discussion forward while continuing to demonstrate the literary and social relevance of the book. Meanwhile, a third film version
was released to an eager viewing public in 1974, fueling yet another
popular revival of interest in the novel. Over the span of this period, as
the book gained in both popular and scholarly resonance, and as critical
approaches began to open out in manifold new directions, it began to
appear, as Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli would put it a few years
later, in 1985, that the books ability to provoke discourse and interpretation was, indeed, inexhaustible (New Essays, 12).
At the outset of this major period in Gatsby criticism, it seems that the
pioneering work of the 1950s had laid the groundwork for more specific
formal examinations of the rich patterning that makes the book such an
artistic achievement. In a sense, critics must have felt free to take on this
level of explication as there no longer seemed to be a need for evaluative work on the novel; as Nicolas Tredell points out, by the outset of
the 1960s, general consensus on the stature of The Great Gatsby created a climate in which particular aspects of the novel could receive a
fuller examination, without the need to make a more general case for its
achievement (74). If, indeed, the book was now more or less secure as
a classic of American literature, then the time was right to develop the
thematic discussions laid out in the 1950s with more intense readings
of patterns in symbolism, imagery, setting, characterization, and narrative
structure. Fitzgerald himself had said of the novel, in a letter to Maxwell Perkins from July of 1922, when he was just starting to work on it,
that the book would be something new something extraordinary and
beautiful and simple + intricately patterned (in Bruccoli, Reference, 53).
That he succeeded in his efforts to make the book intricately patterned
can be seen in any number of critical essays to emerge in the 1960s. Following the precepts of the New Critical model, with its emphasis on
close reading of the literary text, as well as the influence of Canadian
literary critic Northrop Frye, who argued for the importance of studying
formal patterning within literary works and connecting these to the larger
literary archetypes from which they spring, critics of the age began a spirited dissection of The Great Gatsby. Far more than mere exercises in symbol hunting, the best of these formalist explorations of the intricate
pattern of The Great Gatsby are insightful in allowing readers to trace
deeper structures of meaning in the work, while also boasting the added
side benefit of being immensely enjoyable to read.
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59
This trend toward closer looks at the patterning of the novel can
be seen in the first major Gatsby essay of the decade, J. S. Westbrooks
Nature and Optics in The Great Gatsby (1960). Westbrook identifies
the two key patterns of the novel as having to do with problems of seeing
and with the idea of nature; these two patterns are thematically interlocking, and together they amount to a hallucinatory order of nature (83)
that is at the core of the novels meaning. Westbrook argues that Nick
Carraways experiences in the East amount to an ocular initiation into
the mysteries and wonders of a magical country (79); he traces a series
of images Nick takes in that seem distorted nearly to the point of hallucination. Against this code of visual distortion is the famous symbol of Dr.
Eckleburgs eyes, which for Westbrook are the novels clearest image of a
sense of distorted vision (82). The most consistently distorted images
in the novel are natural ones: In contrast to Mizeners famous description
of the book as a pastoral elegy, Westbrook calls our attention to a tone
more hallucinatory than elegiac, characterized by continual references to
violated nature (81) that help to define the novel. Citing such details as
the great bursts of leaves that grow on the trees of West Egg as things
grow in fast movies (GG, 7), the piles of crushed flowers and fruit
rinds that litter Gatsbys garden paths after his parties, and the all sorts
of funny fruits (97) that Jordan Baker expects to fall from the skies of
New York, Westbrook concludes, The profusion of horticultural effects
becomes, at last, oppressive. There is an overripeness, an unnatural plenitude in this new Eden (81).
The garish, overripe vision of nature in the novel is, Westbrook
argues, reflective of a society that has not so much renounced nature
as they have failed to perceive its limits (80). The conflict between a
materialism that would supersede natural limits and a natural world that
refuses in the end to be fully silenced is what, for Westbrook, gives the
close of the novel its singular force:
But in fleeting intervals throughout the story we are confronted with
unadulterated nature. They happen late at night when the lights of
the houses have gone out. The moon survives the glow of Gatsbys
parties, the stars wheel in their courses; on the night that Carroway
[sic] descries Gatsby genuflecting to the light on Daisys dock, the
bellows of the earth have blown the frogs full of life, and there is a
sound of wings beating in the trees. At such intervals the intensity
of natures own utterances is a little eerie and inexplicable, like the
crashing of surf on a deserted beach. These are adumbrations of the
forgotten, the unknown island, which can now be summoned in
its fullness only in visions. Carroways [sic] vision of it, like a buried
theme in music, struggles for articulation from the early pages of the
novel to the moment near its terminus, with Gatsby dead and the
houses in West Egg shut up, when it emerges in the famous ode
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to a buried fertility, the green breast of the new world that greeted
Dutch sailors eyes. (83)
Westbrooks assertion that a key to the novel is its lament for an irrecoverable (83) natural world in the age of modernity and mechanization makes his analysis less a contrast to Mizeners pastoral elegy than a
variation on it. And there would be continued work on this thematic and
symbolic pattern in the novel in the coming years.
M. Bettina in 1963, argues that throughout The Great Gatsby,
Fitzgerald uses an image pattern in which natural imagery is paired with
the artificial; through this pattern, Fitzgerald touches nature herself with
artificiality, and in the comparison she takes on freshness (140). This
contrived, artificial freshness of nature, for Bettina, points toward the
books higher meaning (140), centering on the essential aloneness of the
characters, the distance between them and nature and God (141).
Kenneth Eble, in his 1963 book F.Scott Fitzgerald, also looks at the
sense of a lost pastoral dream, approaching the point from a social and
historical context. Looking into the symbolic geography of the novel, its
counterpoising of eastern and western locales, Eble builds on the work of
Robert Ornstein, while suggesting a broader comment on an American
preoccupation at the time of the novels composition: The loss of a rural
paradise haunts many writers of early twentieth-century America, Eble
claims. Fitzgeralds attitude makes The Great Gatsby almost a fictional
counterpart of Frederick Jackson Turners The Frontier in American History. Being deprived of that edge of the frontier against which energies,
ambitions, ideals, can be freshly honed, the American character must
undergo change (Fitzgerald, 9697). Eble points out that both Carraway and Gatsby seem ill equipped for life in an America of the postfrontier age. If, as Turner had claimed in his famous frontier hypothesis, the
western frontier had been a central symbol to the American philosophy of
rebirth and renewal, then its closure, at the end of the nineteenth century,
signaled an end to an innocent conception of limitless possibility inherent
in American life. For Eble, both Gatsby and Nick are duped by the myth
of the second chance (97). David Trask, in his brief, excellent Note on
Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby, would second this point, arguing that the
novel is haunted by the death of the Jeffersonian agrarian myth. In a deft
reading, Trask points to the much-studied oculist, T. J. Eckleburg, as a
symbol (initials and all!) of none other than a devitalized Thomas Jefferson, the preeminent purveyor of the agrarian myth (200). Trask discusses the surreal, polluted imagery of the Queens landscape over which
Eckleburgs eyes preside, that fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat
into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens (GG, 21), and convincingly
identifies it as a remarkably evocative description of the corruption that
had befallen Jeffersons garden (Trask, 200). Similarly, Charles Thomas
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61
Samuels, in The Greatness of Gatsby, (1966) argues that the central

theme of the novel is the wasting away of America as it grows from wilderness to civilization (793).
Leo Marx, in his highly influential 1964 work The Machine in the
Garden, also discusses Gatsby as a book that centers on the loss of connection to the natural world in the modern age. Marxs central thesis
concerns a recurring thematic focus of American writers, the depiction of a pastoral landscape irrevocably changed by modernization and
mechanization, the intrusion of the machine into the garden. In
an epilogue to the book, which otherwise focuses primarily on writing
from the nineteenth century, Marx examines the ways in which Fitzgerald explores the theme in a twentieth-century context in Gatsby. He,
too, sees patterns of artificiality in the natural settings, from the synthetic and delusive (357) lawns of Long Island to the hideous, manmade wilderness (358) of the valley of ashes. The irony of Gatsbys
pastoral desire to transcend and reverse time lies in the fact that he is so
fully immersed in the mechanized workings of progress; it is his outrageous car, after all, that brutally extinguishes Myrtles life in the valley
of ashes (it is the machine in the garden). Marx ultimately argues that
the distinction between Gatsbys muddled, unreflective pastoral idealism and Nicks critical consciousness of his own attraction to images
of pastoral felicity amounts to the distinction between sentimental
and complex pastoralism (362). That is, Nick understands the futility
of being drawn to an Edenic past in a way that Gatsby simply cannot.
Nowhere is this clearer than in one of the books most famous passages,
when Nick, after hearing Gatsbys plan to bring Daisy back to Louisville
and be married from her house just as if it were five years ago (GG,
86), tries to explain just this point:
I wouldnt ask too much of her, I ventured. You cant repeat the
past.
Cant repeat the past? he cried incredulously. Why of course
you can!
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in
the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
Im going to fix everything just the way it was before, he said,
nodding determinedly. Shell see. (86)
Given his more complex (or at least more realistic) understanding of the
workings of time and place, Nicks return to the West at novels close is,
for Marx, to be read less as a return to a landscape of virtue (as Mizener
and others would have it) than as a relatively futile retreat from the inexorable forces of modernity: Nicks repudiation of the East is a belated,
ritualistic withdrawal in the direction of nature. It is ironically set against
the fact, which the entire novel makes plain, that the old distinction
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between East and West has all but disappeared. Nicks final gesture is a
mere salute to the memory of a vanished America (364).
Perhaps the fullest exploration of the pastoral mode in The Great
Gatsby can be found in David Stoucks 1971 essay White Sheep on Fifth
Avenue. Stouck begins by establishing a pastoral pattern in the narrative,
recounting a number of passages notable not only for rural imagery, but
also for glimpses . . . of an innocent, childish view of the world (335).
For Stouck, the childlike pastoral imagery reveals, in both the narrator
and the tale, a deep-seated yearning for the recovery of lost innocence
(336). Taking further the long-established notion of Nick Carraways
identification with Gatsby and his dream, Stouck argues that the two
characters are scarcely distinguishable from one another and that they
share in a parallel process of growing awareness and inevitable disillusionment (336). As Marx had also argued, Stouck believes it is Nicks
more complex and ironic mode of awareness that allows him to survive
his disillusionment. The most significant contribution of this essay is the
manner in which it pairs careful close reading for example, Stouck convincingly links Daisy, through her repeated connections with white and
green colors, to an ideal of innocent pastoral love to larger statements
about how the novel resonates with a certain strain of American idealism. The American imagination has been essentially pastoral, Stouck
argues, and as such has been preoccupied with the arresting of time and
the possibility of going back (340) to a mythic or Edenic natural past.
Through the perspective of his narrator, Fitzgerald is able to capture both
the lure of this dream and an ironic understanding of its limits.
These essays tracing patterns of natural and pastoral imagery comprise one of several strains of patterns elucidated by critics throughout
the sixties and early seventies. Certainly one of the most important articles in this vein is Victor Doynos 1966 Patterns in the Great Gatsby.
Through his study of various drafts of the novel, from the holograph pencil version to the galley proofs and revisions, Doyno stresses the conscious
artistry that produced the intricate design being explicated by so many
of his fellow critics, noting that the patterns which appear in the final
text are often the result of laborious revisions (95). Doynos approach
and conclusions build off of similar work done by Kenneth Eble in his
1964 essay, The Craft of Revision: The Great Gatsby. Like Doyno, Eble
found through comparisons of first draft and revisions that few of the
pages (325) of the book are free of revision.1 Doynos essay could also
be thought of as continuing the work done in the late 1950s by W. J.
Harvey and James E. Miller, Jr., and existing also in a line with Robert
Emmett Longs later work, The Achieving of the Great Gatsby, in that all
are genetic critical works focusing directly on Fitzgeralds craftsmanship in composing the novel through a series of drafts. Doyno looks at
less-studied patterns in the book intentional repetitions in characters
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63
phrasing, repeated physical gestures and positioning of couples, even correspondences between descriptions of different kisses and demonstrates,
convincingly, how Fitzgerald uses such patterns to guide the reader toward
particular interpretations and impressions of characters and events. In a
broader sense, he also examines the larger units of the narrative (focusing acutely on the codas one finds at the ends of chapters, for example),
showing how Fitzgeralds revisions on this larger, structural level worked to
heighten dramatic effect and underscore dominant themes.
Like Doyno, James Mellard, in Counterpoint as Technique in The
Great Gatsby, goes at the issue of patterning in the novel from a standpoint of narrative technique, emphasizing how the author creates order
through contrast. He examines Fitzgeralds sustained use of counterpoint, or the playing off of one character, setting, or item against another
as a means to bring out, by contrast, the essences of both. Mellard refers
to counterpoint as the major technical device (853) of the novel and
discusses how Fitzgerald uses the technique as a key to characterization,
treatment of physical setting, and narrative structure itself. He examines
how the technique plays out with paired characters, like Gatsby and Tom,
on one hand, and Myrtle and Daisy on the other, and he also examines
contrapuntal settings such as the repeated contrasts, on both micro and
macro levels, of east and west settings, picking up on a point discussed
previously by Ornstein and others.2 Where Mellard breaks new ground,
and prefigures some critical work that would come into vogue much later,
in the 1990s, is in his discussion of contrapuntal narrative structure. He
invokes Northrop Fryes notion of modal counterpoint in narrative,
the sense evident in some works of a juxtaposition of contrasting modes
(as in the case of the tragicomic novel) and applies this to Fitzgeralds
treatment in Gatsby of the theme of American innocence.
Using R. W. B. Lewiss famous work The American Adam as his
framework, Mellard suggests that the novel offers two counterpoised
visions of the Adamic journey, and this counterpoint is what creates the
enduring achievement of the novel: its paradoxical treatment of America
as an Edenic paradise. For Mellard, both Gatsby and Nick represent variations on the figure Lewis identifies as a common hero in American literature. An outsider, free of connections to family, traditions, and social
confines, the American Adam is an innocent who is forever changed,
perhaps destroyed, by his entrance into and experiences in society.3 Mellard argues that Gatsby represents one version of this hero, the Christlike Adamic figure who suffers and is sacrificed for his innocent idealism,
while Nick represents the contrasting Adamic figure, whose story is one
of fall, redemption, and resultant wisdom. Their contrasting embodiments of a common archetypal figure help to create the interplay in the
narrative between a mode of doomed idealism and one of wry commentary and judgment. Mellards method of looking at contrasting narrative
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modes offers, I would suggest, an answer to that vexing question of just

what exactly Fitzgerald is saying about the American dream and American
innocence or idealism in the book. If we pay attention to the continual
play of counterpoint in the narrative, we ought to see, along with Mellard, that there is no fixed answer to such a question: Fitzgeralds theme
is a paradoxical combination of two counterpointed attitudes toward the
American Dream. . . . Consequently, the final major problem in the novel
seems to involve the resolution of these antithetical themes. But there is
no real need to achieve a synthesis, for one theme is just as valid as the
other (859). In other words, the seeming ambivalence at the heart of the
book, long thought by many to be a puzzle to be resolved, is, for Mellard, instead a carefully constructed and patterned dual vision, itself perhaps the greatest strength of the work and source of its undying appeal.
In addition to the work on patterning in imagery and on the level
of narrative structure, any number of critics in the sixties and seventies
penned essays that identified and explicated patterns of symbolism in the
novel. The range of patterned material ripe for explication is impressive
in its own right, and this period saw a burst of new approaches. Though
too numerous to cover here with any sufficiency, the range of approaches
is suggested by a quick look at some notable entrants in this field. Robert F. McDonnells appetizingly entitled 1961 essay, Eggs and Eyes in
The Great Gatsby, examines the convergence of ocular imagery with the
description of the twin peninsulas of East and West Egg, arguing that the
relationship connotes the gaze of the omniscient, all-encompassing, and
largely disinterested God who oversees the folly (36) of the society
depicted. Daniel Schneider, in his 1964 Color Symbolism in The Great
Gatsby, provides through careful, close readings of color-symbols
and their complex operation in rendering . . . the central conflict of the
work (13) material for generations of future undergraduates seeking to make sense of Gatsbys blue lawn, yellow cocktail music, and
gorgeous pink rag of a suit.4 Arthur Mizener, in a 1965 essay, points
out that houses in the novel are much richer in meaning than the books
more obvious symbols (F.Scott, 186), and he explains how the fakery
or emptiness behind the Gatsby and Buchanan houses marks the worlds
of both West and East Egg as morally and imaginatively infantile (189).
And Laurence MacPhee, in his clever 1972 essay The Great Gatsbys
Romance of Motoring, looks at the portrayal of automobiles in the
novel, arguing that Fitzgerald uses cars as part of a pattern of images
embodying the disorder of the Twenties and, particularly, the chaotic
lives of the central characters (207). Even in essays like MacPhees that
rightly emphasize an atmosphere of disorder in the novel, what these
essays on image and symbol patterns share in common with one another,
and with much of the critical work of the middle to late fifties, is a desire
to confer a sense of order on the novel itself; that is, the teleological aim
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of much of this critical work is the presentation of a complex, highly patterned, unified whole.
We see such an impulse at work in Bruce Starks excellent 1974 essay,
The Intricate Pattern in The Great Gatsby. In this work, Stark moves
from a highly specific discussion of reverberating image patterns to a
larger statement about the nature of signification in this novel. In a compelling analysis, Stark discusses the parallels between female characters,
noting how both Myrtle and Daisy are bound to Tom Buchanan like
expensive pets (54). He demonstrates this point through a close reading of what might otherwise seem minor symbolism. For Stark, the dog
collar Tom buys for Myrtle functions symbolically in the same way as the
string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars (GG,
60) that he gives to Daisy the day before their wedding. What . . . this
indicates is that Myrtle is Toms bitch; it also suggests that Daisy, who
puts Toms string of pearls around her neck and is kept by a wealth that
imprisons as well as preserves, is his expensive, well-bred house pet
(53). Similarly, he links Daisy Fay to Ella Kaye, the betrayer of Dan Cody,
through the phonological equivalences (58) of these characters names.
In this argument, Ella Kaye rises from the status of minor character in a
side story to a crucial foreshadowing of Gatsbys downfall at the hands of
Daisy. Stark analyzes several more specific examples of such reverberating signification throughout the novel, but it is in the larger point, with
which he closes the essay, that we get a compelling statement concerning
what all of this pattern-tracing criticism leads us to; the patterned images
and characters, Stark argues,
are not just empty signs that refer to external meanings, nor merely
pleasing verbal ornaments, they are elements in an extremely complex and unified system of internal, nonreferential meanings. As
such, the novels words are concrete exemplifications of Northrop
Fryes assumption that a poems meaning is literally its pattern
or integrity as a verbal structure. Its words cannot be separated
and attached to sign-values: all possible sign-values of a word are
absorbed into a complexity of verbal relations.5 When this absorption is as completely realized as it is in The Great Gatsby, the result is
a unique verbal artifact whose words resonate with one another in an
ever-widening circle of internal signification. It is this multiple use of
a few elements that makes The Great Gatsby, like a successful poem,
at once simple and yet complex, and it is this complex simplicity,
this meaning that is in the books web of words, that makes it extraordinary and beautiful and simple. (59)
The keywords here are: complexity, unity, and internal signification. As

opposed to more socially and politically oriented criticism that would
become more prominent in the later sixties and seventies, critics of this
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time were, by and large, following New Critical and Archetypal approaches
to analyzing The Great Gatsby, seeing the text (to borrow a phrase from
the famous New Critic W.K. Wimsatt) as a verbal icon a complex
and intricately crafted prose poem whose meanings could be deduced by
tracing the internal patterns of signification.
If the quest to identify pattern, form, and completeness was a common thread of criticism from the early and middle sixties, particularly as
this form and pattern related to the books American themes, it was not
the only noticeable strain in critical discourse on Gatsby at the time. At
the same time, others were looking beyond the American themes, and
looking at the questing tone of the work from universal and spiritual
angles. British critic A. E. Dysons gracefully written 1961 essay, The
Great Gatsby: Thirty-Six Years After, affirms the tragic vision of the novel
while stepping outside of the strictly American context explored by previous critics. Arguing that the book represents themes even bigger than
the demythologizing of the American Myth (113), instead capturing
something of the tragic predicament of humanity as a whole (112),
Dyson examines the Carraway-Gatsby relationship in an effort to account
for the novels haunting tragic vision. For Dyson, the valley of ashes setting, itself symbolic of the human situation in an age of chaos (113), is
central to understanding the terms of Gatsbys tragedy. We see in Dysons
reading a hint of the exploration of Christian themes that would appear
in criticism of the coming years. He refers to the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg as
a haunting symbol of the deus absconditus, an image whose emptiness
as a religious symbol precludes the possibility of judging the ash-gray
men against traditional religious norms (113). In 1964, Dale Randall
seconded this point, referring to Eckleburgs eyes as an inverted symbol,
more suggestive of absence than presence, a sign of what is no longer
viable and no longer available spiritually (56).
In Dysons view, the self-fashioned Jay Gatsby, the apotheosis of his
society (117), serves as a fitting symbol of a post-spiritual age, one who
must rely on his faith, a profound belief in himself and his illusions
(117), as the only sufficient counterbalance to the cynicism and hypocrisy of the world he inhabits. Dysons use of the term faith, which he
places in quotation marks, suggests the novels underlying tone of spiritual questing, while also emphasizing the characters essential aloneness.
For Dyson, Carraways eventual tribute to Gatsby, epitomized by the last
words he calls out to Gatsby, Theyre a rotten crowd. . . . Youre worth
the whole damn bunch put together (GG, 120), reveals Nicks growth,
his development of genuine human warmth and pity (123), which is
what paves the way for his visionary conclusion to the book, in which he
realizes a universal tragic vision (123).
Henry Dan Piper took up the question of faith and its role in The
Great Gatsby in his essay The Untrimmed Christmas Tree, which was
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first published in Frederick Hoffmans 1962 reference book The Great

Gatsby: A Study and later appeared, in expanded form, as a chapter in
Pipers 1965 work, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait. Piper traces
the religious element of the novel back to the 1924 short story Absolution, which Fitzgerald had mentioned to Perkins was originally intended
as a prologue of the novel (in Piper, Untrimmed, 323). In Absolution, the ten-year-old protagonist, Rudolph Miller, experiences an awakening regarding his relationship to the church; though he is initially torn
between a cavalier disregard for the churchs moral strictures and occasional bouts of guilt and compulsions to repent, his moral quandary is
unconventionally resolved due to his encounters with Father Schwartz,
the parish priest who longs for the secular life, which he sees as a world
redolent with sensual pleasures and shimmering beauty. Rudolph, who
has created in his mind a dashing, imaginary alter-ego by the name of
Blatchford Sarnemington (a figure unfettered by Rudolphs own sense
of conscience), decides in the end to be more like his imagined identity.
The rather unexpected advice of the priest, who rhapsodizes about the
image of the amusement park and its Ferris wheel as a symbol of the glittering things of life, in effect pushes Rudolph away from the church.
Despite his horror at the priests odd discourse, he resolves at storys end
to embrace the secular: All this talking seemed particularly strange and
awful to Rudolph, because this man was a priest. . . . But underneath his
terror he felt his own inner convictions were confirmed. There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God
(Absolution, 271). With its complex and unconventional treatment of
Catholicism and its glowing imagery, there is little doubt that Absolution is one of Fitzgeralds strongest stories. At the same time, one can
rightly ask what all of the above has to do with interpreting Gatsby.
This is where the waters get a little muddy. Though Fitzgerald originally conceived the story as background for the protagonist of the novel
that would become The Great Gatsby, he ultimately decided against this
move, cutting the material because, as he noted in a letter, I preferred to
preserve the sense of mystery (in Piper, Untrimmed, 324) about the
protagonist, Gatsby. Nonetheless, Piper and other critics who have written about the religious aspect of Gatsby consider Absolution to provide
material relevant to the novel. Indeed, Piper sees a discussion of Absolution not only as fair game, but as required territory: Any attempt
to come to terms with The Great Gatsby . . . cannot afford to overlook
its relationship to Absolution. The short story is especially important
because it makes explicit the religious considerations that served its author
as the basis for the moral judgments that he made so conspicuously in
its sequel, The Great Gatsby (324). The point is arguable, as should be
evident by Pipers description of Gatsby as a sequel to Absolution.
Given Fitzgeralds decision to separate the two works, treating Jay Gatsby
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as the grown-up version of Rudolph Miller as Piper does is, despite

their numerous similarities, problematic at best. Similarly, there is the
potential problem of larger themes becoming conflated in the two distinct works; Pipers analysis of the novel treads lightly on religious motifs
in the book itself, instead deflecting questions of religion and spirituality back to Absolution. He argues that Rudolph Miller is irretrievably
damned (328) by his decision to turn his back on the church, and that
this damnation plays out in the fate of Jay Gatsby in the novel. As for an
explicit religious framework, Piper notes that unlike Absolution, The
Great Gatsby does not express directly a conventional Christian viewpoint,
instead offering the residual tradition of moral values . . . without the
sectarian dogma (333).
A decade and a half later, Joan Allen, in Candles and Carnival Lights:
The Catholic Sensibility of F.Scott Fitzgerald (1978), would make a similar
argument, deepening the connections between Absolution and Gatsby,
and seeing Jay Gatsby as a grown-up and gone-wrong Rudolph Miller:
With the innocence and wonder that had made his Catholic indoctrination so effective, Gatsby commits himself to the false values of materialism
and adapts the residual symbolism of his faith and ritualistic habit of spirit
to his new religion. He becomes a celebrant-priest dedicated to the ritualized acquisition of wealth and the futile pursuit of an idealized City of
Man (102). Of course such an interpretation suffers from the imposition
on the character of a Catholic indoctrination not even mentioned in the
novel (Allen brings it in from Absolution, instead); nonetheless, this
notion of a latent conflict between the material and spiritual playing out
in Gatsbys misdirected idealism is a provocative one that runs through
other spiritually minded Fitzgerald criticism as well. Giles Gunn argues
similarly that Gatsby seems a grotesque parody of some high priest or
shaman who is continually dispensing holy waters, consecrated food, and
other elements of the sanctified life to whatever aspirants he can gather
around him (174); he reads this parodic treatment as a key to Fitzgeralds commentary on American spiritual emptiness and its replacement of
the original theocratic impulse to found a City upon a Hill to the greater
glory of God (179) with the worship of material success as seen in the
City of Man. Indeed, several commentators have noted Christ-like attributes in Jay Gatsby that serve to heighten Fitzgeralds ironic commentary
on a spiritual void in contemporary America. Allen notes that ironic parallels between the figures of Christ and Gatsby are unmistakable (109),
while Bernard Tanner reads the entire novel as a jazz-like parody of the
life of Christ . . . in a minor, sardonic key (467).
If Gatsby does, in some sense, resemble a Christ-like figure (David
Trask even asks whether Fitzgerald, with his fascination with names, was
rendering the literal Jesus, Gods boy in the name of Jay Gatsby [198]),
it is still necessary to account for the significance of the resemblance. While
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several critics see the connection in ironic terms, James Gindin reads
Fitzgeralds moral message in a contrasting light. Arguing that Gatsby is
Fitzgeralds tightest novel from a theological perspective (73), he sees
the central conflict surrounding Jay Gatsby as part of a moral fable that
comments not only on the paradox of the American dream, but indeed
on the nature of man and of original sin. For Gindin, the romantic hero
who would play God (64) by transcending normal human bounds
through the sheer force of his will and ambition is, in Fitzgeralds world,
necessarily defeated. In contrast to some of the arguments about spiritual
absence in the novel, Gindin argues that The Great Gatsby presents a traditional vision of Gods and fathers: Where there is a direct, unbroken
line between father and son (spiritually and in a familial sense), moral values are passed on. As Gindin notes, Nick has this connection to his father,
whereas Gatsby, though he may imagine himself a son of God, lacks a
connection to a guiding father. Thomas J. Stavola seconded this point in
1979, arguing that Nick Carraway possesses a fundamental moral heritage (132) that allows him to escape the destruction that awaits Gatsby,
and the moral bankruptcy that characterizes the misguided lives of most
of the other characters. Though the generosity of Gatsbys romanticism
and his belief in the goodness of others is, for Stavola, a good example
of the Christian view of mans imperfect nature (130), Gatsbys misdirected application of these beliefs, in the secular world, is what brings
his demise. The novels comment on Gatsbys fate is what makes it, for
Stavola and like-minded critics, a religious work, a moral fable (125).
Imagery of Disorder: The Plot

Thickens in Gatsby Criticism
To this point we have focused in on the criticism of the period that sought
to identify the formal patterning in The Great Gatsby as well as analyses
of the books spiritual/religious overtones. Both of these critical strains
might be said to continue, in their own ways, the impulse of much of the
criticism from the 1950s in deducing an overarching sense of wholeness
and unity in the work. To these interpretations we should also add the
observations put forth in several books on Fitzgeralds writing that came
out in the period. In addition to the works already mentioned by Piper
and Eble, Sergio Perosas The Art of F.Scott Fitzgerald (1965), Richard
Lehans F.Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction (1966), Robert Sklars
F.Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocon (1967), and Milton Hinduss F.Scott
Fitzgerald: An Introduction and Interpretation (1968) each featured substantial chapters on Gatsby that assessed the books themes and craftsmanship. Eble, as noted earlier, is notable for his study of the Fitzgeralds
craftsmanship and revisions; another contribution of Ebles chapter on
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Gatsby is the connection he makes to previous Fitzgerald works. While

other critics had to this point been primarily interested in showing how
Conrad and other writers had been influential in shaping Fitzgeralds
mature approach in Gatsby (and Eble dutifully notes the Conrad influence), here we also see a discussion, if only a brief one, of how Fitzgerald himself had been working toward the themes and ideas of his great
novel in previous short stories. Eble astutely singles out not only Winter Dreams (1922), a clear precursor to Gatsby from which Fitzgerald
had directly taken some material and Absolution, which by Fitzgeralds
own accord was originally meant to be an introduction to the novel, but
also the less famous stories John Jacksons Arcady (1924) and The
Sensible Thing (1924), which prefigure both the romantic disillusionment theme of Gatsby as well as the novels preoccupation with the passage of time and its effect on romance. As we shall see, the work of later
critics to establish thematic and stylistic connections to earlier stories picks
up on the threads identified by Eble here.
Like Eble, Perosa traces developmental steps for Fitzgerald, looking at precursor stories to Gatsby. He also singles out Winter Dreams
and The Sensible Thing as attempts to come to terms with the new
material that Fitzgerald was to utilize in the novel. They are, in a way,
preliminary studies or tentative sketches (58). Perosa explains how both
of these stories introduce the juxtaposition of a youthful, idealized sentimental romance against the story of a protagonists rise to material wealth
(though he is a bit dismissive of Winter Dreams, one of Fitzgeralds
great stories). In his brief discussion of Absolution, Perosa steers clear
of the assumption made by Piper that the story is a sort of missing chapter
to Gatsby, and instead draws attention to a technical connection between
story and novel. Noting the storys flashback mode of narration and its
patterned symbolism, Perosa claims that in Absolution we can find all
the premises for the technical and stylistic maturity of the novel (60). As
for the outside influences on that stylistic maturity, Perosa invokes the
familiar figure of Conrad, but also draws more direct attention to Henry
James than had been common to this point. For Perosa, Gatsby, with its
use of foreshortening and its structure based around a series of dramatic scenes, reveals the influence of James to be of paramount importance (76). This connection to James would be echoed by other critics.
John Randall suggested Gatsbys indebtedness to Daisy Miller (581),
while Kermit Vanderbilt draws parallels between James and Fitzgerald as
moral critics of their respective American scenes. Arguing that Fitzgerald, through Gatsby, delineated the developing national character since
James (302), Vanderbilt goes beyond technical comparisons and puts
Gatsby, with its developed moral allegor[y] of American experience
(290), in the American high romantic tradition (294), alongside James,
Hawthorne, and Poe. James E. Miller, Jr., in his 1975 essay Fitzgeralds
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Gatsby: The World as Ash Heap, would further cement the Jamesian
connection, arguing that Fitzgeralds ability to convey what James called
the deeper psychology is evident in his use, la James, of dramatized
relationships among people and through the use of powerfully charged
concrete images (184).
Other critics working on influences found some new territory in the
traditions of satire and social realism. Michael Millgate, in a 1962 essay,
links Gatsby and Edith Whartons The Custom of the Country, arguing that
Fitzgerald, as a social novelist, is much closer to Edith Wharton than
to any of his predecessors or contemporaries (339), while Steven Curry
and Peter L. Hays draw parallels between Gatsby and Thackerays Vanity Fair in narrative techniques, character types, and settings. Still, the
winner of the influence sweepstakes remained Conrad. By the time of
the appearance of Gary Scrimgeours 1966 Criticism essay Against The
Great Gatsby, the connections between Conrad and Fitzgerald, and particularly the similar roles of Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, and Carraway,
in The Great Gatsby, were well rehearsed. Nonetheless, Scrimgeour adds
to the discussion by using the comparison to argue against the greatness
of Fitzgeralds achievement by pointing out how much better Conrad
could think and write (70). Scrimgeour praises Conrad for crafting a
narrator who both tells the story and, through his involvement, gives it
its depth; though the situation of Carraway is the same as that of Marlow, Scrimgeour nonetheless believes that Fitzgerald did not realize
the dual nature of his narrator and therefore handled him very clumsily
(71). Scrimgeours argument is worth considering in some detail, because
his interpretation of Nicks dual nature not only leads us back into the
perpetual debate first opened by Stallman in 1955 about Nicks credibility
as narrator, but also points toward larger questions of authority and representation in the book that open out into some of the more politically
oriented criticism of the 1970s.
The basis of this argument that Fitzgerald really had little control
over his own craft, even in his best novel would have felt right at home
in the criticism of Fitzgeralds own age; that such an argument was, by
the middle sixties, a maverick stance taken against an established American classic, reveals just how far Gatsby and Fitzgerald had risen in the literary pantheon in about a decade and a half. For Scrimgeour, the problem
with Gatsby stems from Nick Carraways moral ambivalence and lack of
development over the course of the narrative. He builds the argument by
comparing Carraway to Marlow; while Conrad had his narrator at times
intrude into the narrative to address his reader directly, thus calling attention to his own status as narrator and thus his subjectivity, Fitzgerald does
no such thing with Carraway. To Scrimgeour, this refusal to call attention
to the narrative as a text consciously crafted by the narrator is the crucial
difference between Heart of Darkness and Gatsby; he finds the latter novel
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wanting because he sees Carraways seeming transparency as narrator to

be a flaw that undercuts the truth value of the narrative as a whole: It
is quite legitimate to ask why Fitzgerald should follow Conrad closely in
narrative technique except for those elements which warn us that the narrator may be giving us a truth which is anything but unvarnished (72).
There are a couple of serious flaws with Scrimgeours argument. The
first is the explicit assumption that The Great Gatsby is a conscious, and
failed, imitation of Heart of Darkness. While the influence of Conrad had
been well established by this point, the notion that Fitzgerald was not
quite bright or adept enough to complete his imitation faithfully is too
much of a stretch, one that not only belittles Fitzgeralds achievement
but also, more importantly, constricts its own analysis of the narrative
itself. Indeed, one senses Scrimgeours recognition of these problems, as
he seems at times to entertain the notion that the moral relativism of
Fitzgeralds narrative was, in fact, a conscious decision and achievement:
One would like to think that Fitzgerald knew what he was doing, that
in the opening pages he intended Carraways priggishness and enervation to warn the reader against the narrator. Certainly there is enough
evidence in the novel to support such a view. However, Scrimgeour can
only conclude by arguing that Fitzgerald was not capable of such ironic
perception (80). Yet, a good part of the essay is devoted to analyzing
Nicks character flaws, and it is in this aspect that the essay becomes not
only rather interesting, but also influential. It is a measure of Nicks hazy
minded (74) sensibility that he falls under the spell of Gatsbys adolescent romanticism, in effect elevating Gatsby to the status of idol just as
Gatsby had done with Daisy. More tellingly, Scrimgeour attacks Nick for
his duplicitous treatment of Jordan, his role as go-between in the Gatsby
and Daisy affair, and, most pointedly, his silence at the police inquisition
following the killing of Myrtle (which is, surprisingly, a scene very seldom
discussed by critics). The ample evidence he compiles leads Scrimgeour to
conclude, in telling phrasing, that Carraways honesty is a matter not of
principle, but of convenience (76). Where Scrimgeours argument about
Nick falls into perilous territory is the point at which he totals up his various indictments of Nicks character and arrives at this conclusion: If the
reader cannot accept Carraways statements at face value, then the integrity of the technique of the novel is called into question (77). One could
argue, conversely, that it is the very lack of an objective moral stance in
the novel, the use of a subjective and at times compromised narrator as
moral center, that gives the novel its modern feel. One could argue that
Fitzgeralds handling of Carraway does not amount to careless technique and cloudy thinking (80) at all, but rather to an adaptation of the
techniques of James and Conrad fit to suit a morally uncertain and questioning narrative. That said, Scrimgeours argument against The Great
Gatsby, with its detailed treatment of the issue of Nicks credibility, made
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a significant contribution to an argument that would only pick up steam

in the years to come.
Published in the same year as Scrimgeours essay, John Frasers Dust
and Dreams in The Great Gatsby argues that indeed Nicks subjectivity
is of a particularly modern sort and that it shapes our interpretation of
characters and themes. Fraser analyzes Nicks attraction to popular culture his taste for popular magazines and songs, as revealed in some of
his narrative asides and argues that this habit of mind in Nick is what
makes him like most of us and what leaves the novel feeling so glowingly modern (556) despite the passing years. At the same time, however, Nicks mindset, as informed by popular culture, affects his ability
to read other characters and hence his credibility as a moral judge: We
are in a world very much a twentieth-century, media-permeated urban
world where the boundaries between life and art, stereotypes and
private individualities, have lost their definiteness and in which the question of when some of the characters are being truly themselves becomes
almost impossible to answer. And it is from Nick himself that we get these
perceptions (556). For Fraser, the romanticized modern sheen can only
undercut the seeming seriousness of the novels message. Countering a
generation of critical opinion, Fraser finds Nicks lyrical closing to the
novel not moving and genuine, but instead redolent of Hollywood
(564): In place of genuine American idealism and values, the reader gets,
from Nick, romanticized imagery. For Fraser, the novel as a whole, with
its celebration of a criminal and his adolescent dreams of love, does not so
much lament lost American virtues as it does fail to present any genuine
virtues or idealism.
Others would jump to Nicks defense. Oliver Evans concedes that
Nick is taken in by Gatsbys allure and fails to judge him properly for his
actions, but argues that he remains fundamentally decent (125) and a
valid, if flawed, moral center. Robert Sklar, in The Last Laocon, argues
that Nicks doubleness, his ability to both participate and observe,
enables him to encompass all the novels life within his values and his
understanding (175) and thus in effect to contain within himself the
natures and motives of the others . . . and stand for them all (176). E.
Fred Carlisle, in The Triple Vision of Nick Carraway, would do Sklars
double vision one better. Arguing that Nick actually embodies three different perspectives of varying detachment from the action (which he helpfully labels Nick1, Nick2, and Nick3), Carlisle suggests that understanding
the narrators level and mode of involvement in the action helps to sort
out the seeming ambivalence in the narrative and should also confirm
that Nick is finally honest (351). Mathematical wizardry aside, not all
commentators were persuaded by these pleas on behalf of Nick. Thomas
Boyle, in a 1969 essay, pulls no punches in accusing Nick of shallowness, hypocrisy, immorality, and compromise (23), and he argues rather
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fervently that the bulk of forty years of Gatsby criticism attests to our
having been taken in by Carraway in somewhat the same way that Carraway has been taken in by Gatsby (22). David Parker concurs, pointing
out that Nick wears his honesty for adornment. . . . It is not something
he values absolutely (14). And Ron Neuhaus argues that Nick is a character who cannot deal with the literal, and who must always construct
an elaborate and moralistic rhetoric to insulate him from confrontation.
Almost immediately, his smugness and complacency become too fulsome (25). Beyond complaints over Nicks personality traits, Neuhaus
levels the rather more serious charge that Fitzgerald violates the rules of
narrative perspective, at times granting Nick an omniscience that he cannot, as a first-person narrator, possess. Though he bases this assessment
on only a few late passages, in which Nick surmises what Gatsby or Daisy
might have been thinking, Neuhaus claims that these lapses into near
omniscience destroy any integrity in the fiction (33). The argument,
based on insufficient evidence, is overly fussy at best, and the somewhat
moralistic conclusion that Fitzgerald fails to create a responsible fiction
(23) is unwarranted. Nonetheless, the ardor of the discussion shows that
the trouble with Nick had not dissipated in the least over the span of
three decades.
Quite in contrast to Neuhaus, who calls for responsibility and integrity in fictional forms, Richard Foster, in his confidently titled 1970 essay,
The Way to Read Gatsby, revels in the slippery, decentered narrative
and the narrator who offers it. He argues that most readers and critics
have misunderstood the role of Nick Carraway, and points out that critics
like Scrimgeour are barking up the wrong tree in looking for stable truths
and moral centers in the book. Instead, Foster argues that Nicks ironic
detachment, as well as his carefully cultivated and largely disingenuous air
of moral rectitude Nick the scorner of artifice in others is all artifice
himself (102) make him the ideal narrator for a moralistic novel of a
thoroughly modern age, one characterized by its moral relativism. That
is, Nick serves as a viable and compelling storyteller for a story of an age
of irony. As Foster states, Nick Carraway is the modern man of integrity;
and Fitzgeralds characterization of him as subtly corrupt and potentially
corrupting in his relations with the unlucky people he observes constitutes a shrewd and original comment on the new laws of consequence
that make the modern world modern (107). Arguing against those who
would see Nick as Fitzgeralds failed attempt to create his own Marlow,
Foster instead identifies a narrator whose moral vision is at best of an
uncertain purity (107) and whose presentation of that moral vision
amounts to a kind of siren song whose seductions are quite clearly discerned and definitely to be resisted (108).
David Minter, in his 1968 Dream, Design, and Interpretation in The
Great Gatsby, offers a contrasting view, claiming that a primary role Nick
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serves through his narrative is to confer order on the disarray surrounding

Gatsby, noting that Nicks interpretive vision, which serves to arrange
and deepen, recapture and relate, is all we have (87). In this regard he
echoes one of the most cogent essays on this debated topic, Peter Liscas
Nick Carraway and the Imagery of Disorder from 1967. Directly referencing the debate about Nicks character and conceding that there can
be no reconciliation (18) between those who see Nick as a hypocrite
and those who see him as a moral center, Lisca works instead to delineate
Nicks functional role in the narrative. For Lisca, the greatest contrast in
a narrative built on contrasts (east/west, future/past, romance/realism)
is the larger contrast between order and disorder within which all the
other elements of the novel are subsumed (23). Not merely Gatsbys
contrived identity and the reckless gayety of his parties and guests, but
also the messiness of the Buchanans lives, the deceitfulness of Jordan
Baker, and a host of other elements add up to a world of disorder and
disarray. It is Nicks role in the book, whatever his other shortcomings, to
create a sense of order from the chaos. Does this mean that he is, then, a
viable moral judge? Not necessarily. Lisca concludes his discussion with an
observation that is fairly brilliant in its simplicity; the novel, written by its
author, is to be judged, in the end, by the reader:
Although he is not a hypocrite and spiritual bankrupt neither is
he an acceptable moral norm. He acts as if he were, but the moral
center remains, as always, in the reader, who must judge not only
the story of Gatsby, but also the judgment of that story by the narrator himself. . . . The meaning of the novel does not lie in Nick Carraway, nor in the opposite of what he stands for, but merely includes
Nick and his judgments as part of the novel; and Nick is restored
to his important role as narrator. By tending to slight this role and
exaggerate his function as moral fulcrum, criticism has obscured the
technical brilliance of The Great Gatsby and encouraged essential
misunderstandings about the novels theme and Fitzgeralds moral
imagination. (27)
Liscas notion of Nick serving a function of maintaining order in a

world of disorder seems as apt an introduction as any to two books on
Fitzgerald that appeared in the early seventies Milton R. Sterns The
Golden Moment and John F. Callahans The Illusions of a Nation. Born
of the same tumultuous historical moment as Liscas essay on disorder,
these two works demonstrate, more than any single essay could, the extent
to which Gatsby was beginning to be read in a larger cultural and political
context than one had seen in the fifties and earlier sixties. If criticism of
that first major phase had drawn on certain unspoken cultural norms concerning what makes great literature great, much of the critical work from
the later sixties and through the seventies would, tacitly or explicitly, call
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into question normative cultural institutions and reading practices alike.

That is, in contrast to the established body of work that argued, convincingly, for the organic completeness of the novel, critics of this later
period, doubtless influenced to some extent by the political and social
upheavals of their own day, began to remark on the feints, concealments,
and fractures (as opposed to a seamless wholeness) contained within this
representative American novel. Far from diminishing the value of Gatsby,
the new breed of more politically acute criticism to emerge in this period
demonstrated the ongoing relevance of Fitzgeralds ambivalent American theme. As Stern succinctly put it, studying Fitzgeralds work helps to
illuminate . . . the identity crisis of our American time (xi).
Sterns historically minded reading of Gatsby, centered on the apparent longing for an idealized, Edenic America of the imagination (and an
emphatic endorsement of Nick as the books moral center), does not in
itself represent a radical break from the interpretations of Westbrook,
Trask, and Stouck, for example, but rather a more contemporary variation
on their points, one haunted by certain key phrases and concepts such
as placelessness, interchangeability of individuals, and a disordered, chaotic contemporary social scene that tie the reading to its own historical
moment. Stern looks past the differences in characters, settings, and types,
seeing instead in the various characters a larger commonality in their futile
yearning to overcome the void in their lives. Along these same lines, he
complicates the long-held critical notion of a binary contrast between the
eastern and western settings in the novel: In the amorphous, yearning
nervousness of American life, there is no distinction between East and
West. . . . All of the people in this novel come from the same America
(203). Stern sees the characters as trapped in a nostalgia that is more than
personal. Their longings for lost Edens whether Gatsbys Louisville of
1917 or Nicks middle-west of his youth bespeak, in Sterns view,
a larger American longing for a place more congruent with an idealized vision of America than with the corrupted land they now inhabit:
Fitzgerald sees that what has become of the dream of the past is inescapably present, and that almost all Americans are indistinguishable from
each other in the irresponsible betrayal of the idea of America by the
wealth of America (206).
Given that Sterns analysis was published in 1970, in the midst of
an extended period of political and civil unrest in the United States, one
could argue that his book thrusts Fitzgeralds writing into the turbulence
of the critics own times. Looked at another way, his discussion of Gatsby
suggests how the book has proven particularly malleable, providing a kind
of moral, political, or philosophical mirror for readers and critics to hold
up to their own visions of America. One can almost hear, for example, the
tensions of the late sixties playing out in Sterns reading of Nicks ultimate decision to return home at novels close:
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Nick knows that his moral choice is in part squeamish provincialism, for the realities beneath the apparent regional differences are
the same. But it is a moral choice in that Nick chooses the memory
of the manners of an older America that was supposed to have provided the dream, even though it did not, chooses that memory over
the absolute limbo of the haunted El Greco night-scape chooses,
in short, moral nostalgia over immoral present fact. (207)
Discussing the ever-changing nature of things in the eastern setting of the

book, Stern refers to it as a panorama of the sense of placelessness and
yearning . . . that, unarticulated, is the real meaning of American mobility
and fluidity (210). Stern also argues that the yearning for success, which
results in misplaced power and energy (224), unites characters from
the various class levels Tom, Gatsby, and Myrtle. All construct facades
as a means of attempting to lay claim to a social standing they either will
never attain (as is the case with Gatsby and Myrtle) or whose powers and
privileges they abuse, as with Tom.
Ultimately, what Stern argues about these characters is that they all
become alienated from their true selves: No matter where one looks,
in whatever social level, all one finds are non-people who have lost their
dreams and dont know where to find them, non-identities wheeling and
wandering and colliding carelessly in a wistfully desperate attempt to overtake a self (23132). Sterns argument in effect transposes Gatsby not
only into the world of postWorld War II realistic fiction, in which alienation was a central theme resounding across the writing of a couple of
decades, but also into the chaotic social turbulence of the late sixties and
dawn of the seventies. Still, his commentary goes beyond matters of class
affiliation or alienation from place and experience; his reading of Gatsby
traces Fitzgeralds commentary on the withering American dream back to
the historic and mythic source material invoked in the novel. In a sense
summarizing and consolidating the work done by previous historically
minded critics of the novel, he examines the ironic use of Franklins Way
to Wealth, the reversal of Thomas Jeffersons agrarian vision in T. J.
Eckleburgs urban ash valley, the ironic references to Stonewall Jackson
Abrams and to Mrs. Ulysses Swett, and the replacement of Buffalo Bill
Cody, the last of the great scouts (243), with the pioneer debauchee
(GG, 78), Dan Cody. Stern implies that this repeated, even insistent pattern of undercutting figures from the mythic national past underscores
the dilemma at the heart of the novel the irreparable break between
the ideal America and the real thing. This predicament plays out, symbolically, in Gatsbys romantic quest: The core of what Fitzgerald wanted
his readers to see is that Gatsbys demand on Daisy is the demand of the
American imagination upon America: nothing less than that the past should
be the imagined past, that history should have been the actualization of
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the ideal, and that the non-ideal actualities of history continuing into the
present should not be true (251). While Stern pulls up short of flatly
stating that it is Daisy, rather than Gatsby, who in professor Trillings
famous words comes inevitably to stand for America itself, his equation of Gatsbys futilely overreaching romantic idealism with the innocent
American imagination offers an interesting twist on Fitzgeralds American
theme as seen in the novel. Americans are fated, Stern suggests, to deny
reality, to assert ignorance, if need be, over recognition of our flawed history and present.
Appearing in 1972, two years after Sterns The Golden Moment,
John F. Callahans The Illusions of a Nation continued the exploration
of Fitzgeralds national vision and his ironic portrayal of the Americans
contradictory, even paradoxical relationship to the nations history and
mythos. Callahan is unabashedly political in his treatment of the material:
References abound to the Vietnam War and the idealistic but failed 1968
presidential run of Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Callahan states plainly
at the outset his belief that American history is a compendium of horrors,
guilt, and madness, and that the legacy of the relentless push of civilizing forces, from the first European settlers onward, is a schizophrenia
from which American history and literature have been unable to escape
(6). He sees just such a divided perspective at work in Gatsby, arguing
that Nicks closing to the novel, his invoking of the mythical moment
of origin, the Dutch sailors vision of the fresh, green breast of the new
world (GG, 140), marks an attempt to step outside of the incomprehensible present, outside of time itself. Nicks eloquent invocation very nearly
allows for an escape, if only for a moment, from the force of history;
however, what the novel shows us, for Callahan, is the impossibility of
such a retreat from history, and hence the paradox built into an idealized
vision of America as an unspoiled land, a new Eden: The Great Gatsby
sketches the evolution of America from fresh green breast of the new
world to valley of ashes, from continent with a spirit commensurate to
mans capacity for wonder to place of nightmare, exhaustion, and death.
Founded upon the myth of a new Eden, the history of the United States
has displaced that vision into an industrial, excremental reality (12).
Again we see in Callahans reading, far more forcefully than in Sterns, an
example of how the novel is used to comment on contemporary concerns.
Callahan identifies Fitzgeralds major theme, in Gatsby and onward
in Tender Is the Night and the unfinished Last Tycoon, as revolving around
the failure of the American idealist either to integrate himself with or
change the course of American history (24). Fitzgerald attempts to
show the reader, Callahan argues, how an inability to develop a historical consciousness, to understand the nightmare of our national history,
will lead to an individuals ruin. This character flaw plagues not only Jay
Gatsby, who refuses to even accept the passage of time, but also, more
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subtly, Nick Carraway, who Callahan perceives as attempting to construct

a separate space for himself outside the forces of history and social responsibility. Indeed, due to his refusal in the end to tell the truth to Tom
about the death of Myrtle (and, as a result, Gatsby and Wilson), Callahan
accuses Nick of not merely being a man of few words, but instead of harboring a furtive moral and epistemological superiority complex (44).
More simply put, Nick sees himself as above it all, a stance that ironically indicates his irresponsibility and culpability. In a larger sense, Callahan seems to battle, throughout his analysis, with the question of how
Carraways narrative relates to Fitzgeralds own political and historical
consciousness. Central to his argument is the idea that Nicks pastoral,
Edenic allusions (49), which invoke the Jeffersonian view of the young,
unspoiled nation, ignore the historical realities that were part and parcel
of the American dream as it grew along with the republic. Regarding
this missing or elided historical subtext, Callahan does not mince words:
Carraway forgets or does not regard as central the fact that this republic
owed its life as much to its institution of slavery and its colonial policy
(really, a policy of extermination) toward the Indians as it did to the courage and democratic institutions of its citizens (49). This impassioned
line of analysis commingles the aesthetic and the political in a manner
that invites its own set of challenges: Should Fitzgerald have had his narrator hold forth on American slavery and genocide? Would doing so have
made Gatsby a better book? One imagines that most readers, irrespective
of political persuasion, would say no, but by the same token the reach of
Callahans demands on the text suggests the cultural power and weight of
Fitzgeralds ironic take on the American myth in this novel. Callahan ultimately separates author from narrator, and praises Fitzgerald for creating
a sort of national jeremiad by using the sickness (58) of his narrator to
make a political point.
Other critics of the period would not always be so willing to draw a
distinction between the authors and narrators view on the novels political points. The question of race and ethnicity in the novel, which had
bubbled under the surface of most critical work on Fitzgerald for the past
few decades without making much of a stir, rose to the surface during the
late sixties and seventies, initiating a complex debate about Fitzgeralds
racial and ethnic politics. Robert Forrey, in his 1967 article Negroes in
the Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, criticized the authors portrayal of
black characters, arguing that darker skinned individuals . . . are generally relegated to clownish and inferior roles (203) and concluding based
on textual evidence that it does not seem unfair to suggest that Fitzgerald believed in the inherent inferiority of Negroes (295). While Forrey
does not specifically discuss Gatsby, Lewis Turlish, in a 1971 note, situates
the novel specifically within racial discourse of the early 1920s, pointing out
the novels affinity with the ideas promulgated by Lothrop Stoddard, the
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most popular American racist of the 1920s (443). Like Turlish, Richard
Lehan, in a 1970 essay, makes the connection to Stoddard, pointing out
the allusion in the novel to Stoddards popular 1920 book The Rising
Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy (Tom Buchanan refers to
the book as The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard
[GG, 14]). Tom effectively mouths the racist ideas of Stoddard, who
believed that the white or Nordic race was imperiled by the expansion
of ethnic others who would compromise and threaten Western culture
(Lehan, Focus). Lehan would push the connections to Stoddard and
Oswald Spengler further in a 1980 essay, to which we will return in the
next chapter. But clearly, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, the question
of Fitzgeralds treatment of race and ethnicity in the novel was beginning
to gain traction.
Josephine Z. Kopf, in a 1969 essay, decries Fitzgeralds portrayal of
Meyer Wolfshiem as a villainous Jew (93). She notes how Fitzgeralds
depiction of Wolfshiem A small flat-nosed Jew raised his large head
and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either
nostril. After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half-darkness
(GG, 55) draws attention to his animalistic qualities and in turn
serves to arouse in the reader feelings of repulsion and abhorrence
(97). Seeing no other reason for the character to be identified as Jewish
(and logically, justifiably pointing out that other characters do not get so
insistently linked to their religious background), Kopf ascribes the caricature to Fitzgeralds own anti-Semitism, a point also raised earlier in the
decade by Leslie Fiedler, who saw such caricaturing as resulting not from
mere habit or tradition, but from conviction and passion (Waiting, 80).
Two essays from 1973 looked deeper into the dynamics of ethnicity
in the text. M. Gidley argues that the novel is ambivalent with regard to
ethnicity, but that it reflects, in both conscious and unconscious ways,
the racial movements of the time (181). Gidley argues for a connection
to both Stoddard and to Madison Grant, whose 1916 book The Passing
of the Great Race, also warned, in what today would be seen as patently
racist rhetoric, about the coming demise of the white race at the hands
of ethnic others. Gidley suggests that the name Fitzgerald chooses for
the author of the racist book Tom discusses, this man Goddard, is an
amalgam of the names of Grant and Stoddard; he sees Fitzgerald as aping
the views of these writers both to satirize and also to borrow ideas which
underpin the structure and philosophy of history of his novel (172).
Peter Gregg Slater, in Ethnicity in The Great Gatsby, argues that questions over whether or not Fitzgerald possessed racist and anti-Semitic
attitudes (53) are somewhat peripheral to the dynamics of the text
itself; instead, Slater suggests that a heightened consciousness of ethnicity (53), itself characteristic of the popular mindset in the twenties,
is a significant aspect of the novel. Of course Tom Buchanan provides
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an obvious embodiment of such a form of consciousness, but Slater compellingly spends more time in his essay looking at how Nicks narrative
is shaped by his awareness of ethnicity and his biases. Slater rightly points
out that Nick tends to point out the ethnic affiliation of the individuals
with whom he comes into contact whenever their ethnicity is not of an Old
American type as is his own and suggests that what this shows is Nicks
unstated belief in the superiority of his own type (55). In situating the
novels depiction of ethnicity within the context of the racial rhetoric of the
age, these writers were opening a discussion that would be explored further
by scholars in coming decades, as we shall see in the next chapter.6
Like the handling of ethnicity, the gender dynamics of The Great
Gatsby would also become part of the critical conversation in the 1970s
and onward. This critical turn began with a series of reconsiderations of
Daisy Fay Buchanan, who had been all but universally maligned in the
scholarly criticism of the fifties and sixties the vast majority of which,
it should be noted, was written by male scholars. Joan Korenman, in
a 1975 essay, looks afresh at the character of Daisy, and more specifically at, of all things, her hair color. While seemingly a whimsical topic,
Korenmans discussion of the varying descriptions of Daisys hair color
(574) at times she seems to be described as blonde, at other times
dark-haired subtly sheds new light on the character. Korenman speculates on the possible biographical connections, noting the critical assumption that Daisy may have been based on the two great loves of Fitzgeralds
life, the startling brunette, Ginevra King, and Zelda Sayre, with her
honey-gold hair (575). But she also pushes the character analysis into
compelling new directions, suggesting that the question of hair color
invokes a larger literary tradition and in turn invites another look at a previously overlooked character: Romantic tradition assigns diametrically
opposed roles to fair and dark women. In his creation of Daisy, Fitzgerald
reflects the influence of this tradition. The character that results is both
cool innocent princess and sensual femme fatale, a combination that further enhances Daisys enigmatic charm (578). If almost no previous critics had even considered Daisy as an enigma worth exploring, much less
a charming one, then such a statement reveals a changing understanding
of how gender operates in the novel.
If Korenman indirectly suggests that previous scholars may have been
overlooking some of the depth in Fitzgeralds leading female character,
Leland Person, in his fascinating 1978 Herstory and Daisy Buchanan,
comes right out and levels the charge: Few critics write about The Great
Gatsby without discussing Daisy Fay Buchanan; and few, it seems, write
about Daisy without entering the unofficial competition of maligning
her character (250). Person argues that a line of heavyweight scholars of
this novel, from Bewley and Ornstein to Kazin and Fiedler, have scapegoated Daisy as the source of the noble Jay Gatsbys ruin, contrasting
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what they see as her shallow self-centeredness against Gatsbys romantic

idealism; the problem with this thinking, for Person, is that it imposes an
overly simplistic Good Boy/Bad Girl formulation that arises from a
kind of critical double standard and simply belittles the complexity of the
novel (250). Person argues in contrast, quite effectively, that Daisy can
be thought of in a far more complex manner, as a romantic figure like
Gatsby, his counterpart or female double (251), whose hand is forced
by her objectification and entrapment. To support this argument Person
refers to the scene when Jordan informs Nick about the events leading up
to Daisys marriage to Tom:
Despite the $350,000 string of pearls around her neck, when Daisy
receives a letter from Gatsby the night before the wedding, she is
ready to call the whole thing off. Gatsbys appeal far surpasses
Toms, and the pearls quickly end up in the wastebasket. The important point to recognize is that Gatsby is as much an ideal to Daisy as
she is to him. . . . Thus, it is only after she is forced into an ice-cold
bath and the letter which she clutches has crumbled like snow that
Daisy can marry Tom without so much as a shiver. She has been
baptized in ice, and with her romantic impulses effectively frozen,
Daisy Fay becomes paralyzed with conventional happiness as Mrs.
Tom Buchanan. (253)
In this reading, Daisy transforms from victimizer to victim, in that her own
complex story, her own desires and needs (253) remain unexpressed in
the text. Person reminds us that the various elucidations of Daisys identity as an enchanted object and a Golden Girl with a voice full of
money are all projections from Nick and Gatsby. Hence, Daisys own
identity is effectively silenced by the text, much as she is victimized by
a male tendency to project a self-satisfying, yet ultimately dehumanizing,
image on women (257).
While Person argued that Daisy was both silenced within the
text via her objectification by Gatsby and Tom, and by Nicks narration and had also been unfairly attacked by a patriarchal critical establishment, a leading feminist critic of the day would add another wrinkle
to the discussion, suggesting that the novel fits an ingrained pattern in
American fiction of hostility toward women. During the first wave of
feminist literary criticism, few texts were more influential than Judith Fetterleys The Resisting Reader (1978). In a chapter devoted to The Great
Gatsby, Fetterley argues, along similar lines as Person, that Daisy is the
object of the novels hostility and its scapegoat (73). In a compelling
discussion, she reads Nick Carraway as embodying the force of hostility toward women. In mounting his own defense of Gatsby, Nick begins
preparing the reader in the first chapter to ensure that Daisy will have no
claims on our sympathy (85). He does so by calling attention to Daisys
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insincerity, as when he notices, after Daisys intimations about her painful past with Tom, an absolute smirk on her lovely face (GG, 17). Such
asides to the reader, Fetterley argues, are meant to build a sort of alliance
against the female character; hence, the deck is stacked against Daisy from
the very beginning of the narrative.7 While Fetterleys occasional general
pronouncements about the workings of the male mind (73) date and
unnecessarily simplify the analysis, the reading, along with Persons, offers
a much needed corrective to a decades-old critical blind spot.
Fetterleys notion of hostility toward women in the text would
find another mode of elaboration in A.B. Paulsons essay of the same
year, Oral Aggression and Splitting. Working from a psychoanalytic
perspective, Paulson analyzes the novel as Freudian romance, with Jay
Gatsbys relentless pursuit of Daisy Fay Buchanan amounting to a reenactment of the desire for the Oedipal mother: For Daisy is really a first
love to which he remains so intensely faithful that we wonder if it is
not some earlier woman that first first love of all little boys to
whom he is so fanatically devoted (80). In support of his thesis, Paulson calls our attention to the texts seeming fascination with breasts.
Recall Nicks description of Gatsbys first kiss with Daisy, on the street
in Louisville, back in 1917:
One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down
the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place
where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. . . . Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of
the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place
above the trees he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once
there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable
milk of wonder. (GG, 86)
In a text filled with split or doubled character types, Paulson argues,

if Daisy represents an unattainable, idealized mother figure and if
Gatsbys punishment for having possessed the mother (80) is his
death then Myrtle Wilson stands as the degraded half of this split
image of the mother (79). He argues that Myrtles violent death she
is found with her left breast . . . swinging loose like a flap and her
mouth wide open and ripped at the corners (GG, 107) indicates not
only the novels aggression toward women in general, but also another
embodiment of the Oedipal plot: Myrtle . . . is the first of several figures
in the text who play out versions of the mother. In her death, the primitive
object of rage and frustration the unappeasable hunger appears as
the mutilated breast (78).
Perhaps aware of the paucity of psychoanalytic interpretations of The
Great Gatsby, Paulson seems at times bent on making up for the lack all
in one fell swoop. There are few Freudian notions he seems unwilling
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to give a whirl; and while many of the ideas hit the mark, some border
on the absurd. After convincingly discussing Jordan Baker as an example
of a phallic woman (82) based on textual evidence we recall Nicks
initial description of Jordan as a slender, small-breasted girl with an
erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at
the shoulders like a young cadet (GG, 12) Paulson then indicates, in
something of an insouciant tone, that he will see if he can make a similar
case about Daisy: Fitzgerald twins her with Daisy so many times that
it is tempting to search for phallic characteristics in her as well (82).
The search leads him to the famously funny scene in which Gatsby
flings his many colored shirts into a pile and Daisy, overcome with emotion, buries her head in the rich fabrics and sobs. After aptly noting the
uncomfortably fetish-like intensity of the scene, his conclusion that,
with Daisys storm of tears, a climax is reached . . . in which Gatsby,
uniting fetish with his girl-phallus, provokes what amounts to an ejaculation (83), seems to strain credulity a tad, particularly since Paulson
has already set Daisy up, in rather contrasting terms, as an idealized
mother figure. But such quibbles are minor when compared to the contributions of this unique essay; by tapping into a psychosexual level of
the text merely grazed by scholars to that point, Paulson opened up
questions about the dynamics of gender and sexuality in the novel that
would continue to be explored by critics to follow.
One critic who pushed such discussions in another new direction is
Keath Fraser in his 1979 essay, Another Reading of The Great Gatsby.
While the modest title implies that the analysis will be yet another predictable discussion of character or image patterns it may be the worst title
in all of Gatsby criticism what is contained within is a step in a new
direction. Fraser addresses a question that is frequently asked by students
who read the novel today but had never been posed at all in the critical
literature to that point: Is Nick gay? Fraser argues that the novel possesses a quality of concealment (58) that has duped previous readers
into looking beyond scenes that call Nicks sexuality into question. In
situating his discussion, Fraser invokes Leslie Fiedlers brief essay from
Love and Death in the American Novel as being one of the few critical
pieces to address the fluidity of gendered and sexual identities in Fitzgeralds fiction. But while Fraser finds Fiedler reluctant to admire (61)
this quality in the writing, he suggests that the novels sexual ambiguity
is a central factor, at the heart of larger issues of narrative reliability and
uncertainty. What The Great Gatsby seems about in part, and where it
derives its suggestiveness and energy, lies in what is not accounted for,
what is undisclosed (68).
Fraser calls our attention to the scene that transpires with Mr. McKee
at the end of Myrtles party. Amidst the blood and chaos at the end of the
evening,
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Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat
from the chandelier I followed.
Come to lunch some day, he suggested as we groaned down in
the elevator.
Where?
Anywhere.
Keep your hands off the lever, snapped the elevator boy.
I beg your pardon, said Mr. McKee with dignity. I didnt know
I was touching it.
All right, I agreed, Ill be glad to.
...I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between
the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.
Beauty and the Beast . . . Loneliness . . . Old Grocery Horse . . .
Brookn Bridge....
Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning Tribune and waiting for the
four oclock train. (GG, 32; ellipses in original)
Noting the phallic imagery of McKees grabbing of the lever, the seemingly spontaneous decision of the two men to retire to McKees bedroom, and the prevalence of ellipses, with their implication of matters left
unsaid and moments unaccounted for, Fraser finds that the scene illustrates what is typical of Fitzgeralds treatment of sex in the novel, that is,
its ambiguity (61). While the McKee episode is certainly a main piece
of evidence for Frasers argument, it is by no means all. He explains the
fascination for Nick of Tom Buchanans physical presence, the enormous
power of that body within the effeminate swank of his riding clothes
that seems to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing
(GG, 9). Discussing this passage, which concludes with Nick eyeballing
the great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his
thin coat (GG, 9), Fraser rightly concludes that Tom possesses a body
of rather more interest to Nick than the one he courts in Jordan Baker. In
fact, it fascinates him (62). When Nick does bother to mention Jordans
body it is, as noted above, to praise its erect, masculine qualities. Fraser also discusses the Facsimile of the Gatsby manuscript, where he found
some potentially revealing changes from the original draft, including the
deletion of a reference by Nick to the man I balled around with most all
summer who doesnt appear in this story at all (59). The cumulative
effect of such feints and suppressions is, for Fraser, a fluid and undefined
sexuality a kind of sexual anarchy (65) that is a defining, if previously unexplored, element of the novels larger atmosphere of ambiguity.
It may seem by this point that The Great Gatsby had undergone a
fairly remarkable evolution, at least from a critical perspective, transforming in a couple of decades from a richly patterned, unified, and complete
exploration of American dreams, myths, and realities into an unstable text
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laden with ethnic and gender anxieties, sexual suppression, and narrative
manipulation. Edward Wasiolek, in a 1975 essay, considers this evolution and predicts a further critical development away from the familiar
grids of interpretation imposed on the novel during the heyday of
the New Criticism. Multiple novels lie in The Great Gatsby, and only a
few despite the great volume of criticism have been written. The
novel has been congealed in the grids of Fitzgeralds problems and special views of his age, in the historical realities of the twenties, and in the
mythic quests of America (Texts, 389). By way of contrast, Wasiolek
suggests that a shifting of the grid of interpretation would open the
novel to compelling new interpretations from Marxist, Freudian, and
gendered perspectives. Is this the same as a critic imposing meaning onto
a text, privileging theoretical framework over artistic achievement? Not
so, says Wasiolek: Seeing Gatsby through different grids is not a matter
of translating the text into alien structures. The alien structures are the
text, unless we feel that the text reads itself, a view that the New Critics seemed to hold. We read the text and we read it with the best and
most we and our age can give (390). The perspective offered here by
Wasiolek is worth considering as we depart the critical discussion of the
sixties and seventies. Published in the second volume of Critical Inquiry,
which would become a central journal of the age of literary theory in
the United States, Wasioleks vision of the open, even alien text would
predict the range of new strategies brought to The Great Gatsby in the
coming decades.
Matters of Style: A Glamorous

Flop and an Artistic Achievement
Before leaving the seventies behind altogether, it is important to note
that, while the critical discourse churned along in the academic journals,
Gatsby itself continued its larger public existence as an icon of glamour
and style. In 1974, Paramount Pictures released the third film version of
the book. Directed by Jack Clayton, with a screenplay adapted by Francis
Ford Coppola, and starring Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, Bruce Dern,
and Sam Waterston, Paramounts The Great Gatsby was a vastly hyped
work that would capture the national imagination in the time leading up
to its springtime run in the movie theaters. As was the case with the film
adaptations of 1926 and 1949, the release of the motion picture renewed
public interest in the novel. In fact, with the prevalence of modern marketing techniques including a range of product tie-ins, from fashions
to Scotch, to the most outrageous of the marketing gimmicks, white-colored Teflon pans linked to the film this version of Gatsby created nothing less than a national stir. The New York Times reported on weeks of
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calculated frenzy, hoopla, and hype leading up the New York premiere,
noting that the film had replaced Watergate as the No. 1 topic of gossip
on the chic cocktail circuit (Klemesrud, 45). Time magazine summed
up the blitz of hype surrounding the film rather succinctly with the cover
of its March 18, 1974, issue, devoted to covering the movies release;
accompanying a still of Redford and Farrow is the caption: The Great
Gatsby Supersell. Unfortunately, once the film finally arrived, it landed
with a fairly resounding thud.
Given the glowing, cinematic quality of so much of Fitzgeralds imagery in The Great Gatsby, it might seem a curious fate that the book presents
some sort of Bermuda Triangle for filmmakers. The case becomes even
more ironic when we consider that Fitzgeralds own attempts to make it
as a Hollywood screenwriter also never got off the ground. Though there
would be numerous cinematic adaptations of his works (most recently,
David Finchers mawkish 2008 film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), most of them never quite hit the mark. Ultimately, it seems that the
visual medium of film is not particularly well suited to Fitzgeralds work,
the pleasure and power of which derive from his haunting use of language, his unique romantic lyricism. When those transcendent passages
of description are translated by a screenwriter into dialogue, or replaced
with visual cues, the bottom falls out. Such is the case with Paramounts
Gatsby. It looks right it fits the suit, if you will but possesses little of
the magic of the book. Though the film would find a few defenders, like
the reviewer for the New Yorker, who found it a stately film of beauty
and thoughtfulness (Gilliatt, 288), most were rather more direct in
their choice of descriptors. Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, wrote
that the film is as lifeless as a body thats been too long at the bottom of
a swimming pool (32). A guest columnist for the New York Times was so
overwrought by the disaster of a film, that he worried the movie might
do permanent damage to the reputation of the novel. He describes the
guilt he felt when his nine-year-old daughter asked him, on leaving the
theater, why they called Gatsby great: It was my fault. . . . I only hope
she can forget it and years from now go to the book with no memory of
the film at all, and find out for herself why he was great (Darst, 281). No
doubt these fears about the books fragility were unfounded: One piece
of evidence to the contrary is that Bantam Books, after getting the rights
to release a cheap paperback edition of the book tied in to the movies
release, promptly printed up 480,000 copies (Severo, 36). As in the early
fifties, when The Disenchanted and The Far Side of Paradise put Fitzgerald
back on the popular culture map, Paramounts 1974 film, whatever its
artistic merits or failures, only further ingrained Gatsby novel, myth,
legend into the public consciousness.
Of course, the young girls question about the greatness of Gatsby
is only fitting. How to account for the greatness of Gatsby has been a
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question that has concerned scholars and critics of Fitzgerald as well

as even his most ardent fans for a long time. One scholar who made a
full-fledged effort to try to answer this question was Robert Emmet Long
in 1979. In some ways it seems fitting that the last major work on Gatsby
in the 1970s would be entitled The Achieving of The Great Gatsby. By
this point, three decades of critical inquiry and explication had firmly
established the reputation of both novel and novelist, and works tracing
the novels sociological relevance, patterns of symbolism, and narrative
point of view had plumbed the formal and thematic depths of the book
extensively. Where Longs study adds to this mix is in his consideration
of the creation of the masterpiece as a culmination of the authors previous fictional efforts, literary relationships, influences, outside reading,
and craftsmanship. While previous scholars had considered many of these
ideas in isolation the fifties and sixties in particular saw the publication of any number of influence studies, as we have seen, and writers like
James E. Miller, Jr. and Kenneth Eble, to name two notable examples,
had shown Fitzgeralds artistry in the novel to be the evidence of careful,
devoted practice of craft Longs work takes a multifaceted approach
that adds to our understanding of the great leap forward Fitzgerald made
with Gatsby. The book is divided into sections devoted to what Long sees
as the primary influences on Fitzgeralds artistic development, leading to
Gatsby. It begins with a study of Fitzgeralds earlier fiction, the apprentice period preceding Gatsby, and goes on to include an extended discussion of Conrad as a key influence, as well as a discussion of Fitzgerald
among his own artistic and fictional milieu in the twenties.
In tracing the writing of what he calls Fitzgeralds apprentice period,
Long probes earlier works for evidence of the technical and thematic
touchstone of the later masterpiece. This Side of Paradise introduced not
only Fitzgeralds stylistic flourish, but also his thematic concern with the
individual alienated from society; The Beautiful and Damned, despite its
notorious flaws, showed not only a stronger hold over the formal properties of the novel, but also a deepening concern, inspired by his relationship with Mencken and his admiration of literary naturalists like Norris
and Dreiser, with money and its effect on the lives of . . . characters
(46), as well as first hitting on one of the main themes of Gatsby: the
spiritual emptiness of the great city and its suburbs (60). Long also
discusses the major early stories May Day (1920), The Diamond
as Big as the Ritz and Winter Dreams (1922), and Absolution
(1924) seeing in them precursors to Gatsbys sweeping historical vision
and national critique (evidenced in May Day and Diamond), as well
as to the novels themes of romantic longing and disillusionment (as seen
in Winter Dreams and Absolution). For the most part Long steers
clear of some of the minor stories that also presage themes seen in Gatsby;
He makes brief mention of The Sensible Thing and John Jacksons
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Arcady, two 1924 stories that mine the same thematic territory of the
attempt to recapture a romantic love from the past that we see in Gatsby.
Both stories also, like Winter Dreams, evoke the associative power of
houses of the past, another key link to Gatsby. And both were written
during the Fitzgeralds time living in Great Neck, New York, the gestation period for Gatsby. While Longs case may have been even stronger
had he considered minor stories like these in greater depth, in all, his
careful working through of the important early works offers a corrective
response to the overly simplistic view that Gatsby was simply a bolt out of
the blue for a writer who had shown few signs of such promise before.
Longs argument suggests, in contrast, that the novel was the culmination
of years of fictional efforts.
In devoting a substantial portion of his book to Joseph Conrad as
an influence on Fitzgerald, Long does not open uncharted territory, but
rather deepens a discussion that had been afoot for some time. As Long
notes, among the many critics who had earlier weighed in on Fitzgeralds fictional technique and the influences on it, James E. Miller and
Robert Stallman had both specifically pointed to Conrad as the inspiration behind Fitzgeralds decision to use the third-person, participantobserver perspective in Gatsby. Whereas Miller, in The Fictional Technique
of F.Scott Fitzgerald (1957) and Stallman, in his essay Conrad and The
Great Gatsby (1955) focused squarely on Fitzgeralds technical or structural indebtedness to Conrad (concerning matters of point of view and
narrative control), Long digs deeper into the connection between the two
writers, discussing thematic connections as well as patterns of character
types that Fitzgerald seemed to have borrowed or inherited from Conrad.
Working from lesser-known material such as Conrads first novel, Almayers Folly (1895) and the short story Youth (1902) to the major novels
Lord Jim (1900) and Heart of Darkness (1902), Long presents compelling textual evidence of Fitzgeralds connection to Conrad. The similarity of the Carrraway/Gatsby relationship to that of Marlow and Kurtz
receives a good bit of attention, not surprisingly; Stallman had mapped
out these connections thoroughly, even exhaustively, in his 1955 article.
More unexpected are the connections Long builds to the earlier works.
Through close readings and cross-references, he builds a case for Fitzgeralds larger indebtedness to Conrad. Going beyond the issue of narrative perspective, he demonstrates how Gatsby shares with Almayers Folly
a disillusionment theme, an ironic treatment of time and the past, and
even an obsession with the symbolic resonance of houses. Miller does not
mention the work of Robert Sklar in this section of his book, but if we
add in to the Conrad sweepstakes the work of Sklar who sought to
debunk the connections to Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness but added in
his own claim about Fitzgeralds indebtedness to Nostromo then we
could claim that, in the quarter century between Stallmans Conrad and
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The Great Gatsby and Longs Achieving of The Great Gatsby, the case
for Conrad as the prime influence behind Fitzgeralds mature artistry in
Gatsby was made from nearly every possible angle. The great influence
debate seemed to have been won by the end of the seventies, one reason
perhaps why this strain of scholarship on Fitzgerald, while not dead, has
subsided in subsequent decades.8
But there is another kind of influence Long discusses: the impact
of Fitzgeralds own literary contemporaries, as well as the thinkers who
shaped the intellectual climate of the day. Long claims from the outset
that to be fully appreciated Fitzgeralds achieving of the novel must be
understood as a very large and complicated act of cultural assimilation
(11), and it is in making this case that he seems most convincing and
provocative. Arguing that The Great Gatsby emerges out of a quite definite intellectual-literary milieu (172), Long connects Fitzgeralds ideas
to those of his friend Edmund Wilson, as well as to Walter Lippmann and
Van Wyck Brooks. What makes Longs discussion interesting is the extent
to which it counters an age-old popular conception of Fitzgerald as a kind
of artistic idiot savant, an unschooled wonder-boy who somehow just
happened to churn out the Great American Novel, without even really
understanding what he was doing or what the book signified. Longs
counterpoint, that Fitzgerald was very much engaged in the intellectual
ideas of his age, has influenced subsequent scholars, perhaps most notably
Ronald Berman, who has written a number of compelling books tracing
Fitzgeralds connection to the prevailing public philosophy of his day.
In broadening out his discussion of Fitzgeralds intellectual-literary milieu, Long considers The Great Gatsby alongside the other major
American novels of 1925, Dreisers An American Tragedy and Dos Passoss Manhattan Transfer. Though not arguing for mutual influence
among the works, Longs interesting discussion notes the thematic and
philosophical links between the 1925 novels, perhaps most notably the
fact that all of them are about the end of the American dream (173). As
long points out, both Gatsby and An American Tragedy invoke but ultimately subvert the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches theme. Like Jay Gatsby,
Dreisers protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, is first presented as a rootless
American youth, a nave searcher for a better, more fulfilling life (174).
Long argues that the publication of these two novels in the same year,
while of course on one level coincidental, reveals a deeper connection to
fundamental American concerns, ones that persisted in an era marked in
equal measure by material success and philosophical uncertainty: Both
[novels] tap the same archetype of the poor boy as outsider that is so
deeply embedded in the American imagination, and this sort of connection reveals Fitzgeralds immersion in an archetypal pattern of American
consciousness (17475). Long also relates Gatsby to Dos Passoss kaleidoscopic but ultimately haunting and cautionary image of New York City
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in Manhattan Transfer, arguing that Dos Passoss New York denizens,

like Fitzgeralds, lead lives that are shortcuts from nothing to nothing
(176). While generations of critics had noted (and often lamented) that
The Great Gatsby was a novel of its moment, Long dismisses the shopworn notion of Gatsby as merely a glossy period piece, putting forth the
much more profitable argument that the novel engaged with its sociohistorical moment on far deeper and more compelling levels:
Dos Passos, Dreiser, and Fitzgerald approach their common subject
from different sides, in works different in kind; but the shared theme
itself, occurring in significant novels of the same year, is a reminder
of how deeply The Great Gatsby is part of its moment, rather than
being, as it might seem on a casual reading, the expression of a
purely special sensibility. . . . The Great Gatsby is central to the literature of the twenties in more than surfaces; in its articulation of
modern estrangement, it is in the mainstream of American realism as
it emerged after World War I. (177)
Indeed, as we have seen, by the end of the seventies Gatsby could be recognized as something more than a central text of the literature of the
twenties; in its ability to elicit impassioned critical discourse from everwidening perspectives, while remaining a popular favorite and a synonym
for glamour and style in American culture, The Great Gatsby had become,
by this point, a central text of American literature and culture.
Notes
1
Regarding these revisions, the relationship between author and editor is worth
considering as well. Carla Mulford, in a 1982 essay, revisits Fitzgeralds revisions
to the manuscript, and particularly those that were made in response to advice
from his editor, Maxwell Perkins, and suggests that we be more cognizant of
Fitzgeralds debt to Perkins, in that Perkinss comments . . . helped the author
to shape the book into its present form (210).
In his discussion of paired characters, Mellard does not mention Gatsby and
Myrtle Wilson, though he might well have. Indeed, Barry Edward Gross makes
a good case for thinking of the two of them not merely as similar to one another,
but as a sharp contrast to all of the other major characters. Above and beyond
their obvious similarities as desperate social climbers, Gross notes the affinities in
other aspects, such as their taste in home dcor: As Myrtle is a Gatsby in miniature in extremis, her New York apartment is a West Egg in stiflingly constricted
miniature. . . . Myrtles apartment is, like West Egg, a nouveau riche try for elegance that serves only to distort traditions and pervert the past (58). Robert
Sklar, in The Last Laocon, also links them, as two careless, immoral lower-class
figures destroyed by their own too great determination, destroyed by the greater
power of the careless and immoral rich (192).
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Lewiss book, originally published in 1955, traces the Adamic figure through
nineteenth-century American literature, but he also includes an epilogue in which
he briefly considers Gatsby as a modern incarnation of this American motif. The
legend of the second chance is . . . poignantly re-enacted by Gatsby, Lewis writes,
as he carries forward his incorruptible dream beneath the surface of his guessedat corruption. In The Great Gatsby, the Adamic anecdote retains a singular purity
of outline; the young hero follows the traditional career from bright expectancy to
the destruction which, in American literature, has been its perennial reward. But
the image of the New World . . . is subtly exploited by Fitzgerald as a mirror to
reveal the true ugliness of societys hard malice and shallow sophistication (197).
For another detailed, close reading of Fitzgeralds use of color patterns in the
novel, see A. E. Elmore, Color and Cosmos in The Great Gatsby.
The Frye passage is quoted from The Anatomy of Criticism, 78.
For an interesting, more recent discussion of Fitzgeralds evolving attitudes

toward racial and ethnic others, see Alan Margolies, The Maturing of F. Scott
Fitzgerald (1997).
In a recent (2000) essay, Redirecting Fitzgeralds Gaze, Scott Stoddart uses

the language of feminist film theory to make a similar point about Nicks manipulation of our perspective on Daisy. Invoking Laura Mulveys pioneering 1975
essay in feminist film theory, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Stoddart
argues that, as narrator, Nick wields the power of the male gaze in passages
such as this to control our perceptions of Daisy.
A more fashionable recent choice as influence on the novel is Willa Cather. For
discussion of Cathers influence, see Tom Quirk, Fitzgerald and Cather: The
Great Gatsby; Robert Seguin, Ressentiment and the Social Poetics of The Great
Gatsby; and Stanley Browdin, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Willa Cather: A New
Study.
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4: Gatsby, in Theory (and Out): New

Paradigms in the Eighties and Nineties
A Sense of the Past: Situating Gatsby
f the period from the end of World War II to the end of the fifties
saw the dramatic rise of The Great Gatsby from neglected novel to celebrated American masterpiece, and if the sixties and seventies saw the further canonization of Gatsby in particular and the rise of Fitzgerald studies
in general, the eighties and nineties would see Gatsby criticism turn in
new directions yet again. This period lacks the dramatic arc of the previous four decades (after all, the battle for recognition of Gatsby as a great
American novel had long since been won, and seemingly every conceivable image pattern and narrative nuance had been traced, and an endless
supply of interpretations on the novels mythic, historic, and romantic
themes some vital and illuminating, some not been offered). Nonetheless, as the institution of literary studies took a major turn toward new
theoretical models in the United States in the eighties (following the lead
of European literary critics from the sixties and seventies), not only would
new works be considered as part of the canon of the nations literature,
but the accepted classics would be reinterpreted from new angles. Hence,
it would turn out that all had not, in fact, been said about Gatsby back in
the glory days of the tweed-jacketed English professor. A new generation
of scholars, informed by poststructuralist, new historicist, and narratological theories, would consider the novel from a range of new perspectives.
To be sure, some studies mined familiar territory while finding some
new ways to contribute to the ongoing discourse on the novel. Brian
Ways 1980 book F.Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Social Fiction eschewed
the mythic and archetypal approaches of the past and focused instead on
Fitzgerald as a social realist. While Way considers this a much needed
corrective to a superabundance of material focusing on the overarching
American themes (and one cannot deny that, by 1980, he had a point
there), still his study, with its focus on manners and class issues in Fitzgeralds work, is not as groundbreaking as he may have thought. Nonetheless, his chapter on The Great Gatsby does touch on an aspect of the novel
surprisingly neglected in much of the critical work the books sense of
humor. Way focuses in specifically on the character of Jay Gatsby, arguing
that he is Fitzgeralds greatest success (112) in achieving a comic tone
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in the novel. While it is probably arguable that Gatsbys creativity lies in

his power to arouse wild incredulous laughter (112), still Ways discussions of the extremely humorous reunion scene with Daisy and the levity
and outrageousness of Gatsbys parties, as well as the favorable comparison he draws to the coarser comedy achieved in Petroniuss depiction of
Trimalchios banquet, serve as a good reminder that Gatsby is, among its
many other merits, at times a very funny book.
Other critics of this time offered subtle variations on established
approaches to the text. Glenn Settle, in his 1985 American Literature
essay Fitzgeralds Daisy: The Sirens Voice, pairs the tried and true
frameworks of the character study and the elucidation of classical allusions to offer a new look at the character of Daisy Fay Buchanan. Daisy,
who had received nothing but critical scorn throughout the first few
decades of serious scholarly work on the novel, had by this point, after
the essays of Korenman, Person, and Fetterley in the seventies, come into
something of a critical vogue. While the emergence of a more complex
and nuanced view of Daisys character owes much to the rise of feminist
criticism in the 1970s and beyond, Settles essay itself does not follow a
feminist methodology, instead establishing connections to the figure of
the Siren from classical Greek and Roman literature. Indeed, a feminist
critic might shudder at the steps Daisy takes backward, when viewed from
this perspective, into the realm of perhaps the ultimate sexist archetype
(the irresistible female whose cooing voice woos good men to their ruin);
nonetheless, Settle makes his case with valid textual support. Of course
the primary appeal of Daisy, as noted by generations of scholars, is the
allure of her voice (also the weapon of the classical Siren); and Settle also
traces the floral and seafaring imagery in the novel, particularly Gatsbys
connection to the sea as seen through both his early career and the imagery connected to him, to further establish the parallels to Jason, Odysseus, and other classical heroes brought to near-ruin by the temptations
of the Sirens.
Other critics of the period offered pieces linking Gatsby to traditional
literary antecedents. Elizabeth Morgan, in a 1984 College English essay,
also looks at the Daisy/Gatsby relationship from the perspective of literary history, arguing that Fitzgerald invokes the courtly love tradition in
the novel, using it in an ironic way to comment upon the bankrupt
(176) values of the day. Morgan offers something of a paint-by-numbers
critical approach, defining the components of the courtly love tradition
and then demonstrating, one at a time, how the novel matches up to these
criteria. While the case made in the article seems reasonable, the justification for it is slim and perhaps misguided; claiming that extant criticism
has turned the novel into a personal and cultural period piece (173),
Morgan concludes that her study of Fitzgeralds ironic use of the courtly
love tradition in The Great Gatsby gives texture to the novel and provides
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yet another proof that he is an artist, not merely a social historian (175).
Such comments, of course, bear little if any relationship to the critical
stature of both the novel and its author. D. G. Kehl and Allene Cooper, in a 1993 essay, take yet another route from literary history toward
the Gatsby/Daisy romance, viewing Gatsbys love as a grail quest from
medieval tradition. Like Morgan, they establish a step-by-step definition of the grail quest, from Arthurian legend, and then make the match
to Gatsby. They also seem similarly unaware of previous criticism of the
novel, as based on their claim that no previous scholars had examined the
grail quest theme in the book (203).1 The essays sometimes humorous
misspellings2 also undercut its authority, and the conclusions reached by
the authors that Gatsby as grail quest knight is an archetype of fidelity
to the ideal in a paradoxical world, and that he illustrates Fitzgeralds
paradoxical view that such dreaming, though never to be fulfilled, greatly
enriches life (215) are hardly original. Nonetheless, Kehl and Cooper
deserve credit for cleverly tracing the Arthurian echoes in the comic 1922
story O Russet Witch! and showing how it prefigures the use of such
material in Gatsby. This minor, farcical story is not often mentioned as a
precursor to Gatsby, and the point is original and interesting.
At the outset of the 1980s, one of the major scholars on Fitzgerald
and The Great Gatsby would make a literary connection to the past that
would prove more valuable. Richard Lehan, who had published essays
on Gatsby and the 1966 book F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction, and who would go on to produce the book-length study, The Great
Gatsby: The Limits of Wonder in 1990, published F. Scott Fitzgerald
and Romantic Destiny, an article that elucidates his ideas on Fitzgeralds connection to the ideas of German philosopher Oswald Spengler. As
we recall, the connection to Spengler had first been made by Stallman in
his apple-cart-upsetting 1955 essay, Gatsby and the Hole in Time, and
Lehan had further defined Fitzgeralds connection to Spenglers thought
in his F.Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction. Why the need for more
on Spengler in the eighties, then? In part, Lehans return to the topic
was occasioned by a fairly interesting little controversy on this subject.
Several critics, notably Robert Sklar, in The Last Laocon, had seemingly
debunked the notion that Fitzgerald could have been influenced by Spengler when writing The Great Gatsby (as Fitzgerald himself said he was3),
since Spenglers major work, The Decline of the West, was not translated
into English until 1926, the year after Gatsbys publication, and Fitzgerald could not read German. Lehan, in making his case for the connection
as an important one, begins his 1980 essay by countering Sklars claim,
pointing out that Spenglers ideas were in wide circulation in Englishlanguage publications in the early twenties, and that his general theory of
the West was debated in intellectual circles in both America and Europe
(Destiny, 137). Publications in which Spenglers ideas were summarized,
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analyzed, and extensively quoted included Century magazine, one of

Fitzgeralds favorites (137).
It may not be possible to tell precisely how many of Spenglers
excerpts Fitzgerald had gotten hold of during the time when he was writing The Great Gatsby, but Lehans exploration of the links between Spenglers ideas and those of the novel is worth considering in some detail,
as the ideas promoted by Spengler were by no means the isolated ruminations of one man alone. Indeed, as Richard Overy points out in his
recent history of interwar Britain, The Morbid Age (2009), Spenglerian
anxieties about the coming fall of civilization were commonplace in the
twenties and thirties. Overy describes the time as a period famous for
its population of Cassandras and Jeremiahs who helped to construct the
popular image of the inter-war years as an age of anxiety, doubt or fear
(2). And while his particular focus is on the spread of this mindset in
Great Britain, Overy argues that ideas generated in Britain concerning the
decline of civilization were rapidly and widely disseminated in America
and Europe (7). The title character of Edmund Wilsons 1929 novel I
Thought of Daisy, asked by the narrator where she had come up with a
line about the downfall of western civilization, caually replies, Oh . . .
that was just something I picked up at the Ritz Bar in Paris! (211). If
Wilsons line suggests the ubiquity of such ideas about social decline and
decay, Overy reminds us that Spengler was most often credited, correctly
or not, as their source: Spengler and Spenglerian thinking became
popular shorthand for any form of pessimistic determinism applied to the
decay or collapse of civilization (32).
As previously noted, Spenglers major philosophical idea from
The Decline of the West is his cyclical notion about the rise and fall of
civilizations. For Spengler, the progression from culture to civilization from a unified, localized, organic group tied to its landscape, to
a modern, urban, rootless, plural society is necessarily and inevitably
a process of decline. Himself writing in the shadow of World War I and
in the midst of cultural upheaval across Europe, Spengler argued that
Western societies faced an inevitable decline. Though certainly controversial, Spenglers thoughts had a good deal of influence in an age characterized by reactionary concerns over growing cultural plurality. (The
first part of the twentieth century also saw the rise of the science of
eugenics, the study of improvement of the human gene pool through
selective breeding.) Lehan claims that an affinity of mind (Destiny,
138) between Spengler and Fitzgerald can be seen through examination
of his later novels, beginning with The Great Gatsby. The case he builds
by examining the landscape of the novel is rather compelling and worth
quoting at some length. Lehan discusses how in Spenglers view a culture,
under the influence of modernity, mechanization, and progress, suffers
from a sense of dislocation in which
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the sense of the infinite gives way to cold reason, science, and technology. Man no longer feels at one with the land, moves to the new
city, which has become a money center. The rise of a new breed of
money brokers turns the old world upside down. Spengler believed
the movement from country to city involved a destructive process.
In historical terms, Culture gives way to Civilization; . . . the priestking is replaced by the new Caesar, the man of money and power.
When this happens, a primitive sense of race is lost, and the decay
embodied in the idea of Civilization begins.
All of these Spenglerian elements infuse The Great Gatsby. While
Fitzgerald does not labor the point, he clearly shows in what way
an artificial, urban world has replaced a natural landscape. In his
description of the Valley of Ashes, for example, we find that a fantastic farm brings forth ashes which grow like wheat into ridges
and hills; nature has given way to grotesque gardens, where ashes
take the form of houses and chimneys, as if the process of nature
had been inverted, bringing forth a distortion of itself, as Spengler
maintained happens when the countryside is transformed by the city.
Beneath the city streets lies a lost world. (Destiny, 140)
In this Spenglerian reading, Gatsby and Tom emerge as far more than
romantic rivals; instead, they embody different moments in a cultures
decline. Gatsby, the dreamer, represents what Spengler dubbed Faustian
man, the doomed idealist whose fate is to not know that his goals are
unattainable in the cold modern world, while Tom is the face of modern
Civilization, the moneyed force who rules over a world that is increasingly heterogeneous and uncontrollable. From this perspective we see, as
Lehan notes, that Toms relentless fears about the impending doom of
civilization (whether due to the insidious Rise of the Coloured Empires
or because pretty soon the earths going to fall into the sun) bespeak
another Spenglerian connection: That Toms remarks are abstract, unfeeling, garbled, and contradictory is to the point, and reveal a quality of mind
in keeping with Spenglers description of modern man who has been separated from the rhythms of nature by scientific systems of thought (142).
The most shocking of Toms pseudo-scientific beliefs about the downfall
of civilization is his theory about race, taken from a fine book he has
been reading. This is the original passage from the novel:
Civilizations going to pieces, broke out Tom violently. Ive gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise
of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard?
Why, no, I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
Well, its a fine book and everybody ought to read it. The idea
is if we dont look out the white race will be will be utterly submerged. Its all scientific stuff; its been proved.
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Toms getting very profound, said Daisy with an expression of

unthoughtful sadness. He reads deep books with long words in
them. What was that word we
Well, these books are all scientific, insisted Tom, glancing at her
impatiently. This fellow has worked out the whole thing. Its up to
us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will
have control of things. (GG, 14)
Lehan points out that the book Tom discusses by this man Goddard is, as mentioned previously, most likely a thinly veiled reference to
Lothrop Stoddards popular 1920 book, The Rising Tide of Color, which
warned against the impending doom facing the white or Nordic race
at the hands of the colored races. Stoddards text not only found a
sympathetic audience in an era that saw the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan
and an increasing sentiment of nativism in the United States, but it also,
as Lehan notes, reflected a sensibility aligned with Spenglers vision of
Western culture falling amidst an increasing heterogeneity. Given the
real-world echoes of Toms rant, this would seem to be a point where
Lehans argument would push up to its logical conclusion of assaying
whether Fitzgerald was invoking the Spenglerian view to endorse it or to
criticize it. If it is merely Tom Buchanan who serves as the mouthpiece
of Spengler, via Stoddard, then it would seem that the Spenglerian view
is being critiqued. After all, Tom is a buffoon and the target of much of
the books most pointed humor (indeed, I would argue against Brian Way
and his point about Jay Gatsby as the books comic force; a good case can
be made for Tom in that role), and his huffy proclamations about civilization are clearly held up by Nick for our ridicule. However, as Lehan
points out, echoes of Spenglers philosophy run throughout the text, and
indeed, despite his derision toward Toms overheated rhetoric, Nick, too,
seems to recoil from the racial heterogeneity that he encounters. Given
the Spenglerian view of the city as the center of a civilizations decline,
it is no coincidence that encounters with ethnic and racial others transpire
primarily within the boundaries of the city.
In much the same way that confrontation and physical violence are
initially situated in the city itself, visibly ethnic others are also carefully and specifically placed in the city early in the novel. While Meyer
Wolfshiem, the stereotypical Jewish gangster, holds forth in his midtown Broadway haunts, other ethnic figures seem to mark the boundaries of the city: While passing over the Queensboro Bridge into the city,
Nick spies a car full of mourners in a funeral procession who look at him
with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern Europe, and
immediately afterwards a limousine passes in which a white driver is ferrying three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl (GG, 55). Nicks
reaction to his company on the bridge suggests his resistance to, even fear
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of, the racial pluralism of the city: Anything can happen now that weve
slid over this bridge, I thought; anything at all (55). This observation,
in its emphasis on geographic and demographic boundaries, recalls in a
gentler fashion Tom Buchanans paranoid fantasy about the Rise of the
Coloured Empires; indeed, it might be argued that the direct correlation
between increasing violence and increasing visibility of race and ethnicity in this novel is itself a narrative underscoring of Tom Buchanans own
reactionary, racist philosophy. Lehan chooses not to go quite this far with
his reading. He claims that Fitzgerald links a sense of the lost promise of contemporary America with racial disharmony, and he quotes
the Queensboro Bridge passage, claiming that it bursts with implied and
double meaning (Destiny, 143), but he does not elaborate on this
meaning before moving on to another point.
George Garrett, in his 1985 essay Fire and Freshness: A Matter of
Style in The Great Gatsby, takes a different approach to the Queensboro
Bridge passage; he argues, in contrast, that the authors intention in this
brief sight gag was clearly to show Carraways modernity, his openness
to and delight in the otherwise shocking (to the reader) confusions of
order in America (107). Whether or not Fitzgerald is ultimately mocking or endorsing racist rhetoric of the 1920s seems less verifiable than the
fact that the novels anxiousness over a spreading racial and ethnic plurality does extend beyond the vilified character of Tom Buchanan. As the
Queensboro Bridge passage demonstrates, Nick, as much as Tom, identifies ethnic others as a potentially disruptive element in the social order,
one associated with the bustle of the contemporary urban environment.
Text and Context: Reading the

Novel in the Age of High Theory
If Lehan, in reading the novel as a reflection of Spenglerian notions of
social decline, finds Fitzgeralds portrayal of race and ethnicity to be
fraught but ultimately ambivalent, others would take a more pointed
approach to this issue. Jeffrey Louis Decker finds Fitzgeralds allusions
to Stoddard perfectly fitting in a novel that oozes with what Decker
sees as the white Americans ethnic and national anxiety in the Tribal
Twenties (53). A backlash against waves of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe manifested itself in national policy with the
Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Reform Act of
1924, which would restrict immigration from these regions; moreover,
in terms of broader public sentiment this backlash would find its way
not only into popular periodicals but also the academic and literary
realms. Decker, in examining the novel from a new historicist perspective, argues that a familiarity with the climate of racial nativism afoot at
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the time provides a context for understanding the production of classic

American literature at mid-decade (53). As for Gatsby, we see echoes
of nativism in the manner in which Fitzgerald invokes, only to undercut, the classic American uplift story of the self-made man, a staple of
the culture from Franklin through Alger, in his depiction of Jay Gatsby.
In juxtaposing Gatsbys mysterious and unprincipled ascent and Toms
hysterical nativism, the narrative bespeaks larger fears about the decay
of white culture: A story of entrepreneurial corruption, accented by
the language of nativism, competes with and ultimately foils the traditional narrative of virtuous American uplift. In this way, Gatsby stages a
national anxiety about the loss of white Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the
Twenties (52).
Key to Deckers argument is the impression of Gatsby as somehow
not quite white (64); his shadowy origins, as well as his partnership
with the Jewish immigrant gangster, Meyer Wolfshiem, taint his ethnic
identity and as a result undercut the validity of his identity as a self-made
American man.4 For Decker, the novel must be read against the Nordicist theories of popular writers like Stoddard and Madison Grant, the
most important nativist in modern American history, who argued that
cross-breeding with non-Nordics would lead to the degenerative process of mongrelization (64). Decker traces how widespread such ideas
were in mainstream culture of the early twenties, from the halls of Congress to the pages of Good Houskeeping magazine. Viewed in this context, the battle between arch-Nordicist Tom Buchanan and mysterious
Gatsby over Daisy, a product of her white girlhood (GG, 19) whom
Decker provocatively describes as a version of the all-American girl . . . a
symbol for Nordic national identity in the Twenties (64), takes on considerable cultural weight. Decker quotes a passage from the Plaza Hotel
showdown, where Tom applies his infamous label to Gatsby: I suppose
the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make
love to your wife. . . . Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life
and family institutions and next theyll throw everything overboard and
have intermarriage between black and white (GG, 101). While some,
including Walter Benn Michaels, have read Toms words as implying that
Gatsby is in some sense black (195), Decker interprets the passage as
further evidence of the anxiety over Nordic racial purity that runs through
the novel: According to the nativist logic of Toms argument, Gatsby
seems less-than-white because of his intimate connection with immigrant
crime. The association licenses Toms accusation that Gatsby jeopardizes
the health of the family, the institution indispensable to maintaining white
racial purity (66).5 While at times Deckers argument may seem to strain
a bit, as in his equation of the novels dream of Nordic national origins
seen through Dutch explorers eyes with Marcus Garveys contemporaneous dream of a distant but glorious African past (59) that fueled his
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back-to-Africa movement, this essay pushes discussion of race and ethnicity in the novel decidedly forward, by contextualizing the analysis in
terms of the debate over race, ethnicity, and national identity that reverberated throughout the culture in the early 1920s.
We see in an argument like Deckers an effort to use social and historical context in order to move discussion of ethnicity in the novel beyond
questions of perceived bias or racism and into a more complex terrain; his
objective, broadly speaking, is to consider textual representation in light
of a broader social representations and discourse. A similar evolution can
be traced in discussion of gender and sexuality in the novel. We recall
the pioneering reevaluations of the character of Daisy in the late-1970s
essays of Korenman, Person, and Fetterley. Further work in the coming
two decades would progress from recapitulation to complication of the
points these writers raised. Sarah Beebe Fryers 1984 essay Beneath the
Mask: The Plight of Daisy Buchanan seems philosophically aligned with
Person and Fetterleys discussion of the characters victimization but goes
about making its case in different manner, by defending Daisys character
traits and personality. Fryer mines various scenes of the novel, with an eye
toward peeling back Nicks judgmental opinions and revealing the true
character beneath, and praises Daisys hopeful nature (158), capacity
for feeling (160) and stubborn honesty (165). Nicolas Tredell aptly
points out that Fryers discussion suffers from the fallacy of treating
Daisy as if she were a real person (Tredell, 137), but then again, perhaps the weight of decades of critical vilification warranted the approach.
In any case, Fryer does offer a valuable reminder that our perception of
Daisy is in large measure a construct of our readerly allegiance with or
subservience to, depending on how you look at it Nick Carraways
perspective.
While Fryer continued the examination of patriarchal bias in the
text, other critics would dig deeper into what Keath Fraser had dubbed
the atmosphere of sexual anarchy in the novel. Picking up on many of
Frasers points, Edward Wasiolek reads the novel as a tale of repressed
homosexual love between Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby. As with Fryers
essay, one sometimes gets the sense from Wasiolek that he is attempting
to read the characters minds or emotions, as if they were real people,
about whom only he knows the real story: Nick favors Gatsby because
he favors what Gatsby is, feels so intensely for Gatsby because he feels
what Gatsby feels. Put bluntly we are confronted with the sympathy of
one homosexual for another. Is there anything in or [sic] text to support this. Yes, rather blatantly so (Drama, 18). As for this blatant
evidence, Wasiolek discusses the McKee scene and Nicks description of
Jordans body, as had Fraser a decade and a half earlier. Wasiolek praises
Frasers essay but faults him for being too timid . . . in making firm and
definite Nicks homosexual proclivities (19). The quest for a firm case
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leads Wasiolek to consider Jordan and Daisy in many ways parallel

characters, as he aptly notes as what might be called, in the vernacular,
beards for Nick and Gatsby, respectively.
Wasiolek is not always careful, however, in his reading of the text (or in
his spelling, but that is another matter); en route to proving his case about
Nicks homosexuality, he hones in on the manliness of Jordan, pointing
out, When she perspires the suggestion of a moustache appears on her
upper lip (1920). This is a misreading of the text; Nick is not describing Jordan in that passage, but rather recalling how his lady friend from
back home in Minnesota would perspire when playing tennis. Ultimately,
Wasiolek finds homosexuality everywhere in the text; even seemingly
hyper-hetero Tom Buchanan fits the mold, as we learn that his exaggerated masculinity is as much a sign of his homosexuality as is Gatsbys idealism (21). While the premise of exploring the sexual dynamics of the text is
an absolutely valid one and indeed, the definitive essay on the topic may
be yet to be written Wasioleks take on the issue suffers from the lack of
a theoretical framework or rationale. Where one might expect some synthesizing remarks about the discussion, instead the essay ends with an absurd
conclusion that expounds, without evidence, upon the repressed homosexuality and other psychosexual demons that tore apart Scott Fitzgerald
himself He kept his fears at bay by hatred and repugnance. And for a
while it worked (22). This sounds rather more like the opening lines to a
film noir than the conclusion to an attempt at serious literary criticism.
A far more compelling and theoretically informed look at the novels
sexual dynamics can be found in Frances Kerrs 1996 essay, Feeling Half
Feminine. The title phrase, half feminine, comes from a description
Fitzgerald once made of his own sensibility as a writer: I dont know
what it is in me or that comes to me when I start to write. I am half
feminine at least my mind is (in Turnbull, 259). Kerr situates this
and other remarks Fitzgerald made about feminine aesthetic sensibilities
within a larger framework of masculinist discourse pervasive among male
writers in the modernist period. Male modernists, Kerr argues, tended
to associate serious literary effort and craft with masculine achievement;
conversely, the modernist avant-garde chose female images of disease,
fat, ignorance, laziness, or sentimentality to signify a lack of either emotional or intellectual vigor (405). She provides numerous quips from
literary giants of the day, ranging from Pound and Joyce to Mencken
and Edmund Wilson, to support her contention. By reading the novel
against this modernist dialogue on the gender of emotion in art (406),
Kerr finds a compelling new angle into not only questions of ambiguous sexuality in the book, but also the seemingly time-worn issue of
Nick Carraways connection to his author. Kerr suggests that Nick, like
Fitzgerald, finds himself at the helm of a mans story, but one so wrought
with romantic longing that it threatens to teeter over at any moment into
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feminine sentimentality. Similarly, Nicks own idealistic admiration for

Gatsby can be read as a cover for a far stronger, emotional connection to
the gorgeous protagonist. The various feints and suppressions of Nicks
narrative are thus manifestations of Nicks gender trouble: Nicks fear of
being perceived as feminine and the secret knowledge that he is feminine
create the troubling fissures in his personality that we have traditionally
described as either moral lapses or narrative unreliability. . . . Nick acts
like a man, but sometimes feels like a woman (410).
Much as Deckers essay advances our understanding of ethnicity in
the novel through his careful analysis of contemporary discourse on race
in America, Kerrs examination of the text against the backdrop of modernist discourse on gender opens up new ways to look at sexuality in the
text.6 As opposed to Wasioleks relentless and relatively aimless outing
of male characters, Kerr, while examining several of the same relationships, reaches conclusions that situate the novel within its own historical and aesthetic moment in compelling ways. Consider her discussion
of the McKee episode. While noting that Nicks references to time at the
end of chapter 2 leave some three hours of time unaccounted for, hours
presumably spent with McKee, the important questions about Nick and
McKee center not so much on what transpired between them but rather
on the nature of their mutual attraction. In escaping the aggressive and
violent masculinity of Tom and leaving the party with McKee, the effeminate would-be artist, Nick traverses very different modes of masculinity
and male relationships, and his usual reserve seems to crumble. Nicks
suppression of details in the scene, a key moment in Fitzgeralds sexually ambiguous novel, connotes a sense of homosexual panic, a term
Kerr borrows from queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to describe an
anxiety over disclosure of feelings outside the heterosexual norm.7 In
this regard, the odd little episode at the end of chapter 2, consciously or
unconsciously ignored by critics for decades, is for Kerr a moment that
comments back on gendered and sexual anxieties that exist throughout
the novel and indeed have informed its aesthetics as well:
What is important here is not whether Nick feels homosexual desire
for Mr. McKee but Nicks responses to both McKee and Tom,
responses which create the ambiguity of the whole McKee episode.
Rather than an absolute ideological statement about feminine emotion in art or a clear revelation of Nicks sexuality or gender identity,
the chapter registers Fitzgeralds ambivalence toward the high modernist taboo on sentimentality and personal expression and perhaps
also anxiety about the nature of his own artistic talent. The chapters
strange gender transgressions suggest Fitzgeralds discomfort with
strict divisions between masculine and feminine behavior and personality. Homosexual panic, aesthetic and personal not explicit homosexual desire is the fragmented subtext of chapter 2. (416)
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In a more general sense, the notion we see here from Kerr of a text
in some way in conversation with the cultural discourses from which
it emerged reflects the influence of new historicist criticism, which
would continue to shape criticism of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries.
In fact, in a book published just a year before Kerrs essay appeared,
Bryan Washingtons The Politics of Exile (1995), we see another attempt
to situate both the gender and race dynamics of The Great Gatsby into
the context of broader social and literary discourse. Specifically, Washington considers Gatsby as a sort of response to Henry Jamess drama
of the American girl attempting to navigate the social order of the Old
World, Daisy Miller. Washington suggests that in the relationship
between Nick and Daisy Fay Buchanan, we are given something of a reimagining of the Winterbourne/Daisy Miller relationship in Jamess classic story. Like Winterbourne, Nick observes, classifies, and judges; also
like Winterbourne, it is in Nicks nature to moralize privately rather than
engage publicly. But it is the larger textual connections, for Washington, that are most significant: Both texts, he argues, express anxiety at,
even revulsion (46) over, the prospect of female sexuality, and both
are also preoccupied with defending an ideal of whiteness embodied in
their respective lead female characters. Hence, though Fitzgeralds connection to James had been argued from a technical and, to a lesser extent,
thematic standpoint for decades by this time, here we see a very different use of intertextual argument, one that situates the discussion specifically within the purview of late-twentieth-century literary criticism. Class,
race, gender, and sexuality are often invoked in the criticism of this age as
points of entry into unpacking literary texts. Taking a cue from poststructuralist theory which highlighted the discursive, socially constructed
nature of texts class, race, and gender theorists opened new avenues
of approaching classic texts by isolating and destabilizing what were seen
as socially constructed systems of meaning at work in the writing. Such is
the case with Washingtons take on Fitzgeralds anxious depiction of race
and sexuality in Gatsby.
Like Kerr, Washington uses as a jumping off point Sedgwicks notion
of homosexual panic; however, he extrapolates beyond the sexual confines of Sedgwicks formulation to see a text in various states of panic:
sexual, racial, and social (35). A measure of the impact that contemporary theory had had on Gatsby by this point is that Washington considers
his contention about racial anxiety and homosexual panic as central to
the novel to be hardly startling (35). Washingtons chapter on Gatsby,
in fact, provides a good example of both the strengths and weaknesses of
the politically inflected, 1990s-style of literary explication. In identifying
a fear of female sexuality as a driving force in the narrative, Washington
makes a compelling point. Like Paulson, he sees the female figure as split
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in the text, between Daisy (silenced and contained, and therefore acceptable) and Myrtle, who is, in all her vibrant, uncontrollable sexuality, the
potentially relentless force in this gendered cultural garden that must
be expeditiously weeded out because she places male (textual) authority
in . . . peril (41). In his discussion of racial panic, however, Washington provides an object lesson in the dangers of privileging the theory over
a careful reading of the text. While his contention that race dominates
the discourse (40) of the novel and that Fitzgerald ultimately supports
Tom Buchanans views is certainly a valid, arguable stance, his support of
this case is based largely on a misreading. The central point of evidence
offered is this:
Nick says of his mysterious neighbor: I knew I had discovered a
man of fine breeding after I talked with him for an hour. I said to
myself: Theres the kind of man youd like to take home and introduce to your mother and sister. . . . As I shall demonstrate, this is
an intricate textual moment. Arguably, it is at this point that Nicks
readiness to welcome Gatsby to the nativist family, to extend a fraternal embrace, is at its most pronounced. Given his earlier reservations about his background, Nicks renewed conviction that Gatsby
is indeed a man of fine breeding can be read as an ethnological
sigh of relief. (44)
Clever language about nativist families and ethnological sighs aside,

the problem with this analysis is that it is based entirely on a misreading. Nick Carraway never makes the man of fine breeding speech; the
speaker in the passage quoted is Meyer Wolfshiem. Indeed, the passage
is so characteristic of Wolfshiems manner of speaking, and so opposed
to Nicks, that it is difficult to understand the source of the confusion.
The analysis of this scene, unfortunately, continues: But complicating
the deliberation over bringing Gatsby home is desire itself. Does Nick
speak as a man, a woman, or both? Like Eliots Tiresias, Nick is within
and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible
variety of life . . . capable, that is, of being both male and female, Jew and
gentile, black and white (45). Again, the rhetorical flourishes here are
based on nonexistent textual evidence; there almost seems to be a suggestion made that Nick is deliberating about taking Gatsby home to his
family in the Midwest. To point out these interpretive errors is not to discount valid ideas that Washington advances, but rather to note that fidelity to the text matters; and we see not only in this work, but also in those
of Wasiolek and Kerr, characters misidentified and resultant interpretive
gaffes that seem to slight the integrity of the text in favor of advancing
methodological or theoretical points.8 While contemporary theory of the
late twentieth century enlivened literary analysis by moving beyond the
New Critics narrow focus on merely the internal dynamics of the text, in
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so doing it also presented the risk of loose handling of the text itself. The
central New Critical axiom of close reading of the literary text careful treatment and consideration of what is on the page is something
that should not go out of style in literary analysis, regardless of the prevailing mode of discourse.
To be sure, close reading of Gatsby was by no means a thing of the
past in this era; several notable works of the eighties and nineties used
particularly close textual analysis to advance understanding of narrative
perspective and image patterns in the work. Andr Le Vot, in his 1983
biography of Fitzgerald, examines patterns of light and darkness in the
novel, taking in a new direction the discussion of color imagery that dates
back to the sixties. Donald Monk, in his very well argued 1983 article,
Fitzgerald: The Tissue of Style, looks more broadly at image patterns
in the book, arguing that the interlocking patterns not only enhance the
story, but in effect are the story, far more so than character or plot. Monk
traces the pattern of images related to the sporting life and deftly shows
how this pattern is linked to the novels larger concern about fabricated
self-image. Arnold Weinstein, in his 1985 essay Fiction as Greatness,
focuses on how Fitzgeralds linguistic and dramatic inventiveness finds its
thematic counterpart in the repeated trope of self-invention in the novel.
He spends much of the essay examining a passage almost entirely ignored
by critics, the Blocks Biloxi discussion that transpires between the
group at the Plaza hotel, just before Toms showdown with Gatsby commences. Calling it the most fascinating sequence of The Great Gatsby
(33), Weinstein argues that the group conversation about a man who may
or may not have even existed highlights the notion of the individual as
irrepressible ghost, of the complete self-made man as a construct
of words (34). In this regard, Biloxi, the liberated signifier that can
be shaped to yield countless . . . signifieds (37), not only mirrors the
self-made Gatsby, but embodies the novels larger playfulness, its repeated
insistence that, as Nick says, Anything can happen . . . anything at all
(GG, 55).
Further close readings managed to shed new light on what by this
point could be seen as a well-worn theme, the notion of the novel as
a meditation on American history. John Rohrkemper in 1985 touched
on a recurring pattern in which historical or mythic allusions are shown
to devolve, in the present day, into shadows or even perversions of their
former selves. Hence, the figure of Daniel Boone de-evolved to Buffalo
Bill Cody as embodied in Dan Cody (156) suggests a loss of genuine
American vitality and spirit, as does the reimagining of Franklins plan
for moral perfection in Gatsbys boyhood schedule and list of General
Resolves scribbled into his copy of Hopalong Cassidy. The net difference,
again, is a loss of founding American idealism: Gatsbys plan, unlike
Franklins, makes no mention of moral improvement; his goal appears
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never to be more than success material success. Fitzgerald seems to

suggest throughout the novel that, in pursuit of our dreams, we have
abandoned that element which connects them with the larger dream
(157). The valley of ashes as a poisoned farm is, in Rohrkempers
reading, a further example of this patterning in which mythical American allusions become debased: It is Jeffersons agrarian ideal corrupted
in modern America (160). In a related vein, John Callahan argues that
the American ideal of the pursuit of happiness is transformed, in the
novel, into a pursuit of property and possessions, resulting in an American world bleaker and, for all its glut of accumulations, more insubstantial than the spare, monotonous prairie James Gatz started from in rural
North Dakota (Evolving, 383).
Other critics focused more squarely on the workings of narrative.
Colin Cass, in a 1980 essay, grapples with Nicks role as a pander to
Gatsby and Daisys romance, noting that if Nick is indeed guilty of pandering then the moral weight of his narrative would be called into question. Rather than attempt to resolve Nicks character issues, as previous
critics had done, Cass instead views the conundrum over Nicks involvement in the affair as a problem of narrative perspective. Having chosen
the first-person form, Fitzgerald was forced into a position where his
narrator needed to be on hand at the novels key events. How, then, to
place Nick at the reunion scene while absolving him of culpability? Cass
argues that Fitzgerald pulls this off by having the normally astute Nick
fail to realize the seriousness of his actions in arranging the reunion.
Regarding Nicks thought that Gatsbys request of him to set up the
reunion was really such a little thing (GG, 62), Cass comes to the
interesting conclusion that Fitzgerald here consciously allows Nick to
miss the point of the request and fail to understand its larger moral
ramifications, in order that he can preserve Nicks integrity as a moralist
and the books conscience:
If Nick had refused on moral grounds, he would have excluded
himself from the books central scene. And if he had agreed with
a worldly tolerance for waywardness in others, then he would have
denied himself the right to the sweeping moral pronouncements that
the book begins and ends on. Fitzgeralds only choice is to make
Nick seem temporarily to have missed the point. For the plots sake
Nick must cooperate, but for the themes sake he must not appear
to cooperate with anything he recognizes as seriously immoral. Furthermore, the author does all he can to distract us from the moral
ramifications of what does amount to pandering. (12021)
Cass goes on to play off Nicks role in this arrangement against the famous
Dutch sailors passage at the end of the novel, comparing the two images
of pandering in the novel and weighing Nicks culpability. Ultimately, Cass
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argues that there is so much evidence of Fitzgeralds efforts to underscore

Nicks credibility and basic moral soundness that Fitzgerald intends that
the reader should not regard Nick as a pander (122).
Where Cass saw problems with perspective, others examined the
complexity of time in the narrative. Thomas Pendleton, in his 1993
book Im Sorry About the Clock, studies with surgical detail the great
number of references to time, dates, and seasons that recur throughout the novel. In the process, Pendleton traces a series of chronological
inconsistencies and claims that these problems, unnoticed by scholars
and presumably nearly all of the books countless readers over the previous seventy years, seriously undermine its artistry. While allowing that
the novel is not totally without effective structuring elements (136),
Pendleton argues that The Great Gatsby cannot seriously be considered a
masterpiece due to its chronological errors and ambiguities. This argument, however, is based on a narrow and prescriptive view of how time
and chronology ought to work in a novel, and also on the sense that
Fitzgerald was not in control of the storyline he was creating; others
would argue that the playfulness with time is part of the novels modernist vision and that the fragmentation of the linear narrative is probably far from haphazard (J. Skinner, 135). Indeed, for some, temporal
disjunctions comprise the very essence of the novels deepest meanings.
Tony Magistrale and Mary Jane Dickerson, in a 1989 essay, make such
an argument about Gatsby. The use as a framework Russian literary critic
Mikhail Bakhtins notion of the literary chronotope, a moment of temporal/spatial intersection in the text that heightens the readers awareness of time and place. They see the reunion scene, and particularly the
incident with the defunct clock from which Pendleton takes the title of
his book, as one such chronotope that embodies the texts larger drama
of competing systems of time at work. Their analysis deftly uncovers the
serious nuances of the funny scene:
That Gatsby has been reunited with Daisy gives momentary substance to his belief that the advance of history can be altered or
even halted. And this thesis is symbolically portrayed as Gatsbys
head, the place where his memories of the past originate, is juxtaposed with the broken clock. Actual contact between head and
defunct clock, then, suggests a conscious suspension of time in
which Gatsby has conquered the passage of time itself. Moreover,
this scene is an illustration of Bakhtins time-space relationship:
Gatsby exists physically in one temporal arena, but mentally inhabits quite another. The clock occupies the center of the chronotope
here, as it is materially representative of time in the present, but
actually is not, like Gatsby himself, an accurate or valid manifestation of what it appears to be. (122)
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The Bakhtinian perspective used here helps us to see the temporal dislocations of the novel as something other than mere inconsistencies or
faults, as Pendleton would have it. They can also be viewed as central to
the narratives mode of signification.
Indeed, the theoretical work of Bakhtin, which was translated into
English in the 1970s and 80s, proved very influential to literary critics
and theorists in the last two decades of the century. We see other Bakhtinian approaches to The Great Gatsby in this period, including Richard Goddens compelling 1982 essay, The Great Gatsby: Glamor on the Turn.
Godden invokes Bakhtins notion of the carnivalesque that which playfully inverts or distorts accepted social norms from his work Problems of
Dostoevskys Poetics, to explain Gatsbys self-invention: Gatsby . . . might
be the very spirit of carnival. Reality is laughable because it is changeable.
Gatsby was Jay Gatz, and look at him now. Daisy loves him through his
property perhaps she too may be changed (352). Here Bakhtin helps
Godden contextualize his case that the novel provides an example of a
work existing on two different levels of meaning, the fabricated drama
played out by characters who are themselves putting on a glamorous, carnivalesque show, and the deeper drama of Nick Carraways narration and
its significance. Elsewhere, in stressing the staged nature of the action,
Godden relates the plot to Brechtian drama to make a similar point. This
fascinating essay shows what theoretically informed reading can do with
an open text like The Great Gatsby; rather than enforcing a single analytical framework onto the text, Godden surveys the field, drawing from
Marxian, poststructuralist, and psychoanalytic theories in an essay whose
playful nature matches that of the text it studies.
The goal of the essay, itself related to Bakhtins notion of the doublevoiced text, is to show the reader how to look beyond the sheen of the
dramatic action, to discover what he calls Nick Carraways furtive text,
the novel within a novel (371) hidden beneath the glamorous surface.
In contrast to what he sees as the slack and obscuring language (359)
that characterizes the bulk of the critical interpretations over the years,
Godden sees in the story a hidden tale of class warfare, one that is submerged in Nicks narrative precisely because Nicks ambivalence toward
his own class (360) prevents him from speaking plainly about such matters. The passage in which Godden reveals this thesis, beginning with his
invitation to the reader to think of Gatsbys death as a minor skirmish in
a continuing class war (359), is worth quoting at some length:
In such a reading, Tom Buchanan, having disembodied his own
wife for purposes of display, needs to approach denied satisfactions
through the body of the working-class female; an upwardly mobile
Gatsby seeks status via the release and theft of the feminine leisure
class body. In response, Tom extends the hegemony of his class to
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the abused industrial male. (One can only speculate on how it was
done, but it would seem likely that appeals to sexual ownership
prompt a man with minimal property to murder Gatsby and destroy
himself.) The double death secures Buchanans grip on the leisure
class token and releases him from the growing threat of his own
uneasy liaison with the industrial class. Along the way vengeance
is enacted by the leisure class female on the offending body of her
working-class counterpart one of Myrtles breasts is left flapping,
the blood drains away and her vitality is conspicuously evacuated.
Nick cannot afford to write this kind of murder story. . . . Consequently, whenever the contradictions within his subject become too
disquieting, he turns social aspiration into dream, sexual politics
into romance, and translates class conflict as tragedy. (359)
While the notion of considering Gatsbys class dynamics was not

new and indeed, other critics of this time would examine the book
from Marxian and Veblenian perspectives Goddens unique contribution lies in his textual approach to class issues in the novel; the idea of a
second, furtive text of class warfare running in contraposition to the
glamorous surface text adds yet another twist to our understanding of the
novels essential doubleness.9
A Bakhtinian perspective of the double-voiced or dialogic text also
anchors one of the more theoretically complex discussions of the novel
from the 1980s, Michael Holquists 1988 Stereotyping and Historiography: Colonialism in The Great Gatsby. While the title might suggest
an examination of attitudes toward race and ethnicity in the novel, in fact
Holquist approaches the concept of stereotyping from a linguistic perspective. Following Bakhtins notion of dialogism, Holquist begins his
analysis by working through a philosophical discussion of the relationship between self, other, and language. Holquist argues that notions of
self-identity, themselves contingent on immersion in the symbolic field of
language, involve a constant negotiation between self and other. Much as
the linguistic sign can only aspire to confer fixed meaning on an object
through the silencing of other potential or contingent meanings, the
self can only be defined through contraposition to knowable others.
Hence, to label or define the other is to attempt to secure ones own selfdefinition, through the linguistic act of stereotyping. For Holquist, it is
thus in the nature of how we use language to stereotype, and therefore
all literary texts, not merely postcolonial works, will evidence the use and
power of the stereotype. He argues that The Great Gatsby is an exemplary text in this regard, because it textualizes its own stereotyping with
the clarity of a paradigm: in large measure it is about the suppression
of difference and change required to maintain the (stereotypical) illusion
of identity and stasis (463). If, as Holquist argues, all characters in the
book stereotype others, there is no greater stereotypical figure than Jay
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Gatsby himself, a composite figure . . . of key American stereotypes

(469) whose self-creation amounts to an effort to step outside the boundaries of the symbolic order, outside of time itself, and enter the realm of
the mythic. That Nick repeats this gesture in his own portrayal of Gatsby
underscores the power of stereotyping in the narrative.
While Bakhtinian analyses such as those of Holquist and Godden combine precisely detailed textual readings with an eye toward the broader social
relevance of the text, the theoretical school of narratology features a tighter
focus on the workings an narrative itself, offering, as one critic put it, the
opportunity to explore how a novels formal structures create its aesthetic
effects (Coleman, 208). Narratological analysis of The Great Gatsby may be
said to have reached its zenith in Patti Whites 1992 book, Gatsbys Party.
White uses Nicks famous list of guests who had attended Gatsbys parties as
a jumping off point for discussing the prevalence and function of such listing
in modern narratives. What makes Nicks list paradigmatic, White argues, is
its dual functioning both as a meaning-rich component of the narrative and
as an identifiable, self-referential structural marker of how meaning is transmitted in the narrative. That is, for White, the logic of listing as seen in Gatsby
reflects the larger function of narrative, which entails using listing, patterning,
and other internal structures as a way of limiting and organizing information
to create a meaningful whole or, as White puts it, as a means of maintaining order in the face of encroaching chaos (29).
Like many others who work from a narratological perspective, White
writes with a scientists eye for detail and structure of narrative; thus, useful insights into the functioning of the narrative sometimes need to be
unpacked patiently from a blur of dense, multisyllabic pronouncements.
For example, after helpfully defining novels as supersystems composed
of a series of coherent and cooperative systems (59) such as the author
system, reader system, and textual system, White digs deeper into what
makes the textual system of Gatsby work:
The narratological component of The Great Gatsby is a function of
internal operations that categorize data and transmit formal codes in
a structural language. . . . Gatsbys entire systemic structure suggests
a realization of pattern recognition and formal transmission, and certainly its narrative strategy is initiated by Nick Carraways attempts
to collect, filter, and categorize information about Jay Gatsby. And
that strategy is formalized by Carraways subsequent codification
of information into a transferable structure. Thus, Carraways narrative is informed by his information-processing endeavors, which
are themselves informed by the patterns into which Gatsby data
clusters resolve over time. Indeed, a multiscalar recursive symmetry,
encoding pattern recognition and translation procedures, operates
between and across each systemic level so that the Gatsby supersystem is pattern dependent at any point of observation. (6364)
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Does any of that sound familiar? It should, but it may not. Essentially,
what we have here is a return to the discussion, popular from the early
sixties onward, of the importance of patterning in the novel. One might
recall Bruce Starks observation, from some twenty years earlier, that
the rich patterns of the book are elements in an extremely complex
and unified system of internal, nonreferential meanings. . . . Its words
cannot be separated and attached to sign-values: all possible sign-values
of a word are absorbed into a complexity of verbal relations (59). And
while it is true that narratology (and some strains of poststructuralism)
could be said to be, with their intense focus on the formal properties of
the text, dressed-up New Criticism, it is what the narratologists do with
their focus on patterning and narrative systems that sets this later criticism apart.
White, for example, renders all of the critical huff over Nick Carraways credibility, character, and morality over the years to be utterly
beside the point, at least from a systemic perspective. For White, Nick is
important as the structuring agent of the narrative, the one who decides
what goes into and what gets left out of his account of Jay Gatsby. It goes
without saying, therefore, that he will privilege some types of information
and exclude others; this fact is not evidence of unreliability or deception
but rather part of the very essence of his role as narrator to manage
information, to communicate messages, to control chaos. In a sense part
of Whites argument recalls Peter Liscas interesting 1967 essay, Nick
Carraway and the Imagery of Disorder. Whereas Lisca had argued that
Nick served as a mediating factor amidst the social chaos that surrounded
him within the world of the novels action, for White, his role is to impose
a sense of order on textual chaos. It is the nature of narration itself to
attempt to create, through selectivity, patterning and internal signification, some kind of order from a chaotic plenitude of material, an alwayslooming textual riot that constantly threatens disorder. Nick as narrator is
therefore neither to be lauded nor condemned for his moral fiber; what
matters is the tension that runs throughout the novel between Nicks
success and failure in transmitting his vision of Gatsby and of the events
of that summer. The guest list itself is the embodiment of this tension:
With its extensive length, detail, and intimations of ethnic and class affiliations among the summers guests, it aspires to represent a fullness (68),
but Nicks omissions, failures of memory, and inclusion of seemingly
unnamed or interchangeable characters push the list into a condition of
ambiguity (69). Paradigmatically, self-referentially, the list embodies the
value of structure and pattern while simultaneously undercutting it. The
resultant ambiguity is nothing to fret over; indeed, it is, as White suggests
in her provocative summary of the battle between order and chaos in the
narrative of Gatsby, the name of the game:
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Complex systems thrive on imperfection, on environmental challenge and ambiguous data. Predictability and precision actually
squelch the . . . processes that enable complex systems to extend
their operations; without internal or external chaos to manage, such
systems become unregenerative, inert, and doomed. . . . With sufficient variation and difficulty in the data pool, however, systems
flourish, inhabiting a region that fluctuates between order and
chaos. (70)
The objective and precise language of narratology evident in the

above passage from White, with its references to complex systems and
their operations, drawn from a varied data pool threatens on
occasion to make literature sound more like a science than an art. Nonetheless, the objectivity and precision of narratology help to generate acute
insights into the workings of narrative; for a richly crafted and complicated narrative like the one Fitzgerald produced in The Great Gatsby, such
textual insights enhance our understanding of the works significance.
A very different kind of textual approach to Fitzgeralds writing in The
Great Gatsby perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a contextual approach can be seen in Ronald Bermans two books on the novel
from the 1990s, works with which we will complete our discussion of
Gatsby criticism in the 1990s. In contrast to formalist critics who looked
inwardly at the workings of the narrative, in The Great Gatsby and Modern Times (1994) and The Great Gatsby and Fitzgeralds World of Ideas
(1997), Berman looks outward; using a kind of dialectical perspective,
he works to situate the novel within its own historical moment, arguing
that the text reveals its authors deep engagement with both the popular
culture of his day and, perhaps more significantly, intellectual and philosophical conversations afoot at the time.
In The Great Gatsby and Modern Times, Berman situates the characters and events of the novel within the prevailing cultural context of its
times no, not the world of bathtub gin and flapper dresses, but a world
caught up in the onrush of modernity, where fixed ideas and identities
were dissolving in a new, fluid social order. Berman examines how echoes
of this spirit of modernity infuse the text. The spectacular assemblage of
settings and place references few other works of fiction locate themselves so firmly among so many identified places (45) inexorably
dissolves into a sense of geographic confusion, reflective of modern rootlessness and drift (44), and a repeated yearning for a lost Eden (46);
some characters attempts at self-reinvention from Jimmy Gatzs anglicizing of his name to Myrtle Wilsons relentless decorating and accessorizing echo the ages spirit of self-improvement as seen in popular
periodicals and through the advertising industry; other characters tendency to pose and don temporary, contrived identities such as Daisy,
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who generally plays to an audience and has a shrewd sense of how she
is being received (114) reflects the influence of the visual mass media
and arts, stage and film, on one hand, and print advertising, on the other;
and in a larger sense, the text as a whole, particularly Fitzgeralds use of
the visual code and his handling of dramatic scenes, displays the profound
influence of motion pictures on the novel. We might say that Bermans
work in this study approaches the novel from an intertextual perspective,
illuminating in fresh and exciting new ways the sense of how the novel
was in conversation with ideas, concerns, and attitudes bubbling throughout the popular culture of the day.
In The Great Gatsby and Fitzgeralds World of Ideas, Berman pushes
his contextual discussion in directions that open the text to yet more
new approaches. Arguing for a new outlook on Fitzgeralds writing that
accepts and analyzes the authors engagement with his own historical
moment, Berman reacts against both the critical tradition that insists on
viewing the novel from a mythic, and thus trans-historical, standpoint,
and the work of scholars who would impose a contemporary historical
perspective on a work from an entirely different generation and historical moment indeed, from a different America and a different world. A
founding assumption of Bermans approach is his revaluation of Fitzgerald as a member of an artistic and intellectual community: Fitzgerald was
a first-rate observer of the American scene. It is, I think, no longer possible to think of him as a lightweight; he was, in fact, more knowledgeable and considerably more sensible than those who have confused his life
with his mind (23). Understanding the important argument that Berman puts forth in this work necessitates some context of its own: To be
sure, Berman is not the first scholar to have suggested Fitzgeralds connection to prevailing philosophical questions and issues. As noted in this
chapter and indeed throughout, Richard Lehan and others have studied
reflections of the philosophy of Spengler and of eugenicists and nativists
like Grant and Stoddard in The Great Gatsby, and others have likened the
texts recoiling from a chaotic modernity in favor of stable, mythic images
of the past to the prevailing tone of Henry Adamss influential The Education of Henry Adams (1905). Where Berman does break new ground is
in the cultural conversation within which he places Fitzgerald and, specifically, Gatsby. Arguing that the author was attuned to the ideas being
debated by the Public Philosophers of the age, including Santayana,
Dewey, Lippmann, and Royce, Berman claims that in both themes and
language, The Great Gatsby echoes a great American conversation (7)
that transpired throughout Fitzgeralds lifetime.
One example of this conversation in play in the text involves the
tension invoked throughout between the urban center and a series of landscapes of memory from images of pastoral myth to memories of childhood small towns. The tension that Fitzgerald sets up between the city
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and the provinces, Berman argues, responds to an ongoing debate about

the issue among the public philosophers. Following the lead of William
James, the principle figure of Public Philosophy (31), who linked the
modern city with anonymity and alienation, thinkers like Royce argued
for a return to the provinces as the answer to that sense of alienation. As
Berman notes, It is a plot that Fitzgerald considers; although it might be
said that he changes the scenario from a cavalry charge to an exhausted
retreat (36). Indeed, this idea of a retreat from the chaotic life of the
metropolis also situates the novel in conversation with the Public Philosophy in a larger sense: Unlike James and Royce, who argued the importance of the individuals active engagement with civil society (especially
the educated and well-to-do individual), a character like Tom is quick to
pronounce his verdict on society, but utterly unwilling to engage with his
world or lend his considerable energies to it: Toms response is to see
America and the modern world of which it is a part as a pigsty.
He and Daisy will retreat from it, close themselves off hermetically from
present realities. The response itself is an American issue, transplanted by
Fitzgerald from contemporary arguments on the need to come to terms
with the times (4142). On the other side of the coin is a character like
Myrtle Wilson, who devotes all her energy into being part of a larger social
scene but who lacks any sort of social agency that would allow her to direct
her energies productively. Instead with her mind tactically shaped (51)
not only by Tom but also by middle-brow popular culture, via magazines
like Town Tattle and its advertisements, Myrtles vitality results only in an
unquenchable acquisitiveness that leads to the humorously cramped and
chaotic furnishing of her apartment in Washington Heights. As Berman
notes, the physical chaos that ensues there also can be read as a fictive representation of the concern over chaotic modern times expressed throughout the culture, from the realm of the Public Philosophy to the literature of
Fitzgeralds fellow American authors.
Indeed, Berman traces a larger theme of contrast between contemporary social chaos and the social order of an imagined or faded past
throughout the work. He analyzes the nature of Gatsbys parties their
inevitable descent from the outmoded sense of order embodied by their
host to the chaos that prevails later on as well as Nicks famous list of
Gatsbys guests as textual embodiments of this tension:
Fitzgerald is sympathetic to the energies of the new majority, but
he is also aware that the democratic crowd in the early twenties
was a literary and political trope of disorder. The writings of the
Public Philosophy address the crowd as a danger to community.
The crowd is the reason why national character must be leavened
by aristocracy: that is, by those who really are what Tom Buchanan
wants to be. (93)
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That is, the peculiarly democratic social world that Gatsby builds, with its
mix of old-guard clans and immigrant family names, connotes not just a
sense of interchangeability (Berman aptly points to Nicks description of
Benny McClenahans four girls, who are never quite the same ones
in physical person but . . . so identical one with another that it inevitably
seemed they had been there before [GG, 50]), but also an undermining
of the social register altogether. In this sense, Fitzgerald is delving into an
area of great concern to philosophers such as Santayana, who dreaded the
prospective vulgarization of society, should the masses be allowed to influence the broader culture without the moderating presence of an aristocratic tradition. Fitzgerald, Berman argues, not only imagines Santayanas
fear in Gatsby but in fact has made the case more extreme: the aristocracy
has not affected the mass but has been absorbed by it. In the process, it
has been denatured (95). What is left of the aristocratic influence, in the
world of this novel, is two-faced Tom Buchanan objecting to the menagerie of Gatsbys home, and then dashing off at Gatsbys party, under
cover of the raucous crowd, to try to pick up another woman.
Bermans analysis in this work sets itself apart from much previous
critical (and, for that matter, biographical) work on Fitzgerald through its
insistence on seeing Fitzgeralds thinking and writing in general and
The Great Gatsby in particular as part of its cultural and historical
moment. That this moment was something far more than a riotous Jazz
Age stereotype and in fact reveals itself to be, on examination, a fascinating period in our history when highbrow culture met low, when artists
were alive to the stirrings of a more widely accessible world of popular
culture, and when philosophy was part of the public domain and life, is a
key contribution of Bermans scholarship in his two books on Gatsby from
the nineties. That his work has been influential can be seen in the number
of works already published in the twenty-first century that attempt, in
various ways, to consider The Great Gatsby through the lens of historical,
intellectual, and cultural context.
Notes
1
By this point, the grail quest theme had been covered many times by critics.
Indeed, the parallel had been a staple of critical discussion since the novel first
began to be taken seriously by critics. As noted in chapter 2, one of the earliest
scholarly essays of merit, William Troys Scott Fitzgerald: The Authority of Failure, established many areas of interest that would be explored by future scholars.
Among these was his assertion that By means of its enforced perspective the
book takes on the pattern and the meaning of a Grail-romance or of the initiation ritual on which it is based (57).
Misspelling the last name of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg (as Eckleberg [214]) is

one thing, but these writers also misread a section of the text, a little piece of
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characterization in which Nick describes Gatsbys lavish bathroom, including

his toilet set of pure gold (GG, 91). In their reading, Kehl and Cooper refer
to Gatsbys toilet seat of pure gold (213), invoking an unintentionally funny
scatological image probably better left on their own editing room floor (though
thankfully not!).
3
As Lehan notes, Fitzgerald wrote to Max Perkins, I read [Spengler] the summer I was writing The Great Gatsby, and I dont think I ever quite recovered from
him (in Lehan, Destiny, 137). See Letters of Scott Fitzgerald, 289.
In a 2006 essay, Joe Kraus argues a related point: Gatsby is no self-creation; he

is instead Wolfshiems creation. As a consequence, Gatsby is part of a four-century
game of moving from the outside in. . . . Gatsby may not be ethnic in the sense
that Wolfshiem is . . . but he is nonetheless someone caught up in the same forces
confronting anyone trying to find his or her way into what he imagines as America (141). Kraus argues that this strange parallel between Gatsby and the vilified,
stereotyped Jewish gangster provides a case in point for how the novel can be read
as a work of ethnic fiction.
For another view of how the novel reflects contemporary anxieties over ethnic
purity and reacts to the scientific literature being published on the topic, see
Bert Bender, His Mind Aglow: The Biological Undercurrent in Fitzgeralds
Gatsby and Other Works. Bender argues that the principles of eugenics, accidental heredity, and sexual selection (400) are central to the novel, and that in
his working through of these issues Fitzgerald was indebted to the biogenetic
theories of Ernest Haeckel, as put forth in his 1900 book, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century.
For a more recent exploration of gender in the novel that functions along similar
lines, see Greg Forters essay, Against Melancholia. Using the framework of
contemporary mourning theory, Forter argues that the novel mourns the loss of
an expressive form of masculine identity, as seen in Jay Gatsby.
See Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet. For a related discussion of how Fitzgeralds writing struggled with accepted gender definitions of the day, see Catherine B. Burroughs, Of Sheer Being, where Burroughs describes Fitzgerald as
keenly observant and deeply connected to the predicament facing both men and
women who rebel against gender roles. He is more attuned than any author I
know to the plight of the man who feels deeply and wants to express his emotions while still receiving assurances that society will accept him as a regular guy
(105).
Like Wasiolek, Kerr misidentifies Jordan as the woman whom Nick recalls sporting a moustache of perspiration when she plays tennis.
Arguing from a Marxist perspective, Ross Posnock in 1984 states that the novel
presents a capitalist society that Fitzgerald reveals to be profoundly incoherent
(202); E. Ray Canterbery in 1999 looks at the novel through the lens of Thorstein Veblens The Theory of the Leisure Class and concludes that the class distinctions made in The Great Gatsby are clearly Veblenian, not Marxist (303).
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5: Twenty-First-Century G: The Great

Gatsby as Cultural Icon
Performance (and) Anxiety: The
Cultural Turn in Gatsby Scholarship
hile it is surely too soon to make definitive statements about the

trajectory of Gatsby criticism in the new millennium, certainly
the industry is alive and well, as the volume of scholarly output continues unabated. While one could argue that the age of high theory has
passed, the theoretically informed approaches of the 1980s and 90s have
impacted the shape of Gatsby criticism to this day. Of particular note is
the sustained interest in the historicity of the text, and particularly how it
responded to the discourses of its own moment from pervasive notions
about race, gender, and national identity discussed in the popular magazines to the imagery offered in popular music and entertainment. A brief
look at some of the more interesting scholarly takes on Gatsby from the
new millennium shows a concerted effort to examine the novels cultural
relevance. Scholars are continuing to deepen the connection between the
text and its own age, and in the process expanding our understanding of
Fitzgeralds historical consciousness.
One of the primary sources for much of the innovative work on
Gatsby in the new century has been the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, an
annual journal of Fitzgerald studies, founded in 2002. The Review picks
up where the founding periodicals in Fitzgerald studies the quarterly
Fitzgerald Newsletter (195868) and the Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual
(196979) left off some years earlier, in providing scholars an opportunity to explore specific texts, approaches, and interpretive avenues free
of the constraints potentially imposed by more general interest journals.
The Review published some twenty articles devoted specifically to Gatsby
in the first decade of the century, and in this broad range of work there
is evidence of both traditional frameworks and entirely new directions.
While the influence study lives on, for example, the range of source material has taken interesting new turns: Dickens, Kipling, Chekhov, and
Chaucer were all explored as influences on Gatsby in separate Review
essays, while the already established connection to John Keats was pushed
in innovative new directions by Lauren Rule-Maxwell, in her 2010 Review
essay, The New Emperors Clothes. A number of essays continued the
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119
work of situating the novel more specifically within its cultural and intellectual moment: While Raymond M. Vince, in a 2006 essay, argued for
connections between Gatsby and the new physics of Einstein, and Ronald Berman, in 2005, considered the relationship between Fitzgeralds
writing and Freudian psychology in the 1920s, other critics published in
the Review explored further Fitzgeralds ties to the popular culture of the
day. Recent essays by Thomas Dilworth and Sharon Hamilton explore
Gatsbys connections to the contemporary worlds of advertising and gossip magazines, respectively. Eric Rawson, in a 2010 essay, examines the
novels links to emergent communication technology; he analyzes telephone calls as a structuring agent in the narrative, arguing convincingly
that a telephonic logic . . . collapsing real time and virtual space, is one
of the fundamental narrative strategies of The Great Gatsby (92).
If these essays suggest a desire among recent critics to push established models of thought about the novel in new directions, much the
same could be said about one of the first major twenty-first-century
Gatsby essays, Scott Donaldsons Possessions in The Great Gatsby. While
he approaches the book by way of examining its perspective on economics and class (a stable enough interpretive category, by now), Donaldson
focuses our attention squarely on the function of commodities in the text,
in the process granting Fitzgerald credit for a more complex and subtle
critique of American capitalism than had previously been noted by most
commentators. Donaldson employs Marxs notion of commodity fetishism the mistaken belief that a product has value in itself, outside of
the labor required to produce it in this compelling analysis of the relation between people and things in the novel.1 He argues that nearly all of
the major characters become so absorbed in the acquisition and display of
commodities (Veblen, and his key concept of conspicuous consumption,
also figure into this analysis) that they become overtaken by their own
fixation on material things and, in turn, are themselves reduced to commodities (201).
This sorry state is most apparent in the case of the two manslaughter
victims, the pair linked by their futile aspirations of social advancement,
Myrtle and Gatsby. Donaldsons analysis of these characters calls to mind
Pierre Bourdieus ideas on the links between cultural capital and class
distinction. Much as Bourdieu argues that acquired goods and aesthetic
dispositions together comprise the cultural capital that defines an individuals class position, Donaldson sees in the victims of this novel individuals who understand the need to participate in a culture game, but who
just dont know how to play it.2 Both Myrtle and Gatsby are guilty of a
crucial error in judgment. They are alike unwilling or unable to comprehend that it is not money alone that matters, but money combined with
secure social position. In the attempt to transcend their status through
a show of possessions, they are undone by the lack of cultivation that
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drives them to buy the wrong things (194). That their failure is essentially predetermined is a central point of Fitzgeralds critique of the class
system in the novel. Though critics often stress Fitzgeralds ambivalence
toward the moneyed classes, Donaldson argues that over the course of
his career Fitzgeralds admiration for the rich faded and his criticism of
their way of life intensified (198). If the somewhat offhanded nods to
socialist thought present in his first novel, This Side of Paradise, would
eventually lead to the attack on capitalism dramatized in Tender Is the
Night (198), then Gatsby, with its insistent focus on both thoughtless
acquisitiveness and the careless cruelty of the rich, marks, for Donaldson,
a turning point in Fitzgeralds economic sensibilities. Though he does
not consider Gatsby a Marxist novel It is highly unlikely that Fitzgerald had read any Marx when he wrote Gatsby, yet his political thinking
had come a long way since This Side of Paradise he does argue that
the novels critique of capitalism demonstrates that Fitzgerald intuitively
grasped and illustrated basic Marxian precepts (199).
One of the more compelling aspects of Donaldsons essay is his sense
of what we might call the performativity of class status, wherein characters attempt to adopt or act out some successfully, others not class
affiliations and attitudes gleaned from the popular culture of the day. In
a different but not unrelated vein, Kirk Curnutt, in his recent essay, The
Great Gatsby and the 1920s, explores the performance of romance and
sexuality in the novel, setting his analysis in the context of popular novels
and films of the day. The conclusions Curnutt reaches may surprise readers of today who might assume Gatsby to have been a racy novel for
its time. After all, we recall the shock of some contemporary newspaper
reviewers who recoiled at the moral looseness of the novel. But seeing the
book in its literary and pop-culture context, Curnutt argues that such an
understanding of the novel is quite far off the mark. He situates his discussion by arguing a key point about the 1920s: Every bit as much as the
fabled 1960s, the decade was obsessed with eros and eroticism (Great,
640). Curnutt cites as examples such works as Elinor Glyns bestselling
erotic romance novel, It (1927), and Edith Maude Hulls 1919 romance
novel, The Sheik, which was subsequently made into the immensely popular 1921 silent film of the same name, starring Rudolph Valentino. Seeing in such works evidence of a sexual revolution in the decade, Curnutt
argues that The Great Gatsby contrasts markedly with their eroticism, particularly in its protagonist, whose idealized sense of romance is a far cry
from the rapacious sexuality of a male lead like Hulls Sheik. In contrast
to the growing fad, in fiction and film, for seductive male leads, Curnutt
notes something often overlooked in The Great Gatsby: when compared
to such figures, Jay Gatsby does not strike one as particularly sexy (642).
Curnutts goal in this fresh look at romance and sexuality is to encourage
a reassessment of Fitzgeralds reputation not so much transforming
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him from libertine to prig (in the novels terms), but suggesting something more complex. Ultimately, Curnutt regards Fitzgerald not as the
standard-bearer for the newly open sexuality of the age, but a critic of it:
Gatsbys lack of sexual animalism reflects Fitzgeralds disenchantment
with the gender determinism that lay beneath the 1920s conception of
true romance (643).
Curnutts essay invites us to see the novel in a new light, through
the connections he builds to the popular novels that shared shelf space
with Gatsby. Similar connections to contemporary popular culture factor into one of the more ambitious essays published at the beginning of
the new century, Mitchell Breitweisers Jazz Fractures: F.Scott Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation. Breitweiser focuses his discussion on
the significance of jazz in the novel, arguing that the distinctly modern
musical form, African American in origin and essence yet already, in the
1920s, being appropriated by white orchestras and as entertainment for
white audiences, represents more than a musical backdrop to the action of
the book. Instead jazz, a musical form understood as energy and velocity (368) and associated with black culture, resonates with those elements of the narrative that threaten to disturb the unity of the society
depicted including Gatsby, the restless, not-quite-really-white roughneck (368). Breitweiser looks specifically at the composition played at
one of Gatsbys parties, a fictitious piece by an invented (and cheekily
named) composer, Vladimir Tostoffs Jazz History of the World
(GG, 41). He argues that this piece embodies the threat to organic unities posed by this insurgent, individualistic, improvised musical form and
includes discussion of a long passage from the manuscript version of the
novel in which Nick attempts to describe each of the movements of the
largely baffling Jazz History, a passage entirely deleted from the final,
published version. Nicks fascination and frustration with the composition
indicate Fitzgeralds own struggle to come to terms with the significance
of a musical form that was not only popular, but symbolically reflective of
the fractures, discontinuities, and improvisations of modern culture.
This is not the only essay of the new century to discuss Fitzgeralds
use of music in the novel. T. Austin Graham, in his recent article The
Literary Soundtrack, focuses on the popular music represented in the
text. He counters Breitweisers assertion that the insurgent African American art form of jazz has a particularly strong weight in Gatsby: Breitwiesers eloquent and compelling argument leaves untouched the novels
many real and literally audible songs, very few of which are likely to strike
the contemporary listener as signifying blackness in any meaningful way
(524). Instead, Graham highlights Fitzgeralds repeated references to
popular music, the ditties of the day that would have been as recognizable
to a contemporary reader as last years fashion trend. This approach, Graham argues, anchors Fitzgeralds mythic, imagined world in a specifically
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dated, eminently recognizable setting, reinforcing the novels signature

contrast of Platonic conception and persistent actuality (540).3 In his
discussion of Gatsby, Graham focuses particularly on the song Three
OClock in the Morning, which Daisy sings in a husky, rhythmic whisper (GG, 84) at Gatsbys final party. While Nick is enthralled by her
voice in the scene, finding her delivery bringing out a meaning in each
word that it had never had before and would never have again (84), Graham points out that Three OClock in the Morning is in fact a rather
obvious love song with the most self-evident of meanings. Yet Fitzgeralds
selection of songs for his novels soundtrack, Graham argues, deepens
characterization even in cases, such as this one, where it would appear to
suggest a sense of superficiality: Even when it seems so harmonious as to
be almost hackneyed, music makes Fitzgeralds point by negative rather
than positive example, in this scene rendering Daisy increasingly unknowable even as it seems to lay bare her mood and mind, pulling readers into
her performance at the same time that Fitzgerald points toward something in it that defies description (540). The persistent use of forgettable
pop music also highlights the fleeting, ephemeral nature not only of the
romances, but also of the society Fitzgerald depicts in the novel.
Meredith Goldsmith, in her 2003 essay White Skin, White Mask,
also turns to the issue of music, and particularly to Vladimir Tostoffs
Jazz History of the World, arguing that Fitzgeralds inclusion of this
fictitious piece draws our attention to the larger performativity of race and
ethnicity in the novel. In its appropriation of a black musical form for the
harmless entertainment of white guests, the piece embodies repeated textual echoes of hidden or subsumed ethnic identity: Like Gatsbys techniques of class assimilation, the Jazz History substitutes imitation for
authenticity: when the Jazz History actually uses jazz, it uses only the
pieces most familiar and unthreatening to a white middle-class audience
(455). Goldsmith, like Breitweiser, sees Fitzgeralds decision to remove a
long passage about the Jazz History as a significant suppression in the
text: The ultimate excision of the Jazz History masks parallels between
Gatsbys self-transformation, racial passing, and ethnic Americanization,
driving a deeper wedge between notions of race, ethnic, and workingclass difference (445). Much as the excised material highlighted a kind
of cultural conversation between white and black musical forms, the
protagonist of the novel follows a path toward cultural assimilation that
marks him as similar to protagonists of ethnic and African American novels of the early twentieth century. In noting that Nick compares Gatsbys
success to that of ethnic immigrants and Tom obliquely equates Gatsbys
romantic pursuit of Daisy to intermarriage between black and white
(GG, 101), Goldsmith argues that we can read Jay Gatsby as a character making an (ultimately failed) attempt to pass as white Anglo Saxon
and thus gain social acceptance. Indeed, Goldsmith claims that both the
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character of Jay Gatsby and the novel as a whole can profitably be read
in terms of a relationship to early-twentieth-century literary models of
black and ethnic self-invention (445).
In this focus on Gatsby as a character embodying ambiguous or
multiple ethnic identities, Goldsmith is by no means alone. In his 2001
Undiscovering the Country: Conrad, Fitzgerald, and Meta-National
Form, Peter Mallios argues that Jay Gatsby serves as the catalyst for
Nick Carraways ruminations on national identity precisely because of his
unknowable, and hence malleable, ethnic and class identity:
Just as Gatsby personally serves as the missing center of his parties no one ever seems quite sure where he is he also narratively serves as an elided site through which the novel ponders
the class, racial, and ethnic boundaries his presence seems to
blur. Gatsby is of the humblest social origins yet the highest class
approximation; he is a concrete intimate of Wolfsheim yet has had
(and will have again) concrete intimacy with Daisy; he summons
images of ethnic immigrants and internal racial minorities, and yet
he also captivates Nick Carraways imagination as cricket-playing
associate of the Earl of Doncaster at Oxford. Gatsby . . . occupies
the social center of his novel . . . because he marks the border zone
where worlds collide. (370)4
In this reading, Gatsby thus allows Nick to envision a pluralistic national

identity while also claiming Gatsby as one his own. While the portrayal
of Gatsby in the text is evidence of Nicks own ambivalent national
vision, Gatsby also becomes the site at which Nick attempts, through
various strategies, to assemble narratives of American cultural continuity (384). In contrast to Goldsmith, who argues that Gatsbys attempts
to work his way into East Egg society are akin to contemporary narratives of racial passing, Mallios sees the stubborn vacancy at the heart of
Jay Gatsby Mr. Nobody From Nowhere as something of a philosophical or rhetorical tool with which Nick, and Fitzgerald, work to create a vision of national identity.
Or, on the other hand, perhaps Jay Gatsby is black. This is the contention raised by Carlyle Van Thompson in his 2004 book, The Tragic Black
Buck. Thompson takes Goldsmiths argument to another level: Where
Goldsmith saw philosophical and narrative correlations to narratives of
racial passing, Thompson declares that Gatsby is in fact a narrative of racial
passing: Indeed, the narrative constantly whispers the presence of blackness. Fitzgeralds extravagant protagonist and antihero Jay Gatsby is the
manifestation of his creators deep-seated apprehensions concerning miscegenation between blacks and whites, in that Fitzgerald, writing about
the quest for the American Dream, guilefully characterizes Jay Gatsby as a
pale black individual who passes for white (75). Thompsons argument
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is based on the sound assumption that Jay Gatsby is, in fact, passing
himself off as something other than he is, and moreover the discussions of
the both the novels and authors racial attitudes are effective. The essay
strains credulity, however, in that no convincing evidence is offered to
explain why one should consider Jay Gatsby to be an African American
character. Thompsons assertions that Fitzgeralds descriptions of Gatsbys extravagant parties and mode of dress create a minstrel image of
the character, one akin to a black actor in whiteface (85) lack sufficient
textual support to make the claim hold. The case becomes yet more tenuous when Daisy is identified as another black character passing for white;
here, the discussion reaches outside the world and language of the novel
altogether in search of support:
Daisys names hold an interesting racial possibility, because daisies
are flowers that have mixed colors. In terms of Fitzgeralds naming
of Daisy Buchanan, according to Websters International Dictionary
a nigger daisy is yellow outside and brown inside. The suggestion
here is Daisy may also be a product of miscegenation or possibly
a light-skinned black woman passing as white. Fitzgerald delicately
whispers this possibility through naming and characterizations. (83)
Analysis such as this suggests the limits inherent in imposing a theoretical

framework on a text in too lockstep a fashion. While Thompsons analysis, like Goldsmiths, usefully complicates our understanding of the drama
of Gatsbys attempts at passing, his reliance on a black-white binary
unnecessarily limits the discussion of a text that does display, as Thompson notes, manifold racial and ethnic anxieties.
A more sound and compelling treatment of Gatsby as both ethnic
outsider and, paradoxically, American Everyman can be found in Barbara
Wills 2005 essay, The Great Gatsby and The Obscene Word. As the
title of the essay suggests, Will focuses in specifically on the moment, in
the penultimate scene of the novel, in which Nick spies an obscene word
scrawled on Gatsbys steps; Nick erases the word, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone (GG, 140). Will aptly notes that few critics discuss
the scene at all, much less consider it particularly significant (I also look
at this scene, from a different perspective, in my essay on the novel, which
I will discuss shortly). For Will, the passage is crucial, in that the erased
obscenity can be thought of, both symbolically and textually, as reflecting Gatsby himself. Like an obscenity, a textual symbol that is unspeakable because it lies outside the boundaries of conventional signification,
Gatsby is a figure who problematizes the nature of figuration itself, drawing the text toward an abject void. . . . But Gatsby is also a figure whose
obscenity lies in the challenge he poses to the presentable, to the natural
and the normal (128). Like the obscenity that must be erased in order
to preserve a sense of decorum, Gatsby is a figure outside the bounds of
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normal society, a threatening figure of the alien, unassimilable (128)

to the larger culture. In this regard, Will links Gatsby to the figure of the
ethnic others who so threaten a Nordicist like Tom Buchanan. By calling attention to Nicks erasure of the obscenity, Will argues, Fitzgerald
deliberately emphasizes the process through which the whitewashing
of Gatsbys reputation takes place (128). In this fascinating reading of
the unjustly overlooked scene, Will demonstrates that it is only through
the erasure of his obscene properties that Gatsby becomes eligible to
stand in for a mythic vision of America in the novels famous close. Following points made by Decker and others, she suggests that it is Gatsbys
mysterious origins and background, his racial indeterminacy (132),
that must be removed if he is to come, as Lionel Trilling famously put
it, inevitably to stand for America itself. Because it is erased, Gatsbys obscenity becomes the absence that allows the texts ultimate presence to emerge: the presence of generations of Nordic American settlers,
mythically united for a moment in Nicks transhistorical vision of national
essence (139).
The Schoolmasters of Ever Afterward:

Gatsby in the Classroom
Several other essays touching on issues of race, class, historicity, and national
vision in the novel would appear in the first major collection of new essays
on Gatsby in the new century, Jackson Bryer and Nancy VanArsdales
Approaches to Teaching Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby (2009). In some
ways, it is no surprise that a number of significant essays on Gatsby from
the new millennium would come from a volume devoted to approaches to
teaching the novel. While this study has looked at various reasons for the
ascent of The Great Gatsby from forgotten period piece to national classic from initial biographical interest in Scott Fitzgerald, to the emergence of American literature studies under the aegis of the New Criticism
and the subsequent search for richly patterned works that reflected American themes, to the dense social and historical valences of the book that
seem ever ripe for new interpretations one key factor that has been lurking in the background all along has been the use of The Great Gatsby as an
assigned novel in college and high school classrooms. We recall Fitzgeralds
comment in the authors apology that prefaced an edition of his 1920
debut novel, This Side of Paradise: My whole theory of writing I can sum
up in one sentence: An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward. It
seems that Fitzgerald, with this novel at least, realized his dream. Received
as a racy novel of the season on its release, and dissected relentlessly by
scholars in the decades following Fitzgeralds death, the book has proven
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so successful and durable in the classroom that it may well appeal to the
schoolmasters of ever afterward.
In an essay from almost four decades ago, Kenneth Eble suggested,
in attempting to come to terms with Gatsbys meteoric rise from forgotten period piece to national treasure, an angle somewhat different from
the usual discussions of social relevance, mythic sweep and conscious
artistry: The continuing popularity of Gatsby, even its high reputation
among academic literary critics, is no certain measure of its greatness. For
one thing, the revival of interest in Fitzgerald coincided with the great
expansion of higher education. Students in lit classes had to have something to read, and Gatsby was American, reasonably recent, and short
(Great, 34). Bryer and VanArsdale, in their preface to their volume of
essays, indicate that the trend continues today, reporting that the novel
is taught in countless secondary school, undergraduate, and graduate
courses throughout the world (xi) and sells some 400,000 copies annually. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is quite common for students to
encounter Gatsby more than once in their academic life, as it is taught
regularly at both high school and college levels; and a study has shown
The Great Gatsby to rank among the top five in most frequently taught
American works in U.S. high schools (Applebee, 3). The book has been
part of the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read program, and
the Web is filled with resources and research materials geared toward student and teacher. Given its central position in the nations education system, it is only fitting that The Great Gatsby would be the subject of a
volume of essays devoted specifically to pedagogical concerns.
The widely varied essays in Approaches to Teaching give further indication of why Gatsby has remained a fixture in the classroom. Material covered ranges from essays that focus specifically on Fitzgeralds language,
style, and patterning in the work to others that examine the books connection to cultural and historical referents from the popular music of the
day to the cultural aftershocks of World War I. In my own essay in the
volume, Love, Loss, and Real Estate: Teaching The Great Gatsby in the
Suburban Age, I offer an approach to the book that takes a slightly different tack than the traditional view of how landscape functions in the
novel. While generations of critics and scholars from Mizener, Ornstein, and Eble onward have rightly focused on Fitzgeralds symbolic
geography in the book, examining, most notably, how his use of eastern and western locales reverberates with connections to the American
mythology, I focus more on the correlation between the settings of the
book, particularly East and West Egg, and the actual places on which
these settings are loosely based. My goal in the essay is not to supplant
the examinations of place as a mythic construct in Gatsby; to do so would
be to shortcircuit what is in my view one of the richest lines of scholarship and interpretation on this classic novel. Rather, my take on the book
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stresses how Fitzgeralds geographic imagination tends to work toward

counterbalancing myth with reality, or romance with realism, or the pull
of the irrecoverable past with the momentum of a culture and landscape
hurtling into the future. The novels deep nostalgia for lost, Edenic landscapes is, I argue, a function of its setting in a modern environment that is
in the process of transforming away from the natural and toward the manmade toward the modern metropolitan landscape of city, highway, and
suburb that is the habitation of most of the books readers of today.
As Fitzgerald closes The Great Gatsby with Nick Carraways extended
reflection on landscapes of the past, which moves from his recollections of
the middle-west of his youth to the final, lyrical passage in which he contemplates the once-wondrous vision of the Long Island landscape the
old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors eyes a fresh, green
breast of the new world (GG, 140) the first-time reader of the novel
gains a retrospective understanding of something those who have been
reading and teaching The Great Gatsby for years take as a given: that one
of the primary concerns of the book involves the characters attempts to
come to terms with the places they physically and psychologically inhabit.
In Gatsby, Fitzgerald created both a yearning remembrance of a vanishing
pastoral terrain and a bustling, proto-suburban narrative that chronicles
the commodification of the natural landscape. Of particular note is the
embattled sense of place in the novels suburban milieu, the towns of East
and West Egg on Long Islands North Shore or Gold Coast. It is in
this setting where Fitzgerald makes most clear the disparity between the
major characters relationships to their present environment and the idealized visions they continue to hold of landscapes from their past. That all
of the major characters eventually fail in their quest to establish for themselves a comprehensible and fulfilling connection to this place suggests
one of the central preoccupations of the novel portraying the anxiety
that inheres to place-bound experience in an increasingly metropolitan
and rootless age.
For students coming of age in an era characterized by continued,
relentless suburban development and sprawl, Fitzgeralds glamorous portrayals of New York City and the stately Gold Coast might seem, at best,
a distant cultural memory. On the other hand, the connections between
Jay Gatsbys gaudy West Egg estate and the architecturally outrageous
McMansions that tower over todays cul-de-sac suburbia seem almost
too obvious to miss. In fact, in many regards The Great Gatsby can be
thought of as a kind of pre-suburban-age novel. This approach allows
readers to bring their own contemporary frame of reference to bear on
the text, while also exposing a less discussed side of this work, its fascinating presentation of an American landscape in transition. The emotional resonance of houses and of landscapes from the past is a theme that
Fitzgerald had already been exploring before Gatsby. As noted earlier, the
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classic story Winter Dreams (1922), as well as two lesser-known works,

The Sensible Thing and John Jacksons Arcady, both published in
1924, center on male protagonists fixated on both loves and houses from
their pasts. Fitzgerald wrote the latter two stories while living in Great
Neck, the suburban Long Island town that would be the model for West
Egg, making the link to Gatsby all the more telling.
Fitzgeralds depiction in the novel of a rapidly evolving and often
alienating landscape is a function of the specific historic and geographical setting of the novel, central factors worth reviewing in some detail.
In 1922, the time of the novels action (and the year when Fitzgerald
moved to Great Neck), Long Islands Gold Coast accommodated over
five hundred estates similar to the Buchanan and Gatsby mansions (Randall, 14). Built by millionaires and industry tycoons, these palatial homes
both utilized and reshaped the natural geography of the North Shore,
signifying social class through elaborate architecture and appropriation
of the rural, seaside landscape. The creation of these homes, which Gold
Coast historian Monica Randall calls an architectural phenomenon
unparalleled both in excessiveness and originality (11), began shortly
after the turn of the century and continued into the twenties. As Ronald
Berman has argued, this phenomenon was most notable for its symbolic
overtones, for the sense that a new American history could be created
in twenty-four hours, an illusion of ancestry long in the land (Modern,
41). Bermans observation is an apt one, for it is the very elusiveness of
dreams of ancestry and connection to the landscape that provides much
of the dramatic tension and carries much of the thematic weight of The
Great Gatsby.
Readers need not look far to find the deep and often conflicted connections between landscape and a sense of history and belonging in this
novel. The paradigmatic connections between place and identity are
set up in the opening pages, when Nick situates the Carraway family as
something of a clan, who have been anchored to the same middlewestern city, a land of wide lawns and friendly trees, for the past three
generations (GG, 67). By contrast, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, whom we
first meet a few pages later, are characterized by Nick as drifters; still,
despite Nicks incredulity, Daisy has declared their move to East Egg a
permanent one. And the carefully landscaped opulence of the Buchanan
home suggests some sense of permanence, or in Bermans terms a feeling
of ancestry long in the land. Nevertheless, this sense of permanence
and groundedness is manufactured and illusory, and as Tom stands on the
porch showing Nick his estate, his proprietary ease seems to be undercut
by a need to explain the orchestrated magnificence of the place:
Ive got a nice place here,
he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.
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Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along

the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a
half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that
bumped the tide offshore.
It belonged to Demaine the oil man. He turned me around
again, politely and abruptly. Well go inside. (10)
By deferring to the previous owner of the estate at the end of this speech,
Tom reveals the anxiety that has accompanied his purchase of an unreadable symbolic landscape. As a homeowner thus once-removed from his
own landscape, Tom Buchanan quickly emerges as a character who is offbalance and quite literally out of place, one reason perhaps for his clinging to a reactionary and idealized vision of a lost civilization, one based
on Manichean racial attitudes and a larger sense of exclusionary paranoia.
Like Tom, Nick also finds himself out of place from the outset.
As he confesses in the beginning of his narration, the practical thing
upon moving to New York would have been to find rooms in the city;
instead, drawn by his longing for an environment at least superficially
similar to that of his hometown, Nick settles in the commuting town
of West Egg (67). Hence, though Nick and Tom have very different
reasons for settling on the North Shore, both share a desire to create
meaning and a sense of belonging through connection to this landscape.
While they both fail in this effort, they fail for different reasons, because
these two characters represent different historical moments in the evolution of their common environment: Tom represents the vulnerable
second-generation of a Gold Coast elite whose time was already on the
wane, while Nick whether he recognizes it or not stands as a member of the new commuter class, the growth of which was already in this
era beginning to turn Long Island into the suburban mecca that it still is
today. If Tom cannot read the symbolic excess of his landscape because it
is already a part of the past, Nicks dilemma is that the landscape to which
he should belong the soon-to-be-born Nassau County suburbia has
not yet quite arrived; the incongruity of his lone cardboard bungalow
(7) sandwiched between numerous West Egg mansions is an image that
perfectly captures this novels larger sense of a landscape in transition. It
is perhaps the most visible manifestation of Fitzgeralds tendency to use
landscape to look both forward and backward in time. As Richard Lehan
argues, this is a novel that not only considers the lure of the past but also,
at times, catches a sense of the future (Limits, 7).
Gatsby himself embodies this sense of being caught in an insupportable present situated, according to Lehan, between a dead past and an
implausible future (38). But Gatsbys temporal dilemma is quite clearly
a spatial one as well, as his romantic quest is consistently played out in
terms of landscape. From the first appearance of Gatsby in the novel as
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Nick spies him peering longingly across the Sound, hands outstretched
toward the green light on Daisys dock to his last appearance, when
Nick describes him just before the murder as being in A new world,
material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air,
drifted fortuitously about (126), Gatsbys dream resides in landscapes.
Nonetheless, Gatsby, whom Tom aptly refers to as Mr. Nobody from
Nowhere (101), remains utterly disconnected from any sort of verifiable geographic background, a fact that poses a dilemma for those like
Tom trying to read Gatsby. Nick eventually associates Gatsby with his
West Egg home, but does so in a way that effaces any real connections to
place or landscape, insisting instead on the absolute autonomy of Gatsbys
manufactured identity: Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang
from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God (77).
If this observation confers upon Gatsby a sort of idealized, Adamic
status, at the same time it emphasizes the plasticity of his identity, something he attempts to counter through the presentation of his West Egg
landscape. Gatsbys manipulation of his own landscape draws attention
to the malleable nature of the Gold Coast environment, and in so doing
emphasizes what Nick early in the novel refers to, somewhat mysteriously,
as the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast (8) between East Egg and
West Egg. Gatsbys idea is to keep his home always full of interesting
people, night and day (71) in order to impress Daisy. This attempt to
keep alive a sort of perpetual tableau vivant for Daisys sake necessitates a
constant flow of partygoers, whom Gatsby shuttles in from the city in his
Rolls Royce and from the train stations in his station wagon, and whose
cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive (34) on a given Saturday night. Gatsbys need to populate his symbolic landscape indeed,
the guests are the principal symbol of this landscape accentuates the
sense of West Egg as a transitory landscape, a place quite literally filled
with commuters. Such a state is abhorrent to an East Egger like Tom
Buchanan, a man who is attempting to shape exurban space in a different
fashion, emphasizing an expansive rurality and the exclusive class identifications that go with it. Indeed, Tom not only bristles at the insurgent,
democratic impulse of Gatsbys parties suggested by the ethnic family
names on Nicks famous list of the partygoers but fears the push of
urban progress itself, precisely because he recognizes that urban progress
involves expansion and intrusion, processes that are already imperiling his
rural fantasy landscape. Daisy as well shares in this disdain for Gatsbys
parties and what they represent; Nicks interpretation of her view of West
Egg emphasizes her fear of the changing, increasingly mobile and urban,
landscape: She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented place that
Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village appalled by
its raw vigor . . . and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants
along a short cut from nothing to nothing (84).
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The irony of Daisys reaction to Gatsbys parties and what they represent lies in the fact that Gatsby is not trying to create a landscape of the
future, but instead is seeking rather desperately through the manipulation of landscape to return to the past. The Gatsby mansion and all
that comes with it are mere symbolic devices meant to lure Daisy away
from East Egg and back to a relationship that is psychologically situated
in the Louisville landscape of 1917. As Nicks narration so clearly emphasizes, Gatsbys dream-vision of Daisy is inextricably bound up with his
memories of Louisville, and more specifically of Daisys girlhood home:
He went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor,
then alone. It amazed him he had never been in such a beautiful house
before (116). Remarkable for the way that it links romance and real
estate, this passage goes a long way toward explaining the motivations
behind the creation of what Nick calls that huge incoherent failure of a
house (140) that Gatsby maintains at West Egg. And yet it is no coincidence that Gatsbys stories of Louisville produce in Nick a sympathetic
reaction, one in which he too is on the verge of remembering something an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words (87) from his own
past. As many critics have noted, Gatsby is not the only character in this
novel who is in some sense trapped in landscapes of the past. Indeed
if, as Berman suggests, the ur-dream of this novel is the memory of
Eden (Modern, 102), it seems that all of the major characters maintain
visions of their own personal Eden Nicks middle-west, Daisys
white girlhood, Gatsbys Louisville of five years past, Toms civilization places which are idealized, for the most part imaginary, and ultimately inaccessible.
The disparity between such idealized images of past environments
and the realities of the contemporary landscape is a recurring motif in the
novel, nowhere more carefully portrayed or infused with the force of history than in the scene of Gatsby and Daisys first reunion. In a telling passage from this reunion scene in Gatsbys house, Nick describes the onset
of night in West Egg: Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint
flow of thunder along the Sound. All the lights were going on in West
Egg now; the electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through
the rain from New York. It was the hour of a profound human change
and excitement was generating on the air (75). Fitzgeralds language
here is significant; his synesthetic pairing of the flow of thunder along
the Sound with the plunging home of the commuter trains reminds
us (to borrow Leo Marxs phrase) of the machine in Gatsbys garden;
this is not Louisville, 1917, but Long Island, 1922 a bustling suburb
in the making, a lapsed Eden characterized by a merely illusory sense of
rootedness, and a stark contrast to the transcendent Louisville landscape
that exists forever fixed in Gatsbys mind. It is not very surprising when
Nick observes, immediately following this moment, that the expression
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of bewilderment had come back into Gatsbys face (75); thrust into the
present time and place, Gatsby at this moment realizes the incongruity between his dreams and reality. It is indeed the hour of a profound
human change.
This is not the only moment involving specific mention of commuting in this novel. With its near constant motion between New York and
East and West Egg, the narrative is literally shaped by the act traveling
to and from the city, and what the various commutes reveal is the sharp
contrast between ways of living in urban and suburban spaces. New York
itself comes to be associated with violence, as in Tom and Gatsbys showdown at the Plaza and, more explicitly, in Toms breaking of Myrtles
nose in the 158th Street apartment. East and West Egg, by contrast, are
represented at least early in the novel as havens, fantasy worlds seemingly
protected from violence and decay by their very distance from the urban
center. The third term in this equation is the valley of ashes, the industrial Queens landscape that is traversed in the various commutes between
the city and the exurbs. Beneath the vacant gaze of Dr. Eckleburgs eyes,
the waste land serves as a visible record of the outward progress of
urban blight. The site cannot be avoided; while the commuters motor
road and railroad run beside one another temporarily in an attempt to
shrink away from this landscape, the effort is futile, for we are told that
passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as
half an hour (21). Hence the very visibility of this landscape is what gives
the lie to the myth of commutation that one can be a city person
while at the same time maintaining a rural identity. Instead, the surreal
inversion of rurality in the valleys landscape, which is likened to a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque
gardens (21), emphasizes the corruptibility of landscape. By situating
the killing of Myrtle in the valley, Fitzgerald uses the setting to underscore the fear of urban violence and decay spreading outside the bounds
of the city center. Fittingly, Myrtles death occurs during indeed, is
caused by another drive out of the city. In subsequently making his
final trip east to Gatsbys home, George Wilson completes the movement
of urban violence eastward into the suburban landscape.
After the death of Gatsby and the disappearance of Tom and Daisy,
actions that in their own right reveal the changing nature of the Gold
Coast environment, two other moments transpire near the end of the
novel that serve as reminders of the extent to which The Great Gatsby can
be read as an examination of a landscape in transition. The first involves
Gatsbys father, who excitedly shows Nick a prized possession:
It was a photograph of the house, cracked in the corners and dirty
with many hands. He pointed out every detail to me eagerly. Look
there! and then sought admiration from my eyes. He had shown
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it so often that I think it was more real to him now than the house
itself. (134)
While the irony of Mr. Gatzs action being fixated on an old photograph of his sons house even as he stands inside the house itself borders on the pathetic, he is really doing nothing more than others have
done throughout the novel: confusing idealized representations of place
for the real thing, searching for place-bound connections to the past in
the face of an alienating and unreadable present moment. Indeed, one of
Nicks final actions carries the same symbolic message. In what may be,
from the perspective of landscape and place, the most telling moment of
the novel, Nick describes his final effort to preserve the idealized memory
of Gatsbys landscape:
On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the
grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a
house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by
some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight
and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I
wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand. (140)
This action which immediately precedes Nicks expansive, lyrical close

to the narration underscores the inevitability of the decay of this exurban landscape. But perhaps more significantly, Nicks erasure stands as a
last effort to maintain an idealized vision of place, to freeze a living, evolving landscape into a fixed and permanent symbol. That such an effort is
doomed to failure is one of the principal insights of this novel.
Like many contemporary readers of the novel, Fitzgerald himself,
during his time on Long Island, lived in a bustling environment undergoing rapid changes. And like many of his characters, he repeatedly looked
back in time, invoking in his fiction architectural and environmental symbols from the past, rich with emotional resonance, as counterweights to
the uncertainty of the present. While a sense of longing for beloved environments of the past would become a standard theme in suburban fiction
and popular culture of the postwar years and onward, when suburban
sprawl would rapidly remake and homogenize the American landscape,
we see a sort of pre-suburban version of a similar anxiety infusing The
Great Gatsby. In a larger sense, the novel provides any number of angles
through which a reader of today can bridge the gap to an era that saw
transitions, on several levels, into modernity.
For example, Kirk Curnutts excellent essay from Approaches to Teaching, All That Jazz, illuminates ways in which todays students can get a
sound understanding of the historicity of the novel through examinations
of its echoes of popular culture of the day. His essay builds on Bermans
work, in The Great Gatsby and Modern Times, in that, like Berman,
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Curnutt presents a text that is in conversation with other texts and discourses that defined the popular culture and arts of the day. He discusses
how the novel responds to the shifting values of the modern age (40)
in that it reflects the rise of a mass culture with a noticeable emphasis
on youth, leisure, and consumption. Curnutt argues that the rise of consumerism in this age of advertising, as well as the success of magazines
like The Saturday Evening Post, which strove to be an arbiter of middlebrow refinement (44), ushered in a distinctly modern era in which personality itself became part of the popular culture marketplace. Curnutt
demonstrates how this spirit infuses the characters of the novel, and not
merely Gatsby, with his patently contrived identity. Curnutt argues that
all of the characters have been shaped by the style and values afoot in the
popular culture, and in this regard the difference between Myrtle Wilson, who dreams to live the life she read about in Town Tattle, and Tom
Buchanan, whose nativist editorializing may as well have come directly
from the pages of The Saturday Evening Post (which supported and published the ideas of writers such as Madison Grant), is not one of kind
but of degree of consciousness: Gatsby dramatizes this concern over the
authenticity of personality by contrasting characters who revel in the selfconscious theatricality of their modes of externalization and those who
naively assume that their gestures create their real selves (41).5 Given
that our own media-saturated age is shaped by the relentless marketing of
a middlebrow, youth-oriented culture, this angle into the novel is particularly fruitful; as Curnutt concludes, It allows students to view the story
as a living link to a past decade whose confluence of changing values and
ideals continues to influence our own time (49).
The Shadow Lengthens: Echoes of

Gatsby in Popular Culture and Arts
What the conclusion of Curnutts essay suggests, with its notion of the
novel as a living link between generations and eras, is the relevance
of the books themes in our own day. If the prevalence of Gatsby and
its influence throughout contemporary popular culture is any indication,
Curnutt is on to something. The broad literary and cultural influence of
The Great Gatsby was the subject of a compelling essay from back in 1985,
Richard Andersons Gatsbys Long Shadow. As Anderson argues, the
stylistic and thematic influence of the novel could be felt among widely
varied writers of ensuing generations, ranging from Cheever and OHara
to Raymond Chandler and Jack Kerouac. Andersons essay offered a
much-needed counterbalance to decades worth of influence studies that
had worked only in the other direction, tracing influences upon Fitzgerald in his writing of the book. By the late twentieth century, Gatsby had
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become a classic of the national literary canon, as Andersons discussion

of the shadow cast by the novel helps to demonstrate.
Where we might add to his analysis of the books influence is in noting the rather remarkable presence of the book in twenty-first century
popular culture. Google Gatsby, and the hits you generate will travel
far and wide beyond the literary realm. Aside from the links to predictable
Gatsby-themed bars, restaurants, and other businesses, such a search
will lead you to offerings as varied as the Japanese Gatsby line of haircare products; the Korean web comic strip The Great Catsby, featuring a
cast of cartoon dogs and cats, with a storyline revolving around the travails and romantic entanglements of a young college graduate (later made
into a live-action TV series in Korea, starring real humans); the computerbased video game, released in 2010, Classic Adventures: The Great Gatsby,
in which the player, adopting the role of Nick Carraway, navigates scenes
from the novel while finding and collecting hidden objects to advance in
the game (one must, as the game begins, immediately find five clocks hidden in the surrounding scenery); and the 2010 Gatsby application for
social networking devices like Facebook and Foursquare: Whenever you
check in, Gatsby will see if there is anyone nearby who shares interests with
you, and if there is, hell text you both with your first name and shared
interests. Well, he always did know how to throw a good party. Musical connections also abound, from the Seattle-based pop band Gatsbys
American Dream to folkies Reg and Phil, whose song Daisy Buchanan
attempts to liven up the shopworn pop music theme of unrequited love
by imagining a connection to Fitzgeralds protagonist (presumably on the
night of his futile vigil outside the Buchanan house, no less): Mr. Gatsby,
I know how you feel / Its almost 2 in the morning / She aint coming so
well / Wash up this mess / And clear out our heads / Its getting late so
lets best get to bed. A more subtle musical tribute comes from a fellow
Minnesotan and giant of American culture. Bob Dylan, in his 2001 song
Summer Days, makes an unmistakable lyrical tip of the cap to Fitzgerald and to Jay Gatsbys most memorable pronouncement: Shes looking
into my eyes, and shes a-holding my hand / She looks into my eyes, shes
holding my hand / she say, you cant repeat the past, / I say You cant?
What do you mean you cant? / Of course you can.
More evidence of the enduring appeal of Gatsby can be found in the
number of stage adaptations performed in recent years. In 1999, composer and librettist John Harbison brought his opera, The Great Gatsby, to
New Yorks Metropolitan Opera and subsequently, in 2000, to the Lyric
Opera in Chicago. Reviewers praised the works attempts to translate the
novel to so very different a form but found the opera a little strenuous
in its reverence (Jones) for the novel. In the summer of 2006, Simon
Levys dramatic adaptation The Great Gatsby took the stage at Minneapoliss Guthrie Theater. This was a major occasion in Gatsby history, in
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that this was only the second authorized stage production of Gatsby, and
the first in eighty years. (The first authorized production of The Great
Gatsby was Owen Daviss 1926 adaptation, which opened in Fitzgeralds
one-time stomping grounds of Great Neck, Long Island, before enjoying a run on Broadway.) The adaptation by Levy, who had previously
adapted both Tender Is the Night and The Last Tycoon for the stage, met
with mixed reviews. While critics praised the polish of the production,
several reviewers noted that Levys determination to remain faithful to the
novel resulted in a play with a sometimes leaden pace and an overall lack
of spark. In a fairly representative review, Richard Morin, of the Seattle
Weekly, claimed that the play lacks magic, a problem he attributed to
relying too heavily on a linear recounting of the novel. For Morin, this
strategy resulted in a play that was, unfortunately, borne back ceaselessly
into the mundane (Morin).
The year 2006 was a clearly a big one in the world of Gatsby. While
Levys version played in Minneapolis and Seattle, another, lower-profile
adaptation was also touring, to high critical acclaim. The experimental downtown New York performance group Elevator Repair Service
launched the official U.S. debut of their marathon performance piece
entitled Gatz at Minneapoliss Walker Art Center in September of 2006.
The group had first begun tinkering with adapting The Great Gatsby in
1999, and after years of development including a series of workshop
performances in New York in 2005 and an official premiere in Brussels in
May, 2006 the Minneapolis opening marked the American debut of a
major work that has become an unlikely success. What ERS has come up
with is a concept that is at once avant-garde and, in a strict sense, very true
to the novel. Gatz is a unique performance in which the entire novel is
read aloud, word for word, while cast members adopt the roles of Fitzgeralds characters. The performance is set in the modern day, in a mundane,
run-down office. As the action opens, the central character/narrator (a
beleaguered office employee played by Scott Shepherd) stumbles upon an
old copy of The Great Gatsby as he kills time in the office, waiting for his
computer to be repaired. He begins to read aloud from the novel. Somewhere between six and a half to seven hours later (including a couple of
intermissions), he will finish. As Shepherds character who serves as a
surrogate Nick Carraway reads, other ensemble members float on and
off stage, taking on personas related to the novels characters, and occasionally interrupting the reading to recite dialogue from the novel.
As Jason Zinoman pointed out in the New York Times, this audacious interpretation is, at heart, a celebration of the novel: At six and
half hours . . . Gatz is one of the most faithful adaptations in the history
of theater. Falling somewhere between a reading and a conventional play,
it is certainly an unusual theatrical experiment (A8). Quinton Skinner,
reviewing the Minneapolis performances for Variety, was equally effusive
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in his praise, describing Gatz as a revelatory and exuberant experience.

Skinner singled out the performance of Shepherd, claiming that he gave
as fine a reading of Fitzgeralds prose as one could imagine, in a performance of exceeding passion and grace. Of the work as a whole, Skinner concluded: Gatz creates its own dramatic universe. It illuminates a
familiar text, breathing strange new life into it while honoring its inherent
completeness. One is left not primarily with the expected exhaustion, but
with a unique and lasting texture of amusement, insight and possibility
(Q. Skinner). After its successful debut in the United States, Gatz headed
off to Europe, while Elevator Repair Service awaited permission from the
Fitzgerald estate to produce the show in other U.S. cities. The reason for
the wait had to do with a problem Gatsby himself could identify with:
unfortunate timing. Since Gatz and the Levy adaptation of Gatsby just
happened to debut at roughly the same time, the Fitzgerald estate, presumably hoping to avoid flooding the market with adaptations, initially
supported Levys more conventional adaptation, at the expense of Gatz.
Once it was clear the Levy Gatsby had fizzled, Gatz got the green
light, as it were, to return to the United States. After a highly successful run in Boston Brian Arundel, writing for the F. Scott Fitzgerald
Society Newsletter, hailed the play as nothing short of magical, an unforgettable experience (9), and Ben Brantley, reviewing the Boston performances for the New York Times, called Gatz one of the most exciting
and improbable accomplishments in theater in recent years (Novel,
C1) the show finally was cleared to open in New York in the Autumn
of 2010.6 To say that Gatz took New York by storm would be an understatement. It made numerous year-end best of lists from the critics, and
was ranked as the best show of the year by both New York magazine and
the New York Times, in which Brantley referred to Gatz as The most
remarkable achievement in theater not only of this year but also of this
decade (which, gee, means this century too), stating that the play captured in inventively theatrical terms the unmatchable, heady rush of
falling in love with a book. And Scott Shepherd, as a common reader
seduced by a great American novel, gave hands down the years
most heroic performance (Hath, 7).7
If the sheer number of stage adaptations suggests Gatsbys enduring
appeal, perhaps even stronger evidence of its relevance to contemporary
writers and artists can be found in a string of recent reworkings or reimaginings of the novel. Suzanne del Gizzo, in a recent Fitzgerald Review
essay, examines one such popular novel with strong ties to Gatsby, Chuck
Palahniuks Fight Club (1996). As del Gizzo points out, following the
cult success of his novel and the popularity of FOX pictures 1999 adaptation starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, Palahniuk wrote an afterword to a new edition of the book in which he offered his take of the
novels meaning by giving an unexpected nod to Gatsby: Really, what I
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was writing was just The Great Gatsby, updated a little. It was apostolic
fiction where a surviving apostle tells the story of his hero. There are
two men and a woman. And one man, the hero, is shot to death (in
del Gizzo, 69). In exploring this intertextual connection which seems,
on the surface, somewhat surprising del Gizzo examines both novels
focus on the world of commodity culture. Like Donaldson, del Gizzo
finds early-twentieth-century commodity fetishism to be at the heart of
Gatsby; in Fight Club, written at the end of that century of exhaustive
consumption, all of the characters resemble mini-Gatsbys, defined by the
things they buy and present to the world, secur[ing] their sense of self
and their social identity through condos in certain parts of town, particular cars, and certain types of sofas. . . . In short, the world of Fight Club is
a logical extension of the culture of commodification at the center of The
Great Gatsby (71). del Gizzos compelling analysis of this connection
demonstrates that the two novels, on the surface presenting such a stark
contrast between glamour and grunge, are in fact remarkably similar
(71). This fact in itself suggests the continued relevance of Fitzgeralds
social critique in the novel.
While Palahniuk credits Gatsby for implicitly providing inspiration for
his work, a more explicit reworking of the novel can be found in Bodega
Dreams, the 2000 debut novel of New York writer Ernesto Quionez.
Bodega Dreams tells the story of Willie Bodega, the mysterious power
broker of East Harlem who tries to transmute his riches, garnered from
the heroin trade, into a rebuilt and revitalized neighborhood, a place populated by a powerful, educated Latino class. Like Gatsby, Willie Bodega
amasses his empire in the effort to recapture a lost love and in a sense turn
back time. As Sapo, the streetwise friend of the novels narrator, Chino,
puts it, Bodega believes everthin he told you about. But hes also in
love with some bitch from his past. Or hes still in love with the past.
I dont know which or both or what the fuck (Quionez, 50). Sapos
humorous confusion concerning Bodegas motives masks a key difference between Bodega and Gatsby; Chino, who as participant-narrator is
the Nick Carraway counterpart, perceptively notes that Bodegas efforts
to turn back time are motivated not only by romantic idealism, but also
by his paradoxically strong social conscience: Bodega was still the same,
believing he could recapture what had been lost, stolen, or denied to him
and his people. As if the past was recyclable and all he had to do was collect
enough cans to make a fortune and make another start (12526). The
novel is filled with such references to Gatsby some direct (the reunion
scene between Bodega and his lost love, Vera, is a marvelous recreation
of the Gatsby-Daisy reunion), and some oblique (Chino relates one of
the novels most profound ruminations on the troubled cultural history
of East Harlem while he is in a car about to drive over the Queensboro
Bridge, that crucial locale from Gatsby). What may be most fascinating
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about the work, however, is the manner in which Quionez appropriates

the figure of Jay Gatsby. In an interview, Quionez pointed out that his
use of The Great Gatsby as a template for his own novel stems from his
reading of the protagonist as an irrepressible cultural outsider: When I
see Gatsby, I see a poor guy who would do anything to become rich. . . .
When rich people see Gatsby they think that he belongs to them, but
Gatsby does not belong to the rich. Gatsby belongs to the poor. He was a
hoodlum (in Weigand).
This notion of Jay Gatsbys belonging to a particular class or social
group indicates the extent to which the character has left the printed page
and become a part of our cultural fabric. Further evidence of this phenomenon of Gatsby as cultural signifier can be found in SONY Pictures
2005 film, G. Directed by Christopher Cherot and featuring an African
American cast, the film is a hip-hop adaptation of The Great Gatsby; the
storyline portrays the efforts of protagonist Summer G, a rap music producer and industry mogul, to recapture his lost love with Sky, the cousin
of our Nick Carraway stand-in, Tre, who writes for a popular rap music
magazine. Sky is married to the very wealthy, powerful, and physically and
emotionally abusive Chip Hightower, a near-perfect modern embodiment
of Tom Buchanan who courts his wealthy white neighbors in tony Southampton, New York, and is disgusted by the raucous antics and hip-hop
music blasted at the parties held at Summer Gs neighboring mansion.
(Yes, Summer Gs house is right across the bay.) While the climax of the
movie delves into melodrama, replacing Gatsbys ruminative, mythic closing visions with a violent finish that lacks in significance, still the movies
fidelity to the narrative of The Great Gatsby even as it reimagines that
narrative in a very different social context indicates the lasting popular
influence of the text. It seems almost as if the story told in the novel its
pitting of self-invention and romantic idealism against the hard realities
of life in American society has itself become a kind of cultural myth,
and Jay Gatsby the embodiment of the tragic dreamer, the bodacious but
futile aspirant in a closed, deterministic society.
To use Andersons terms, these recent interpretations of the novel
suggest that the long shadow that Gatsby has cast over the popular culture only grows longer in the new century. In contrast to these imaginative reworkings of the book, however, Hollywood has had a poor track
record with Gatsby. The extent to which the culture has the stomach for
yet another Hollywood attempt at an adaptation will be tested in the nottoo-distant future, as Australian director Baz Luhrmann has signed on
with Warner Brothers to film a new version of the novel, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick, and Carey Mulligan as
Daisy. The movie will be shot in Sidney, Australia, with filming to commence in August, 2011. While one questions the necessity of yet another
big-budget adaptation, the fact that Luhrmann, who had been working
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on getting the project going for quite some time, was able to bring Warner Brothers on board suggests the potential for the films financial success. Somewhat curious, though, was the announcement made, shortly
after the deal with Warner Brothers was struck, that the film would be
shot in 3-D. While this plan most likely signals the increasing centrality of 3-D technology in contemporary film more so than it necessarily
raises the specter of visual pyrotechnics (Myrtle seeming to be hurled,
by the force of the death car, right into ones theater, for example),
still there seems cause for concern when one of the first major announcements about the film has to do with the use of technological wizardry to
create surface-level visual detail. Of course the visual code is absolutely
central to moviemaking, but one hopes that as much thought (if not far
more) is going into the heretofore unattainable task of somehow capturing onscreen Nick Carraways voice and sensibility, the heart of the novel.
Coda: Gatsby and the Endless Summer

Just as I was finishing up work on this study, a summer novel happened to come along and quickly rise up the list of must-read books
for the season of beachy romance novels. Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Glamour,
People, and even Oprah Winfreys O listed Danielle Ganeks The Summer
We Read Gatsby as a romance novel fit for afternoons on the beach blanket. The story concerns the life and loves of two thirty-ish half-sisters,
Cassie and Peck, who inherit their eccentric, artistic Aunts summer home
in Southampton. (Like Cherot in his film G, Ganek retains a Long Island
shore location, but relocates the action from Fitzgeralds stately north
shore to the well-heeled vacation mecca of the Hamptons, on the Islands
south shore.) A decidedly lightweight affair, the novel makes occasional
references to The Great Gatsby, some rather obvious (the novel opens at
a Gatsby party being thrown by Pecks love interest, the incredibly rich
Miles Noble, at the gaudy mansion of thirty or forty rooms [Ganek,
151] he had recently had built) and some more subtle (just before the
climactic party at the end of the novel, Cassie, the narrator, thinks to herself, la Nick Carraway, anything could happen, anything at all [277]).
In essence, though, the book is a fairly standard-issue summer romance
novel. In a review in the New York Times, Liesl Schillinger describes the
novel as a plucky homage to Fitzgeralds masterpiece that has about
as much in common with Gatsby as Diet Coke has with Perrier-Jout.
Theres little harm and zero calories in Ganeks feather-light fare, so it
would be illogical to seek more from it than simple refreshment. . . . Yet
the question arises: Why bring Gatsby into this story of two women
husband-hunting in the Hamptons? (14).
The question has obvious merit, especially since the narrators habit
of periodically referencing or quoting from Gatsby adds little to the actual
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141
events or significance of the narration. And yet there is that title The
Summer We Read Gatsby with its evocation not only of the American
classic but also of the romantic season it not only depicts, but seems to
embody. Fitzgerald is quick to draw our attention to Gatsby itself as a novel
of the summer: In Nicks opening exposition, he describes becoming accustomed to life in his new home in West Egg: And so with the sunshine and
the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees just as things grow in fast
movies I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again
with the summer (GG, 7). Fitzgeralds cinematic vision here sets the tone
for the history of the summer (8) that follows; his suggestion of an infinitely renewable, verdant freshness at the outset of the narrative is bracketed by the famous closing image of the old island here that flowered once
for Dutch sailors eyes a fresh, green breast of the new world (140). If
the greenness of that old island is now, as our historical fate would have
it, inaccessible, the inexhaustible, and peculiarly American, freshness of The
Great Gatsby is not. We see echoes of it in our popular culture to this day,
and not only in Ganeks reimagining of Gatsby as light summer romance;
we see it also in the character of the aptly-named Summer G, another fresh
gangster/doomed dreamer on the summer shores of Long Island; and
we see it in the closing passages of Quionezs Bodega Dreams, with their
earthy vision of el barrio reborn, if only at the cost of the death of an idealistic and utterly corrupt anti-hero: I looked out to the neighborhood
below. Bodega was right, it was alive. Its music and people had taken off
their mourning clothes. The neighborhood had turned into a maraca, with
the men and women transformed into seeds, shaking with love and desire
for one another. Children had opened fire hydrants, and danced, laughing
and splashing water on themselves (Quionez, 212).
What these textual echoes suggest is the extent to which F. Scott
Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby, with its double vision of glamour and
desperation, of freshness and futility, of dream and disillusionment, has
become an American icon has come to be part of the very fabric of the
national culture that it so glowingly, hauntingly represents.
Notes
1
For Marxs explanation of commodity fetishism, see chapter 1, section 4 of Das

Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy.
For Bourdieus fullest enunciation of these concepts, see Distinction: A Social

Critique of the Judgment of Taste.
As Graham notes, his and other analyses of popular music in Fitzgeralds writing
are indebted to the pioneering essay on the subject, Ruth Prigozys 1976 essay,
Poor Butterfly: F.Scott Fitzgerald and Popular Music.
In the passage quoted, Mallios refers to Meyer Wolfshiem, but spells his name
differently: Wolfsheim. The cause of the confusion here is that, while Fitzgerald
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142
spelled the name with the ie spelling, the most popular editions of the novel,
such as the Scribners paperbacks, feature the name emended to the ei spelling.
Matthew Bruccoli, who edited the 1991 Cambridge Edition of Gatsby, argues
forcefully that the Scribners paperback is a flawed text (Getting It Wrong, 3) as
a result of this and many other emendations that stray from Fitzgeralds manuscript and 1925 first edition. Of the Wolfshiem issue, he says this: Wolfshiem is
the invariable spelling in Fitzgeralds manuscript and in the first edition of the
novel (1925). Edmund Wilson introduced the emendation to Wolfsheim in his
edition of The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel, together with The Great Gatsby
and Selected Short Stories (1941). Wilson also incorrectly emended orgastic to orgiastic in the penultimate paragraph of the novel (13). I do not mean to single out
Mallios for this spelling issue; in fact, anecdotally speaking, I would say that most
critical essays on the novel use the ei spelling of the name.
5
Sharon Hamilton, in The New York Gossip Magazine in The Great Gatsby,
concurs with this reading of the influence of popular culture on characters identities, arguing that Fitzgeralds references to Myrtles fictitious gossip magazine,
Town Tattle, comprise an incisive criticism of the periods loss of moral direction
with the rise of the gossip industry and the beginnings of American celebrity culture (34).
The show was nominated for five 2010 Elliot Norton Awards, recognizing
excellence in Boston-area theater. It took home three of the awards for Outstanding Visiting Production, Outstanding Director, Large Company (John Collins) and Outstanding Actor, Large Company (Scott Shepherd).
Among other regional publications, Newsday (New York) ranked Gatz eighth on
its year-end list; the Boston Phoenix put the play atop its list of the best of the year.
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Beuka.indd 156
7/26/2011 4:59:31 PM
Index
Absolution (Fitzgerald), 6768, 70,
88
Adams, Henry, 114
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The
(Twain), 1, 34, 35, 52
African Americans, 100101, 12124,
139. See also race
Aiken, Conrad, 18
Aldridge, John, 52
Alger, Horatio, 90, 100
Allen, Joan, 68
American dream, 40, 64, 69, 79, 90
An American Tragedy (Dreiser), 90, 91
Anderson, Richard, 13435, 139
anti-Semitic views, 8081, 98, 100,
117n4
Arthurian romances, 9495, 116n1
Arundel, Brian, 137
Bailey, David W., 8
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 10811
Baxter, Warner, 19
Beautiful and Damned, The (Fitzgerald), 88; early reactions to, 2,
1013, 16; plot of, 11; print runs
of, 20n1
Benchley, Robert, 9
Bender, Bert, 117n5
Bent, William, 1617
Berman, Ronald, 90, 11316, 13334;
on creating history, 128; on psychoanalysis, 119
Berryman, John, 3537
Bettina, M., 60
Bewley, Marius, 50, 53, 8182
Bicknell, John W., 43
Bishop, John Peale, 13, 32
Black, John, 9
Beuka.indd 157
Bodega Dreams (Quionez), 13839,

141
Bourdieu, Pierre, 119
Boyle, Thomas, 7374
Brantley, Ben, 137
Brecht, Bertolt, 109
Breitweiser, Mitchell, 121, 122
Brenon, Herbert, 19
Brooks, Van Wyck, 90
Browdin, Stanley, 92n8
Bruccoli, Matthew, 3, 58; on editorial
emendations, 142n4; on Mencken,
11; on Wilson, 21nn56
Bryer, Jackson R., 20n2, 125, 126
Burnam, Tom, 4748
Burroughs, Catherine B., 117n7
Butcher, Fannny, 1516
Callahan, John F., 7576, 7879
Canby, Henry Seidel, 11
Canby, Vincent, 87
Canterbery, E. Ray, 117n9
capitalism, 3031, 110, 117n9, 120.
See also Marxist approaches
Carlisle, Fred, 73
Cass, Colin, 1078
Cather, Willa, 92n8
Chamberlain, John, 24
Chandler, Raymond, 134
Chase, Richard, 5152
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 118
Cheever, John, 134
Chekhov, Anton, 118
Cherot, Christopher, 139, 140
Chopin, Kate, 2
Chubb, Thomas Caldecott, 1112
civilization. See culture
Clark, Edwin, 17, 18
7/26/2011 4:59:32 PM
158
INDEX
class, 42, 43, 110, 117n9; and culture, 11516, 11920; and ethnicity, 12223. See also Marxist
approaches
Clayton, Jack, 86
Coghlan, Ralph, 15
Coleman, Dan, 111
commodification, 119, 127, 138
Conrad, Joseph, 4448, 7072,
8990; Heart of Darkness, 46,
7172, 89; Lord Jim, 46, 48, 89;
Nostromo, 46, 89
Cooper, Allene, 95
Cooper, James Fenimore, 5152
Coppola, Francis Ford, 86
counterpoint, 63, 64. See also narrative
techniques
courtly love tradition, 9495
Cowley, Malcolm, 23, 37; on FSFs
double vision, 3536; on FSFs literary reputation, 28
Crack-Up, The (Fitzgerald), 24, 28,
3135
Crowther, Bosley, 38
culture: and class distinctions, 11516,
11920; versus nature, 5961, 63,
76, 79, 92n3, 97; popular, 5051,
54, 68, 73, 87, 12022, 13440;
and Public Philosophy, 90, 11416.
See also landscapes
Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The
(film), 87
Curnutt, Kirk, 12021, 13334
Curry, Steven, 71
Curtis, William, 17
Daisy Miller (James), 70, 104
Davis, Owen, 19, 135
Decker, Jeffrey Louis, 99101, 103, 125
del Gizzo, Suzanne, 13738
Dern, Bruce, 86
Dewey, John, 114
Diamant, Gertrude, 23
Dickens, Charles, 118
Dickerson, Mary Jane, 1089
Dilworth, Thomas, 119
Disenchanted, The (Schulberg), 3839,
87
Beuka.indd 158
Donaldson, Scott, 11920, 138

Dos Passos, John, 2730, 9091
Doyno, Victor, 6263
Dreiser, Theodore, 1011, 31, 45, 88,
90, 91
Dylan, Bob, 135
Dyson, A.E., 66
Eagleton, Harvey, 67
Eble, Kenneth, 60, 62, 6970, 88,
126
Edgett, Edwin Francis, 9, 12
Einstein, Albert, 119
Elevator Repair Service (performance
artists), 13637
Eliot, T.S., 40, 4445, 105
Elmore, A.E., 92n4
Empson, William, 37
ethnicity, 8081, 86, 9899, 103,
105, 124; and class, 12223; and
immigration policies, 99100; and
stereotyping, 110
eugenics, 96, 114, 117n5. See also race
Evans, Oliver, 73
Farber, Manny, 38
Farrow, Mia, 8687
Faulkner, William, 30
Faustian man (Spengler), 97
feminist theories, 42, 92n7, 94, 101.
See also gender
Fetterley, Judith, 8283, 94, 101
Fiedler, Leslie, 4142, 8182; on
FSFs anti-Semitism, 80; on sexual
ambiguity, 84
Fight Club (novel & film), 13738
Fincher, David, 87
Fitzgerald, F. Scott: and Conrad,
4448, 7072, 8990; Cowley
on, 23, 28, 3537; death of, 20,
2526; double vision of, 3536,
4748, 73, 109, 141; and Eliot,
40, 4445, 105; on Gatsby, 23, 6,
32, 58; and James, 17, 40, 4447,
53, 56n9, 7071; and Mencken,
3, 8, 11, 1415, 88; Perkins on,
17, 51; as screenwriter, 14, 25, 87;
tragic vision of, 3031; and Twain,
7/26/2011 4:59:32 PM
INDEX
1, 34, 35, 52; and Wells, 53, 56n9;
Wilson on, 21n6, 2728. See also
specific works
Fitzgerald, Scottie, 25
Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre, 9, 25, 42, 81
Flappers and Philosophers (Fitzgerald),
10, 12
Forrey, Robert, 79
Forter, Greg, 117n6
Foster, Richard, 74
Franklin, Benjamin, 49, 77, 100, 106
Fraser, John, 73
Fraser, Keath, 84, 101
Frohock, W.M., 46, 47
Frye, Northrop, 58, 63, 65
Fryer, Sarah Beebe, 101
Fussell, Edwin, 4951
G (film), 13941
Ganek, Danielle, 14041
Garrett, George, 99
Garvey, Marcus, 100101
Gatz (play), 13637
Geismar, Maxwell, 34, 55n7
gender, 40, 58, 8185, 117n6; and
male gaze, 92n7, 101; and queer
theory, 42, 1034; and romance,
121; and sexuality, 8385, 1015;
and wealth, 65. See also feminist
theories
Gibson, Walker, 48
Gidley, M., 80
Gindin, James, 69
Glyn, Elinor, 120
Godden, Richard, 10911
Gold, Mike, 24
Goldsmith, Meredith, 12223
Gorman, Herbert S., 18
gossip magazines, 115, 119, 134,
142n5
Graham, T. Austin, 12122
grail quest, 95, 116n1
Grant, Madison, 80, 100, 114, 134
Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald): cinematic qualities of, 15, 87, 141;
color imagery in, 106; film versions
of, 19, 38, 58, 8687, 13940;
FSFs comments on, 23, 6, 32, 58;
Beuka.indd 159
159
humor in, 9394; Modern Library

edition of, 1920; novels inspired
by, 13739; opera based on, 135;
preface to, 1920; sales figures for,
12, 87, 126; stage adaptations
of, 19, 13537; teaching of, 58,
12529; title of, 44
Greenleaf, Richard, 43
Gregory, Horace, 2324
Gross, Barry Edward, 91n2
Gunn, Giles, 68
Gurko, Leo, 2930
Gurko, Miriam, 2930
Haeckel, Ernest, 117n5
Hale, Ruth, 13
Hamilton, Sharon, 119, 142n5
Hansen, Harry, 9
Hanzo, Thomas, 4647
Harbison, John, 135
Harvey, W.J., 5253, 62
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1, 70
Hays, Peter L., 71
Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 46,
7172, 89
Hemingway, Ernest, 29, 30, 33, 118
Hicks, Granville, 29
Hindus, Milton, 56n8, 69
hip-hop music, 139. See also music
Hoffman, Frederick, 67
Holquist, Michael, 11011
homosexual panic, 1035. See also
sexuality
Hull, Edith Maude, 120
I Thought of Daisy (Wilson), 96
idealism, 51, 6162, 7779, 97, 102;
and Platonic conceptions, 33,
4041, 122, 130; romantic, 110,
127. See also realism
immigration policies, 99100. See also
ethnicity
James, Henry, 1718, 40, 4447, 53,
56n9, 7071; Daisy Miller, 18, 70,
104; Golden Bowl, 36; Turn of the
Screw, 18
James, William, 115
7/26/2011 4:59:32 PM
160
INDEX
Jazz Age, 5, 20n4, 2729, 50,

116
jazz music, 68, 12122. See also music
Jefferson, Thomas, 60, 77, 79, 107
Jews, depiction of, 8081, 98, 100,
105, 117n4
John Jacksons Arcady (Fitzgerald),
70, 8889, 128
Joyce, James, 102
Kazin, Alfred, 32
Keats, John, 44, 55n6, 118
Kehl, D.G., 95
Kerouac, Jack, 134
Kerr, Frances, 1025
King, Ginevra, 81
Kinsley, Phil, 1213
Kipling, Rudyard, 118
Kopf, Josephine Z., 80
Korenman, Joan, 81, 94, 101
Kraus, Joe, 117n4
Kuehl, John, 52
landscapes, 45, 9697; Edenic, 51,
6062, 78, 127, 141; of memory,
114, 127, 131; suburban, 12633.
See also culture
Last Tycoon, The (Fitzgerald): editor of,
20, 21n5, 142n4; preparation of,
28; stage adaptation of, 136; title
of, 20, 21n5
Le Vot, Andr, 106
Lehan, Richard, 69, 80, 9599, 114
Lewis, R.W.B., 63
Lewis, Sinclair, 29
Liberal Imagination, The (Trilling),
4041
Lippmann, Walter, 90, 114
Lisca, Peter, 75, 112
Long, Robert Emmet, 8891
Lord Jim (Conrad), 46, 48, 89
lost generation, 26
Luhrmann, Baz, 13940
MacKendrick, Paul, 44
MacPhee, Laurence, 64
Magistrale, Tony, 1089
Mallios, Peter, 123
Beuka.indd 160
Manhattan Transfer (Dos Passos),

9091
Margolies, Alan, 92n6
Marshall Margaret, 27
Marx, Leo, 61
Marxist approaches, 3031, 86, 109,
110; to class dynamics, 42, 43, 110,
117n9, 11920; to commodification, 119, 127, 138; to proletarian
fiction, 24, 42, 120
May Day (Fitzgerald), 88
McCarthy, Eugene, 78
McClure, John, 5
McDonnell, Robert F., 64
McPartlin, R.F., 78
Mellard, James, 6364, 91n2
Melville, Herman, 1, 2, 5152
Mencken, H.L., 11, 88, 102; Beautiful and Damned review by, 8;
Gatsby review by, 3, 1415; Paradise review by, 8, 14, 15
Michaels, Walter Benn, 100
Miller, James E., Jr., 52, 53, 56n9, 62,
7071, 88, 89
Millgate, Michael, 71
Minter, David, 7475
Mizener, Arthur, 3739, 50, 5961,
64, 87; and Chase, 51; on landscapes in Gatsby, 126; and Stallman,
53
Moby Dick (Melville), 1, 2, 5152
Monk, Donald, 106
Morgan, Elizabeth, 9495
Morin, Richard, 136
Mulford, Carla, 91n1
Mulvey, Laura, 92n7
music, popular, 54, 68, 12122, 139.
See also culture
Nafisi, Azar, 2425
narrative technique(s), 93, 107,
11013; of Conrad, 46, 7072;
counterpoint, 6364; Frye on, 58;
of James, 4447, 53, 56n9, 7072;
Perosa on, 70; of Wells, 53, 56n9;
White on, 11113
nativism, 99100, 105, 114, 12425.
See also race
7/26/2011 4:59:32 PM
INDEX
Neuhaus, Ron, 74
New Criticism, 17, 58, 66, 86, 1056,
125; and naratology, 112, 113
new historicism, 93, 99100, 104
Norris, Frank, 1011, 31, 45, 88
Nostromo (Conrad), 46, 89
O Russet Witch! (Fitzgerald), 95
OHara, John, 134
Ornstein, Robert, 5051, 63, 8182
Osborn, E.W., 13
Overy, Richard, 96
Palahniuk, Chuck, 13738
Parker, David, 74
Paterson, Isabel, 3, 5, 27, 29
Paulson, A.B., 8384
Pegler, Westbrook, 2627
Pendleton, Thomas, 1089
Perkins, Maxwell, 14; editorial
contributions of, 91n1; on
rounded characters, 17; on sense
of eternity, 51
Perosa, Sergio, 69, 70
Person, Leland, 8182, 94, 101
Petroniuss Satyricon, 44, 94
Piper, Henry Dan, 41, 45, 6667, 69
Platonic conceptions, 33, 4041, 122,
130
Poe, Edgar Allan, 70
Poore, Charles, 2829
popular culture, 5051, 73, 87,
12022, 13440. See also culture
Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald, The,
2829
Posnock, Ross, 117n9
poststructuralism, 54, 93, 104, 109,
112
Pound, Ezra, 102
Prescott, Orville, 39
Prigozy, Ruth, 141n3
proletarian fiction, 24, 42, 120. See
also Marxist approaches
Proust, Marcel, 37
psychoanalytic approaches, 4243,
8286; Berman on, 119; and gender dynamics, 8283, 117n6
Public Philosophy, 90, 11416
Beuka.indd 161
161
queer theory, 42, 1034. See also sexuality

Quionez, Ernesto, 13839, 141
Quirk, Tom, 92n8
race, 7981, 96101, 1035, 139;
and eugenics, 96, 114, 117n5;
and nativism, 99100, 105, 114,
12425; performativity of, 12224;
stereotyping of, 11011
Raleigh, John Henry, 51
Randall, Dale, 66
Randall, Monica, 128
Rawson, Eric, 119
Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi), 2425
realism, 1011, 91, 93; of Dreiser,
1011, 31, 45, 88, 90, 91; versus
idealism, 51, 6162, 7779, 97,
102; of Frank Norris, 1011, 31,
45, 88; versus romance, 110, 127
Redford, Robert, 8687
Rohrkemper, John, 1067
Roulston, Robert, 56n9
Royce, Josiah, 114, 115
Rule-Maxwell, Lauren, 118
Samuels, Charles Thomas, 6061
Santayana, George, 114, 116
Satyricon (Petronius), 44, 94
Savage, D.S., 4243
Sayre, Zelda. See Fitzgerald, Zelda
Schneider, Daniel, 64
Schoenwald, Richard, 44
Schulberg, Budd, 3839, 87
Scrimgeour, Gary, 7173
second chances, myth of, 2223, 60,
92n3
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 103, 104
Seguin, Robert, 92n8
Seldes, Gilbert, 18, 19, 24
Sensible Thing, The (Fitzgerald),
70, 8889, 128
Settle, Glenn, 94
sexuality, 8386, 1015; of Jordan
Baker, 40, 84, 102; of Daisy
Buchanan, 8384, 1045; of Nick
Carraway, 8485, 1014; and queer
theory, 42, 1034; and romance,
12021. See also gender
7/26/2011 4:59:33 PM
162
INDEX
Shepherd, Scott, 136, 137

Sinclair, Upton, 31
Skinner, John, 108
Skinner, Quinton, 13637
Sklar, Robert, 69, 73, 89, 91n2, 95
Slater, Peter Gregg, 8081
Snyder, Ruth, 1314
Solomon, Eric, 45
Spengler, Oswald, 55, 80, 9599, 114
Stagg, Hunter, 16
Stallings, Laurence, 4
Stallman, Robert Wooster, 4546,
5354, 57, 8990, 95
Stark, Bruce, 65, 112
Stavola, Thomas J., 69
Stendhal, 35
stereotyping, 73, 98, 11011
Stern, Milton R., 7578
Stoddard, Lothrop, 7980, 98100,
114
Stoddart, Scott, 92n7
Stouck, David, 62, 76
suburban landscapes, 12633
Summer We Read Gatsby, The (Ganek),
14041
Tales of the Jazz Age (Fitzgerald), 20n4
Tanner, Bernard, 68
Taps at Reveille (Fitzgerald), 24
Teall, Edward N., 12
Tender Is the Night (Fitzgerald), 6,
22, 120; initial reaction to, 2; print
runs of, 20n1; reviews of, 2325;
stage adaptation of, 136
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 71
Thale, Jerome, 46
This Side of Paradise (Fitzgerald), 88,
120; Authors Apology to, 3,
125; early reactions to, 2, 716;
original title of, 7; print runs of,
20n1; H.G. Wellss influence on,
53
Thompson, Carlyle Van, 12324
Three Comrades (film), 25
Trask, David, 60, 68, 76
Tredell, Nicolas, 55n2, 58, 101
Beuka.indd 162
Trilling, Lionel, 45, 28, 34, 48, 78,

125; Liberal Imagination, 4041
Troy, William, 3234, 49, 53
Turlish, Lewis, 7980
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 60
Twain, Mark, 34, 35
Valentino, Rudolph, 120
Van Vechten, Carl, 18
VanArsdale, Nancy, 125, 126
Vanderbilt, Kermit, 70
Veblen, Thorstein, 110, 117n9, 119
Vince, Raymond M., 119
Wanning, Andrews, 32
Washington, Bryan, 1045
Wasiolek, Edward, 86, 1013, 105
Waste Land, The (Eliot), 40, 4445,
105
Waterston, Sam, 86
Way, Brian, 9394
wealth: and commodification, 119,
127, 138; and gender, 65; and
power, 3031, 42. See also class
Weinstein, Arnold, 106
Weir, Charles, Jr., 3031
Wells, H.G., 53, 56n9
Westbrook, J.S., 5960, 76
Westcott, Glenway, 27
Wharton, Edith, 18, 71
White, Patti, 11113
Will, Barbara, 12425
Wilson, Edmund, 14, 90, 102; as editor of Crack-Up, 25, 31, 33; as
editor of Last Tycoon, 20, 21n5,
142n4; on FSFs literary stature,
21n6, 2728; novel of, 96
Wilson, Louis, 19
Winter Dreams (Fitzgerald), 88, 89,
128
Wolfe, Thomas, 30
Young, Philip, 4445
Yust, Walter, 15
Zinoman, Jason, 136
7/26/2011 4:59:33 PM
City University of New York.
Robert Beuka has constructed an immensely valuable resource for

teachers, students, and scholars. We have needed a book like this for a
long time; Gatsby criticism seems in little danger of exhaustion anytime
soon, and it becomes extremely difficult for readers to organize extant
criticism simply because its so vast. This book will be read and reread,
annotated and underlined, for many years to come.
Kirk Curnutt, Troy University Montgomery
Cover image: Dust jacket of first edition of The Great Gatsby, published by Charles Scribners Sons in 1925. The
image is Francis Cugats Celestial Eyes. Photo used by kind permission of the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli
Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South
Carolina Libraries.
Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby in Critical and Cultural Context
Beuka
American Icon is a terrific book.... Professor Beuka has made sense

of decades of fragmented insights.
Ronald Berman, University of California, San Diego
American Icon
Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby

in Critical and Cultural Context
Robert Beuka is Professor of English at Bronx Community College,
American Icon
itzgeralds The Great Gatsby is widely seen as the quintessential

great American novel, and the extensive body of criticism on the
work bears out its significance in American letters. American Icon
traces its reception and its canonical status in American literature,
popular culture, and educational experience. It begins by outlining the
novels critical reception from its publication in 1925, to very mixed
reviews, through Fitzgeralds death, when it had been virtually forgotten.
Next, it examines the posthumous revival of Fitzgerald studies in the
1940s and its intensification by the New Critics in the 1950s, focusing
on how and why the novel began to be considered a masterpiece
of American literature. It then traces the growth of the industry of
Gatsby criticism in the ensuing decades, stressing how critics of recent
decades have opened up study of the economic, sexual, racial, and
historical aspects of the text. The final section discusses the larger-thanlife status Gatsby has attained in American education and popular
culture, suggesting not only that it has risen from the critical ash heaps
into which it was initially discarded, but also that it has become part of
the fabric of American culture in a way that few other works have.
Cover design: Frank Gutbrod
Robert Beuka
Beuka_cover.indd 1
8/8/11 6:15:51 PM

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City University of New York.

Robert Beuka has constructed an immensely valuable resource for

Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby in Critical and Cultural Context

American Icon is a terrific book.... Professor Beuka has made sense

Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby

Robert Beuka is Professor of English at Bronx Community College,

itzgeralds The Great Gatsby is widely seen as the quintessential

Cover design: Frank Gutbrod

Studies in American Literature and Culture:

About Literary Criticism in Perspective

Rochester, New York

Copyright 2011 Robert Beuka

For my mother and father

1: A Book of the Season Only: Early Reactions to

2: A Green Light: The Fitzgerald Revival and the

3: The Gatsby Industry: Tracing Patterns and Pushing

4: Gatsby, in Theory (and Out): New Paradigms in the

5: Twenty-First-Century G: The Great Gatsby as Cultural Icon

since become valued friends and colleagues. Their influence on this

1: A Book of the Season Only: Early

GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL: What does this phrase signify? Is there

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

a bold (if, ultimately, accurate) statement implies, Fitzgerald was also an

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

The Perils of Precociousness:

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

at first-hand (16); David W. Bailey, for the Harvard Crimson, describes

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

pronouncing, The Beautiful and Damned is a tedious, dull book with

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

It was my material: Gatsbys Literary

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

Fitzgeralds complaints about the critics sensibility, as well as his

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

negligible as any ones work, and vastly important as Scott Fitzgeralds

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

has structure. It has high occasions of felicitous, almost magic, phrase

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

From being called loud, blatant, ugly [and] pointless to being

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

What I cut out of it both physically and emotionally would make

Notwithstanding the hint of optimism that can be found amidst the

Matthew Bruccoli, in his definitive Fitzgerald biography, Some Sort of Epic

Like Jackson Bryer, Matthew Bruccoli has contributed immeasurably to our

As Bruccoli points out, Fitzgeralds decision to name his second collection of

A BOOK OF THE SEASON ONLY

A case could be made that there is a certain irony in Fitzgeralds confiding in

2: A Green Light: The Fitzgerald

1930s, including his alcoholism, his wife Zeldas deteriorating mental

to Tender, referring to the earlier novel as a remarkable performance

As Cowley points out in his essay The Fitzgerald Revival, 1941

September 1945 review of The Portable F.Scott Fitzgerald, There is no

The authors of this article, Leo and Miriam Gurko, go to some

Weir provides a double-edged answer to his own question; in arguing