The Great Gatsby: Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury
208
The Great Gatsby: Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury
208Hardcover
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Overview
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
For generations of enthralled readers, F. Scott Fitzgerald's mysterious millionaire, Jay Gatsby, has come to embody all the glamour and decadence of the Roaring Twenties. Gatsby emerges as if from nowhere, evading questions about his past and throwing dazzling parties sparkling with champagne and jazz at his luxurious Long Island mansion. Nick Carraway, a young man who has moved in next door, is fascinated by his oddly detached neighbor, and by his discovery that Gatsby is motivated by a single-minded quest to regain his long-lost love, Daisy Buchanan. Nick finds something both appalling and appealing about the intensity of Gatsby's ambition to reinvent himself. But Daisy and her wealthy husband are cynical and careless people, and as Gatsby's dream collides with reality, Nick is witness to the violence and tragedy that result. The Great Gatsby's remarkable staying power, nearly a century after its publication, is owed both to the lyrical freshness of its storytelling and to the way that it illuminates the hollow core of the glittering American dream.
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781101908297 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 01/05/2021 |
| Series: | Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Sales rank: | 505,207 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.90(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Date of Birth:
September 24, 1896Date of Death:
December 21, 1940Place of Birth:
St. Paul, MinnesotaEducation:
Princeton UniversityRead an Excerpt
from the INTRODUCTION by Malcolm Bradbury
“The uncertainties of 1919 were over – there seemed little doubt about what was going to happen – America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it. The whole golden boom was in the air – its splendid generosities, its outrageous corruptions and the tortuous death struggle of the old America in prohibition. All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Early Success” (1937)
No writer ever set out more determinedly to capture and condense in fiction the tone, the style, the spirit, the noise, the excitement, the hope and the despair of his own decade than Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. The decade was, of course, the American 1920s—the era when, in the wake of the Great War, the United States became modern and a leading world power, and in an era of economic boom and unprecedented change the nation entered on what Fitzgerald himself tagged the “greatest, gaudiest spree in history.” The great, gaudy spree was not merely something that Fitzgerald observed and then wrote about. Beside his flamboyant wife Zelda, herself a Fitzgerald flapper heroine and the obvious source for the headstrong new women who populate his five novels and his many short stories, Fitzgerald went on to live out the times as a great and glorious spectacle. He gave himself so thoroughly to the task, that it all became personal; on behalf of Ameicans at large, Fitzgerald publicly performed the Twenties. From the moment when his first novel, This Side of Paradise, came out in 1920, just as the new decade started, to win immediate success because it seemed so exactly to voice the spirit, hopes and anxieties of the new post-war generation, he became a cultural icon, an embodiment of what was happening. “I who knew less of New York than any reporter of six months standing and less of its society than any hall-room boy in a Ritz stag line, was pushed into the position not only of spokesman for the time but of the typical product of the same moment,” he noted later. So it was Fitzgerald who ensured that the more frankly sexual and independent young men-women of this golden age were known as “flappers,” and that the age itself acquired, from the sound of its most novel and freewheeling music, the title of “the jazz age.” It was he who could be counted on to bring to fiction the new songs and dances, the new hairstyles, the new manners and mores of dating and petting, the glitz of the new urban amusements, the style of the decades’ parties, he who could voice the disillusionment of the young with their elders and sense the shifting rhythms of excitement and unease that belonged to a decade that was, more than most, in rapid and modernizing transition and, more than most, in a state of apocalyptic anxiety.
In a famous essay, “The Crack-Up,” written in the mid-1930s when the bubble had burst and his younger generation was no longer young and no longer carelessly wealthy, he summed up this singular identification between writer and times. The historical development of America from the weary decadence of the immediately post-war years, through the rising excitements of growing wealth, change and excess, represented, he said, his own psychic curve. The Great Crash of 1929, when the whole flimsy structure suddenly settled earthward, and the free credit was called in, was the exact analogy of his own and Zelda’s breakdown, when the psychic price was paid. The grim political assessments of the Depression Thirties, when glitter gave way to breadlines and dancing gave way to dustbowl, was the match for his onw bitter and struggling endeavor to put his spiritual and historical house in rder. Unlike some other American writers, who had watched the shift from expatriation in Paris, Fitzgerald had been no distant observer of the great American change. It was nothing less than the story of his own life, his parvenu expectations, his obsession with success, fame, glittering wealth and beauty—and his rising sense of disaster, because he had the steady Calvinistic feeling that for all these amusements and fragile splendours there was an ultimate, and inward, price that would duly have to be paid.
Yet so lovingly had Fitzgerald given himself over to the great gaudy bubble that for a long time the critics doubted him and his works; indeed he came to doubt them himself. They saw him chiefly as a stylish chronicler, a literary popularizer, a writer so thoroughly immersed in the unworthy dreams of an age that, in retrospect, seemed so politically naïve and economically foolish that its discredit often became his. He was a writer who had involved himself so deeply with the themes and dreams, the extravagances and wastes, of an uncriticial age that he never himself found the time or the artistic strength to stand back, to examine, to criticize, and certainly not to produce a fully serious, detached and considered work of art. To a certain point (he acknowledged as much himself), the charges were deserved. No writer was apparently more willing to be taken along by the seductive rhythms of success and popular adulation. None granted more to the special and yet specious wonder of the American rich, the grandees of a time of confident American power, nor fell more readily under the sexual spell of its exotic, expensive and often self-destructive women. None seemed more wasteful of his own evident charm, more careless of his own obvious talent. Much of what he wrote seemed a writing of glitzy surfaces, deliberately designed for impermanence. This story was written, he was happy to suggest, to pay for the champagne at one of his famous and newsworthy parties; that novel was produced at speed to equip Zelda with the expensive squirrel coat that she craved and, since craving had to be satisfied, really had to have. As even his good friend Edmund Wilson, who had discovered his promising talents when both were students at Princeton, once said, “he has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without many ideas to express.”
This view of Fitzgerald persisted well after his early death from alcoholism in Hollywood in 1940, when he had been doing boring work as a screenwriter and when his reputation had fallen low. In 1951, Arthur Mizener produced an excellent and important biography, The Far Side of Paradise, which, along with other studies of the time, did much to rehabilitate his reputation as one of the great modern American writers. Yet the book takes the form of a Modernist tragedy (indeed, with the suicide of Ernest Hemingway in 1961, it increasingly came to seem that most of the tales of the major American novelists of the 1920s took the shape of a tragedy). Mizener’s version seemed to confirm Fitzgerald’s own dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. His Fitzgerald is an American dreamer who squanders his talents, loses his way, finds himself trapped in an unhappy marriage which was to culminate in Zelda’s final madness, caught in a world of bills, economic and emotional, that proved too great ever to pay. He was a man who admitted himself, using a favorite economic analogy, that all his investments had gone wrong, who had “been drawing on resources that I did not possess, . . . mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.” His writing came from a singular identification with the life of his times – “my material” – but the demands of popular fiction persistently discouraged him from seriousness. In later life his powers cracked, and he became, in Hemingway’s famous and condescending phrase, “poor Fitzgerald.” It was a familiar American literary tragedy, the story of the writer who always meant to write something “maybe great,” but granted too much to his own glossy, impermanent culture, and who therefore could never acquire the detachment, the originality, to achieve what his talent and ambitions seemed to promise.
To a considerable extent this still remains the “myth” of Fitzgerald, the myth that sees him as what Lionel Trilling once called him, the “maimed hero” of modern writing. It has encouraged the still very common view that of the truly important and genuinely radical modern writers—Hemignway, Stein, Faulkner, Dos Passos—who emerged in the United States during the remarkable literary decade of the 1920s, when the American novel was totally transformed and when it acquired the dignity and character of a true world literature, Fitzgerald, though of the greatest representative importance, was one of the most profligate and least realized authors of the generation. So, where Hemingway, through style, achieved a pure and hard perfection of modernist prose, and Faulkner and Dos Passos, through complex formal experiment, achieved the experimental radicalism of modernist vision, Fitzgerald was to stay the eternal amateur who never mastered what his talent and imagination offered. It is certainly true that Fitzgerald was one of the less obviously experimental writers of experimental times; but that was largely because he made the first object of his experiment not the literary text, rather life itself in an experimental time which he sought to understand in its contradiction and complexity. For Fitzgerald, style in life and style in art were always to be inextricably interwoven, and his writing is in endless passage from one to the other. It is of course entirely true that, of the many short stories Fitzgerald wrote and indeed lived by, many were slight and trivial. It is also true that, of the five novels he wrote, the first two—This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, so popular in their time—were works of youthful charm but indulgent and imperfect method, while the last two –the brilliant Tender Is the Night and the final The Last Tycoon, which were largely disliked in their time—were works of vast ambition that were nonetheless, for different reasons, never truly finished. This, however, still leaves us with a good deal worthy of the highest respect. There remain many remarkable short stories, some cunning and subtle criticism and commentary, of which the once despised “Crack-Up” essays are a distinguished example, and one novel so perfect that it surely stands among the finest of twentieth-century American novels. That book, the book T. S. Elio called “the first step the American novel has taken since Henry James,” the book that in fact offers the most profound and critical summing up we have of the ironies and disorders behind the wonderful glow of the Twenties, the great novel of the American Dream in its modern condition, was The Great Gatsby.
. . .
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements Introduction F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Brief Chronology A Note on the Text
The Great Gatsby
Appendix A: Fitzgerald’s Correspondence about The Great Gatsby (1922-25)
Appendix B: Contemporary Reviews
- H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun (2 May 1925)
- William Rose Benét, Saturday Review of Literature (9 May 1925)
- William Curtis, Town & Country (15 May 1925)
- Carl Van Vechten, The Nation (20 May 1925)
- Gilbert Seldes, The Dial (August 1925)
Appendix C: Consumption, Class, and Selfhood: Eight Contemporary Advertisements
Appendix D: The Irreverent Spirit of the Jazz Age
- From F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931)
- Duncan M. Poole, “The Great Jazz Trial” (1922)
- From H.L. Mencken, [“Five Years of Prohibition”] (1924)
- Zelda Fitzgerald, “What Became of the Flappers?” (1925)
- From Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (1929)
Appendix E: Race and the National Culture, 1920-25
- From Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920)
- From Henry Ford, Jewish Influences in American Life (1921)
- From Frederick C. Howe, “The Alien” (1922)
- Miguel Covurrubias, “The Sheik of Dahomey” (illustration, 1924)
Select Bibliography
What People are Saying About This
James Dickey Now we have an American masterpiece in its final form: the original crystal has shaped itself into the true diamond. This is the novel as Fitzgerald wished it to be, and so it is what we have dreamed of, sleeping and waking
Reading Group Guide
This Scribner reading group guide for The Great Gatsby includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
The Great Gatsby, one of the classics of twentieth-century literature, brings to life America’s Jazz Age, when, as The New York Times puts it, “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession.” Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate and veteran of the Great War, moves to Long Island in the spring of 1922, eager to leave his native Middle West behind. He rents a tiny house in West Egg, dwarfed by a mansion owned by the most celebrated host of the season, Jay Gatsby. Everyone loves to drink and dance at Gatsby’s legendary parties, and everyone loves to gossip about Gatsby’s secret past. Directly across the bay in the tonier town of East Egg lies the home of Nick’s beautiful cousin and her millionaire husband: Daisy and Tom Buchanan. When Nick starts dating Daisy’s friend, the famed but deceitful golfer Jordan Baker, he finds himself caught up in a different romance: Gatsby begs for a reintroduction to Daisy. Gatsby and Daisy fell in love years ago, but the war and Tom Buchanan came between them. As the love triangle of Daisy, Tom, and Gatsby resurfaces – and Tom’s mistress, Myrtle, grows desperate with jealousy – Nick finds himself missing the plains of the Middle West, where hope can thrive in a wider landscape.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. The Great Gatsby features an epigraph by “Thomas Parke D’Invilliers” (a writer invented by Fitzgerald) about winning a lover by any means. How does this short poem set the scene for the novel to come? Why do you think Fitzgerald would open The Great Gatsby with a fictional epigraph, rather than a real quote or poem?
2. Compare East Egg and West Egg. What kinds of people settle on each side of the bay? Why would a couple like the Buchanans reside in East Egg, and men like Nick and Gatsby on the other side? How does the division between these two villages compare to differences between the American East and West?
3. Discuss the role of honesty in The Great Gatsby. Which characters pride themselves on telling the truth? How does duplicity affect the relationship between Nick and Jordan, and the marriage of Tom and Daisy? What falsehoods has Gatsby relied upon to advance in society?
4. Compare two classic party scenes in the novel: the first party at Gatsby’s house that Nick attends, and the impromptu gathering at Tom and Myrtle’s apartment in New York City. How is each party enlivened by booze, romance, and chaos? How are the guests at each party similar, and how are they different? How does Nick’s drunken perspective color each scene?
5. Consider the role of gossip in the novel. What kinds of rumors do Gatsby’s guests spread about their host, and why? Why does public opinion have such a strong hold over the characters in the novel?
6. In Chapter VI, just after Daisy and Gatsby reunite at Nick’s house, Nick reveals the story of his friend’s transition from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby. Why does Nick choose this point in the story to tell Gatsby’s history? How does this chapter serve as a turning point in the novel?
7. Compare James Gatz to the man he became: Jay Gatsby. What do we learn about Gatz’s ambition as a youth? How did he make his transition to Gatsby? What elements from his past did he retain, even as he left his identity behind?
8. Eyes are a prominent feature throughout the novel – T. J. Ecklesburg’s spectacles watch over the “valley of ashes,” “Owl-eyes” attends Gatsby’s parties and funeral, and Nick senses Myrtle’s jealous gaze upon Tom and Jordan when they stop at Wilson’s gas station. What is the significance of this theme of surveillance? Who is being watched throughout the novel?
9. “‘Can’t repeat the past?’ [Gatsby] cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’” (page 110). Discuss Gatsby’s attempts to recreate history. Why is he so eager to go back to life before he went to war, when he was a young officer in love with Daisy? What has Gatsby lost and gained since those days in Louisville?
10. At the moment of the accident that killed Myrtle Wilson, “first Daisy turned away from the woman toward the other car, and then she lost her nerve and turned back” (page 143). How else does Daisy lose her nerve on that drive from New York City to East Egg? Why does she turn back to Tom, instead of choosing a life with Gatsby?
11. Gatsby says about Daisy, “Her voice is full of money.” (page 120). Discuss how class and affects the romances in the novel. Would Daisy be just as alluring without her status? Would Gatsby or Tom be attractive without their fortunes?
12. Nick observes, “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all,” (page 176) since none of its characters are from the East. How have ideas about the “West” changed since Fitzgerald’s day? What is particularly “Western” about each of these characters: Nick, Tom, Gatsby, Daisy, and Jordan? Do you agree with Nick that they are “unadaptable to Eastern life”? Why or why not?
13. Consider the setting of the novel: 1922 Long Island. Can you imagine this story within another time or place? Do you consider The Great Gatsby timeless, or do you think its characters and themes are deeply rooted in the postwar prosperity of the Roaring Twenties?
14. The novel ends with Nick thinking about “Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock” (page 180). Consider the symbol of the green light. What dreams and hopes does the light stand for? Is Gatsby’s “extraordinary gift for hope” an asset or a hindrance to his ambition, in the end?
15. If this was your first time reading The Great Gatsby, discuss what you knew about this American classic before you began reading, and how it met or defied your expectations. If you’ve read the novel before, think back to the first time you read it, and discuss how the novel has changed for you over time. Do you understand it differently today than you did in the past?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Come to your book club meeting dressed like your favorite Great Gatsby character! If you don’t happen to own a pink suit like Gatsby’s, consider donning a partygoer’s pearls, Daisy’s white dress, Owl-eyes’ oversized glasses, Jordan’s golf gloves, Tom’s riding pants, or any other accessory inspired by the Jazz Age.
2. In a nod to the Prohibition era, serve your book club’s refreshments – whether you’re pouring mint juleps or lemonade – in teacups.
3. Get your book club members in a jazzy mood – greet them with “Ain’t We Got Fun,” a song played during Gatsby and Daisy’s romantic reunion. You can find a recording of the 1921 classic here: http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/detail/id/7859/.
4. Learn the history of the house that might have been the inspiration for Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s East Egg mansion, which was condemned in 2011: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3445_162-20054710/the-end-of-an-era-for-the-gatsby-house/.
5. A theater company called the Elevator Repair Service has adapted The Great Gatsby into an eight-hour staged reading, Gatz. Stage a shorter version with your book club – assign parts to Nick, Gatsby, and Daisy, and have “Nick” read the beginning of Chapter V while “Gatsby” and “Daisy” read their lines of dialogue. Does the prose have a different impact when read aloud?