Abstract
Reviewing the recently published Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby (2000), Claudia Roth Pierpont recalls as a great mystery “the fact that the facile and fizzy author [Fitzgerald] produced what may be the century’s most widely read and admired American novel… .”1 Her irreverence takes nothing away from what she regards as a fait accompli, though a wide, admiring readership would only evolve over time. That The Great Gatsby has succeeded in the long run so well, however, seems no accident.
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Notes
Claudia Roth Pierpont, “For Love and Money,” New Yorker 76 (July 3, 2000): 77.
For first-rate descriptions of The Great Gatsby as a modernist text, see Ronald Berman, The Great Gatsby and Modern Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994)
Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 23–43
See Sheilah Graham, College of One (New York: Viking, 1967), 86–87.
Though I mean to reveal in this chapter how troubled and troubling Nick’s authoritative position in the novel is, I accept the standard view that he represents a technical advance derived mainly from Fitzgerald’s reading of Conrad, as well as the assumption that we are to understand Nick as having a greater capacity for disinterested judgment (moral and aesthetic) than any other character in the book. What I think of as a more “traditional” reading of Nick is influentially represented, e.g., by Sergio Perosa, The Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 62–66
Henry Dan Piper, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 107–11
James E. Miller, Jr., F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 118–23
Richard D. Lehan, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966), 109–12
Robert Sklar, F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoön (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 175–80
Milton R. Stern, The Golden Moment: The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 191–96
Brian Way, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Social Fiction (London: Edward Arnold, 1980), 116–17.
See Berman’s discussion of this theme in The Great Gatsby and Modern Times, 125–30. Also see Meredith Goldsmith, “White Skin, White Mask: Passing, Posing, and Performing in The Great Gatsby,” Modern Fiction Studies49 (fall 2003): 447–51
On the first recorded use of this term, see Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 218–19.
Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4.
For excellent critical histories of the rise of the “middlebrow” as a cultural category as well as the key institutions such as the Book-of-the-Month Club that sustained it, see Radway, A Feeling for Books, 219–60, as well as Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), xi–xx
Important instances of this critical viewpoint have been around for some time: see M. Gidley, “Notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Passing of the Great Race,” Journal of American Studies 7 (1973): 171–81
Peter Gregg Slater, “Ethnicity in The Great Gatsby” Twentieth Century Literature 19 (January 1973): 53–62
See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 38–62.
See Mitchell Breitwieser, “The Great Gatsby: Grief, Jazz and the Eyewitness,” Arizona Quarterly 47 (autumn 1991), 62–66
The contrary view persists that Fitzgerald knew and cared little about authentic (black) jazz: see Robert M. Crunden, Body and Soul: The Making of Modernism (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 237–38
Kathy Ogren, The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America & the Meaning of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 149–50.
See Billie Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties (London: Macmillan, 1988), 90
Sarah Wintle, “The Sheik What Can Be Made of a Daydream,” Women: A Cultural Review 7 (winter 1996), 292.
See Irving Shulman, Valentino (London: Leslie Frewin, 1968), 160–62.
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© 2007 Michael Nowlin
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Nowlin, M. (2007). “Trashy Imaginings” and The “Greatness” of The Great Gatsby. In: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11647-5_4
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