The Tyee has published my article Gatsby Revisited. Excerpt:
The Great Gatsby seems insubstantial: a string of parties and social meetings in the summer of 1922, stitched together with train trips and car rides between New York City and the Long Island suburbs of East and West Egg. Most of the characters are in their late 20s or early 30s, the last generation born in the 19th century but very much at home in the 20th. It deals with some love affairs, and a little violence. The story is just 182 pages long.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was just 29 when he published it in 1925, and already the famous author of two earlier novels and dozens of stories and articles. Toward the end of his short life (he died of heart failure in 1940, at 44), he regretted that he had not followed Gatsby with a string of similar books. Instead he veered off into projects that took years (like Tender is the Night). Then, when they appeared in the 1930s, they seemed like warmed-over 1920s. Then he struggled to make money in Hollywood to support his insane wife in a sanitarium and to put their daughter through college.
Actually, it's hard to imagine a novel that could have topped Gatsby. Scott Fitzgerald made The Great Gatsby into a kind of MRI scan of 1920s America, exposing countless social tumours and lesions that remain unhealed almost a century later.
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