Original cover art of the first edition in 1925 – “Celestial Eyes” by Francis Cugat (public domain image), used in subsequent editions

(11) F. SCOTT FITZGERALD –

THE GREAT GATSBY (1925)

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning —

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Ah, yes – the orgastic future, because if there’s one thing I want my future to be, it’s orgastic. Also, those lines pretty much sum up The Great Gatsby.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald – the quintessential novelist of the Jazz Age (which he named as such), who wrote the quintessential novel of the Jazz Age with The Great Gatsby. Ironically for a novel that revolved around the titular character throwing lavishly expensive parties, it didn’t throw any parties of its own – it was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. However, it received generally favorable reviews, while both it and Fitzgerald’s reputation have continued to rise – “with The Great Gatsby, emerging as a strong contender for the Great American Novel”.

“F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic social critique, in which the American Dream of Rags to Riches is portrayed as a noble illusion and millionaires as self-absorbed, emotionally bankrupt rich b!tches…frank but wistful consideration of idealism vs human nature”.

I’m just going to come out and say it – I like Gatsby, the only character in the book (apart perhaps from narrator Nick Carraway) who has some idealistic belief in anything but himself, even if that belief was misplaced and he effectively sacrificed his life to protect the object of his belief, Daisy Buchanan.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made”.

Yes, even if Gatsby was a gangster or front-man for gangsters, bootlegging, and moonshine.

Literary critic Edmund Wilson described Fitzgerald’s style: “romantic, but also cynical; he is bitter as well as ecstatic; astringent as well as lyrical. He casts himself in the role of playboy, yet at the playboy he incessantly mocks…(the) gift for turning language into something iridescent and surprising”.