Gatsby and the Shifting American Dream

Rather than “old sport,” Alabama congressman Frank W. Boykin (1885–1969) called nearly everyone he met “cousin” or “pardner” in a thick, Southern drawl. He became famous around the country, though, by singing, repeating, and more or less branding the phrase “Everything’s Made for Love,” the title of a hit song by 1920s crooner Gene Austin, at one time the best-selling recording artist in history. Boykin, however, used it as a greeting, a way to draw attention to himself—a short, hulking (upward of 250 pounds), flamboyant, and boisterous character—the kind of insider that used to haunt the nation’s capital. Reportedly, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt first met Boykin in the Oval Office, he shouted the catchphrase out to him, bringing a round of laughter from everyone who witnessed the scene.

By all accounts, Boykin was no statesman during his twenty-eight-year career in Washington, but he pulled extensive press coverage for the lavish parties he threw for the nation’s elite on his hundred-thousand-acre hunting compound in Choctaw County in his home state. Like the most famous boys club at the time, Washington insiders were shuttled in and out of southwestern Alabama to hunt deer, wild boar, and other game on the preserve. His fame grew so extensive that in 1965 Time magazine labeled him a “Dixie Gatsby” for his high-priced, yet down-home, galas.^[1]

In 1949, for example, Boykin threw a party for powerhouse Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn from the larger-than-life state of Texas at a hotel in Washington. More than nine hundred guests showed up for the fete, which featured a menu of exotic game ranging from Montana elk to bear meat and antelope. Boykin, who made millions of dollars by gobbling up land, timber, and mineral rights in Alabama, picked up the tab, estimated at $16,000 (about $150,000 in 2012 dollars).^[2]

Closer to home, on his expansive hunting preserve, Boykin’s ostentatious courting of the nation’s power elite took place to store up and gather favors that he might need later, whether these were for his Mobile, Alabama, congressional district or one of his business deals. While most of his constituents seemed to look the other way regarding Boykin’s mixture of personal business with congressional work, critics blasted him for supposed illegalities. Late in his career, Boykin finally got pinched for using his power as a legislator to lobby for a business partner. The 1963 trial ended in Boykin’s conviction, along with his colleague, but the judge basically slapped him on the wrist, fining the multimillionaire a paltry $40,000 and sparing him prison time based on his age and health concerns. Interviewed after the jury sealed his fate, Boykin kept to his old mantra: everything’s made for love.^[3]

In the late 1950s, still at the peak of his influence, Boykin furnished his office suite with exotic memorabilia, ranging from mounted deer heads to pistols owned by famed outlaw Jesse James. Another piece, however, always drew a crooked eyebrow—a mummified whale penis. For Boykin, these curiosities gave visitors and him something to talk about, perfect for a congressman who ran his office from the front door, like some kind of exalted Walmart greeter of today, ever ready with a wink and big smile.^[4]

On the surface, Boykin shared almost nothing with Jay Gatsby, particularly in how the Southern legislator used his charisma and gregariousness to his own advantage, particularly when his clout as a national legislator helped line his own pocket. Labeling Boykin the “Dixie Gatsby” and using the notion of Gatsby as explanation, however, commentators and journalists demonstrated how the idea of Gatsby permeated the national discourse. Ironically, though, their conception of Jay Gatsby boiled down to little more than a stand-in for someone who throws lavish parties, as if the term “Gatsby” merely equates to the notion of extravagance.

From examining the tens of thousands of pages of similar uses across the global mass media from the 1940s to the early 2010s, one sees that this kind of misdirection is more common than not. Unfortunately, what it also reveals is that either people using it in this manner do not understand the novel and its characters well or that it is just an easy example to pull out of one’s writing bag of tricks, regardless of its meaning. In other words, The Great Gatsby is reduced to a generic group of synonyms to describe just about any person, scheme, or character. Over and over again, one sees “Gatsby” as a substitute for ideas such as “wealthy,” “lavish,” or “rags to riches.” The important question here is what it means for a novel to enter the cultural mind-set of a nation, particularly if that appearance opens the book up to wild, speculative, or even incorrect uses. Time and again, “Gatsby” is used in ways that reduce the novel to some basic dictum or idea that usually oversimplifies what Fitzgerald actually wrote to the point of trivializing his intentions.

For example, the fact that Boykin threw extravagant, expensive parties is hardly the most interesting relation he had to the mythical Gatsby. Looking back even further into his career shows that Boykin’s rise from nothing to immense wealth through some highly nefarious methods mirror Gatsby’s, though Boykin did not have an aristocratic beauty as his motivating force. Like so many people in American history who achieve rags-to-riches fame, the congressman simply wanted the riches that often accompany such journeys. From my perspective, an examination of Boykin’s early life exhibits the way the American Dream may unfold in reality, thus providing Fitzgerald’s vision with a real-world case study.

More directly concurrent with Gatsby or a Gatsby-esque rise to power, a Prohibition raid in Mobile in late 1923 found Boykin (then a young, budding entrepreneur) and many of the city’s most prominent leaders arrested, including the county sheriff, city police chief, and many top business leaders. Boykin, though not a leader among the city’s throngs of alcohol racketeers, used his access to powerbrokers in Washington, D.C., to ensure that local whiskey sellers would not get busted.^[5]

Although Boykin got off on a technicality in one trial, another was lined up to go after him directly for outright bootlegging. When the jury acquitted Boykin and his codefendants, another trial began the very next day, accusing him of bribing a federal agent. The third time turned out to be a charm for Prohibition officials when the jury found him guilty. The initial sentence gave Boykin two years in the state penitentiary, but the judge let him post bond. A year later, Boykin’s attorneys finagled the indictment, which got overturned. Boykin claimed that he had been framed, but in the end he never spent a night in prison.^[6]

Perhaps journalists writing in the pre-Internet days did not have access to information about Boykin’s racketeering past; he certainly did not talk about it as he rose in both wealth and fame. However, that link to Gatsby would have made for a much more interesting story and connection to the novel character. Returning to Boykin’s motto—everything’s made for love—maybe he himself would have found the similarity ironic based on a stanza Gene Austin sang:

Austin seemed to get the reason why Gatsby would hold out for the green light at the distant shore. For Gatsby, everything was made of love. A more appropriate motto for Boykin might have been “everything’s done for money.” Using Gatsby as a term in describing Boykin served, therefore, as a bastardization of the ideas contained in Fitzgerald’s work. Even here, though, it is a slippery slope. Should we appreciate the attempt or condemn the swing and miss?

As the American Dream unfolds in the twenty-first century, one might simply wonder: Is the idea an illusion or a reality?

Can you touch it, roll it around in your hands, and feel its weight? Is the American Dream the car you drive or the feeling of the cold brick on your palm when you open the front door of your house? Is it you, your job, or where your children go to college? Maybe it is all the tangible objects around you . . . maybe it is none.

Often, perspective depends on where one believes one sits in the food chain. But even more revealing, a person’s belief in the American Dream is probably hitched closer to what one thinks one can achieve or what the future holds for oneself and one’s family. Adding weight to this understanding is that one’s own individual interpretation of the idea is more or less sacrosanct. In other words, my American Dream is mine and by its very definition as mine is appropriate. In exchange for you acknowledging my notion of my American Dream, I will in turn accept yours.

Thinking about all this for a moment, it becomes clear that the American Dream remains a moving target and represents many different visions of what makes for an ideal life. Writer and consultant Lawrence R. Samuel bluntly proclaims that the American Dream “is the guiding mythology of the most powerful civilization in history.”^[7] The simple fact of the matter, he explains, is that it is a mythology, tightly wrapped up with the many other beliefs and principles that serve to create American culture. The mutability of the idea provides its power, because it can be almost anything to anyone who chooses to employ it as a driving narrative in his or her life.

Advertisers and marketing agencies use the shifting ideas at the heart of the American Dream to sell goods and services by appealing to the cultural tenets of consumers. For instance, Southwest Airlines dumped its quirky low-fare image in March 2013 and moved upscale with messages equating the American Dream with hard work. Its new TV commercials featured images of a baby crawling down a hallway, a young ballerina, a woman walking into a boardroom, and other nontraditional airline imagery mixed in with more typical shots of planes, ground crew, and cabins to underscore the tag: “The American Dream just doesn’t happen. It’s something you have to work for.” Rather than tout its heritage as one of the world’s great discount fare carriers, the corporation changed tactics to emphasize its new status as the nation’s largest domestic airline.^[8] While some critics of the new focus may be left shaking their heads at such a dramatic move, marketers know that the broader appeal to the American Dream carries predetermined messages and symbols that can elevate a brand almost immediately.

Arthur Mizener, one of the nation’s greatest literary critics, sees Fitzgerald’s conception of the American Dream clearly illustrated in the novel, concluding:

Mizener points to the challenge of writing about the concept because of its inherent duality. Yet Gatsby’s tragic commitment to his American Dream is so wrapped in how it is fulfilled via Daisy’s that he cannot see her for what she has become. He hints that it is as base as it seems when he talks of her voice being filled with money, but even then, he longs to relive the past, essentially starting over again with her or picking up from years earlier. As such, his desire to marry Daisy on the steps of her parents’ home in Louisville after she leaves Tom is ludicrous and almost laughable. Though money is the key in keeping Daisy and Tom together, their standing among the nation’s moneyed aristocracy is the real glue. No matter how much money Gatsby makes, he cannot buy into the peerage.

This chapter examines how Fitzgerald’s novel has helped us (and continues to assist us) as we assess the American Dream. Evaluating the Boykin example above, the label “Dixie Gatsby” does little to really elucidate the novel, yet the term has meaning, even if it is misguided. In other eras, Gatsby is linked with different ideas that interrogate the meaning of the American Dream, particularly when it is linked to notions of a person’s rags-to-riches march up the economic ladder.

Again, however, we should think about how these shortcut uses of the book help or hinder us as reflective individuals exhibiting our critical-thinking skills. Could these generic applications of Gatsby just be a way to outsource our thinking, a kind of mental white noise or filler to get us from point A to point B in an article or essay? There is no doubt that Gatsby and the American Dream are deeply connected, yet we must consider how the two converge to help us understand this critical concept.

The Dream Lives On

The American Dream is a unifying national belief (some might even argue that it is now a global ideal), yet at the same time it is both highly individualized and extremely difficult to define. While many people today equate the concept with a singular achievement, goal reached, or acquisition, others view it as a more encompassing idea of what it is to live a good, prosperous, or worthy life. As a result, achieving the American Dream can be as broad as getting into medical school or owning a new home. Over time, the idea developed into a central tenet of what it means to be an American, thus establishing its place in the collective popular culture as both a thing to be achieved and model for living one’s life.

What seems nearly universal when considering the American Dream is that the pursuit is about freedom—the belief that individuals have the right to chase it, particularly if the primary obstacles are based on gender, race, religious views, or other cultural differences. Yet, in modern society, it seems that some dreams are privileged above others, especially if the result vaults the pursuer into the realm of celebrity. As such, young people are applauded for spending hundreds or thousands of hours playing basketball, kicking around on the soccer field, or working out physically in hopes of achieving a one-in-a-million chance at athletic stardom.

In Fitzgerald’s time and ever since, the American Dream has been a critical component of our cultural heritage. As the American Dream became more deeply entwined within popular culture, the idea fostered a sense of hope and renewal that enabled people to keep moving forward during the dark days of warfare, economic collapse, and personal challenges. This idea itself is wholly American—we continually analyze the past to derive lessons, while at the same time yearning to see into the future for glimpses of what is blurrily developing on the next horizon.

Employing the notion of the American Dream, the nation’s citizens found a way to interpret themselves, those around them, and the world as a whole. We trumpeted our national vision, even when we did not live up to its ideals. Sometimes, this willingness toward self-delusion meant that people turned away from difficult societal challenges, instead finding solace in the latest film, radio program, or four-color advertisement for a flashy car. People used popular culture and the American Dream to serve their needs, whether to ignore problems or unify us in a common battle against such evils. Either way, the American Dream served as a force for reinterpreting the nation from within. Each person, it seemed, had the choice to use it as a way to assess society or mask reality in favor of a Hollywood dream version of life that ended with sunshine and rainbows. Regardless, the American Dream enabled these choices on a moment-by-moment scale.

The Great Gatsby resides amid this fog of ambiguity, because Fitz-
gerald wrapped the novel in so many ideas that almost any way a person might define the American Dream, he or she could uncover a means of examining it through the book. Scholar Anthony Larson sees fiction “as a tool for revealing the truth about a world around us; the relationship between fiction and reality is reversed so that it is fiction which serves to better understand and read reality.” From this perspective, he says, “Gatsby is read as a moral lesson on the excesses and failures of a certain America and—perhaps—the American dream itself.”^[10] It is not in the excesses of Gatsby or Tom Buchanan that Fitzgerald fixes the failure of the American Dream in Larson’s view. Rather, it is in the vast wasteland of George Wilson and the valley of ashes. Here, “the reader is quick to recognize the emptiness holding all of this up, the moral price paid by America for its capitalist excess.”^[11]

Celebrity as an Elixir

The American Dream also resides within complicated ideas about celebrity, which Fitzgerald certainly understood. He used the book as a pointed commentary on the celebrity status afforded the movie stars, Broadway singers and dancers, and film executives that populated Gatsby’s parties. These newly rich partygoers, whether from West Egg or on a jaunt in from the city, were different from the well-heeled East Eggers; the latter might be famous based on a family name, but not for being celebrities, like their counterparts who had to work for their wealth. Capitalism allowed for some small percentage of people to rise in economic rank, but the system had little influence on social and cultural standards.

Today, certainly on a grander scale than in Fitzgerald’s era because of the rise of reality television and its offshoots, the nation fixates on celebrity and its relation to the American Dream. The rise from nowhere to icon is a central narrative across mass media. For example, few would find fault with a would-be teen beauty leaving her family and small town behind and heading to Hollywood or Broadway. This is a well-worn path for potential film and television stars. The idea of the rural farm girl heading to Los Angeles or New York City to find success has developed into a central trope in popular culture narratives.

People view the chance to become the next big thing as alluring and worth the risk. Later, if one overcomes the odds and achieves stardom, the struggle reinforces the idea that this kind of American Dream is possible. In this respect, the American Dream is a fantasy built on fame and the wealth that accompanies such a life. Moreover, it is a version of the dream that millions of people buy into, perhaps thinking that with the right guidance their son or daughter can become the next big thing on an international scale. And, if the trials and tribulations of celebrity-as-celebrity fame-mongers like the Kardashians or the casts on any of the dozens of popular reality TV shows demonstrate, then perhaps the pursuit is attainable.

Historian Jim Cullen discusses the impact Hollywood has had on the American Dream, showing the tight connection between illusion and appeal. People today, he contends, understand that the allure of Hollywood and its extravagant lifestyle is a canard, yet the draw is so strong that many simply cannot fight its magnetism. Cullen sees that the entertainment industry has created a “democracy of desire” that we all realize is false and meant to separate us from our money, but nonetheless holds a “tattered validity.”^[12]

In other words, consumers are not the dupes that some advertisers and marketers believe. They participate in the exchange because the transaction and its results hold meaning. Cullen explains this duality, saying, “I know the fable of abundance depicted on the page of a magazine is a marketing ploy, but the magic it appropriates has a life that cannot be wholly contained by a slogan, an image, a bill of goods . . . [and] preys on my worst impulses—greed, lust, gluttony.” However, he concludes, “Every once in a while there is good to be seized among the goods,” which he equates with the works of art that come from production.^[13]

Without the link between the American Dream, consumerism, and celebrity there is no Bruce Springsteen, Tom Hanks, or Frank Lloyd Wright. Furthermore, there would be no need for Gatsby. Yet since this tie exists and centers ideas at the core of the national psyche, the need for Fitzgerald’s masterpiece increases geometrically, particularly as the consumer/celebrity world tightens its grip on everyday life.

My Mansion Is Bigger Than Yours

On a cloudy, late April day in 2011, massive yellow bulldozers some forty or fifty feet high massed outside the decaying hulk of a once-brilliant mansion. These great beasts would soon chortle and puff, ultimately tearing apart the twenty-thousand-square-foot manor, ripping through its rotting wood, delicate fixtures, and ornate hand-painted wallpaper. In short order the Stanford White–designed 1902 masterpiece, once a grand dame overlooking the Long Island Sound in Sands Point, New York, was gone, leaving only its great dual chimneys standing in the wake.

As sad as it is to destroy outdated or overly expensive homes in the name of progress, the mansions of yesteryear are increasingly rare as developers have learned that they can make more money by breaking up grand estates and selling them off piecemeal. Yet this particular demolition drew global interest. According to local lore and general knowledge, this estate served as Fitzgerald’s model for Daisy and Tom Buchanan’s place in East Egg, with its enduring green light and manifestation of Tom’s old-money heritage that would ultimately lead to Gatsby’s demise.

Even Fitzgerald’s influence and a longing for history could not save the place, which cost its owner $30 million and some $4,500 a day to maintain. The sagging fortress, with a peeling roof, broken-out windows, and paint ravaged by the sea air simply could not be saved. Instead, after demolition, the lot would be broken up into five individual homesites, each in the $10 million range. Perhaps a bit less Gatsby-esque than the original, but certainly still reaching epic proportions, even for that section of tony Long Island.^[14]

The passionate outrage over tearing down such a historically significant site paired with the general inability to do much more than mourn the loss of Fitzgerald’s muse combined to show how important a building can be in the national psyche. Just as Gatsby’s mansion symbolized the fact that he had made it in the fictionalized West Egg, this real-life estate took on a life of its own in its prime, owned by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope, who held the grand parties that included young Fitzgerald and his stunning wife, Zelda. When news spread of the home’s demise, news outlets and television stations appeared on the scene to put its history into perspective. The resulting ire revealed the tight bond between the ideas of success and owning a home.^[15]

The American Dream is most concrete and most illusory when it comes to the notion of homeownership as its central facet. Fitzgerald sensed this in his own life as he moved in and around wealthy friends and families. He then turned the Gatsby and Buchanan mansions into star characters in Gatsby. The houses do more than provide setting; they reflect the era, its people, and, in effect, all ages, since the desperate desire to own a home is central to how we see ourselves and others. Even in the midst of the Great Recession plaguing the world in the late 2000s with millions of homes at or near foreclosure, owning a home remained a central theme.

One needs look no further than what writer Terry Castle calls the “house porn” industry, which runs the gamut from the cable television channel HGTV (Home and Garden Television) to the dozens of “shelter” magazines, such as dwell, House Beautiful, or Architectural Digest to observe how the house and the idea of the home serves as the sun in the universe of the mind for those hoping to achieve the American Dream.^[16] At any given time in a twenty-four-hour period, one can turn to HGTV for shows dedicated to buying a first home, buying and flipping a home for profit, redecorating or remodeling the kitchen, or purchasing internationally. Yet, despite the industry that has sprung up to fortify and accentuate homeownership, the tie to that notion and the American Dream is driven by capitalism and corporate forces that gain in the merger of dream and reality.

Given that Gatsby is set on Long Island amid the real mansions of the nation’s elite in the early decades of the twentieth century, one of the most constant uses of terms associated with the novel comes from the New York Times as its reporters keep an eye on the real estate market on the famed Gold Coast. Writing articles on that region and its real estate fortunes allows the Times to appeal to local tastes, link to Gatsby via the pithy use of quotations from the book, and entice readers across economic classes with glimpses of longed-for mansions and estates.

In early 2010 in an article titled “Gatsby Would Feel at Home,” for example, reporter Marcelle S. Fischler takes readers into the pristine, exclusive Kings Point village, where a remarkable twenty-two new homes were under construction, despite the widespread recession and market downturn felt by most of the nation. According to one designer, each of the eight-thousand-square-foot homes built on one acre of land would cost about $4 million to $6 million, while larger homes with more land could run $6 million to $10 million or more. The typical exchange began with a buyer purchasing a lot and home (in the 3,500-square-foot range) that they then planned to have demolished. The new home would then be beefed up to its full potential and thus a mansion was born. Many of the new homes were not only extravagant, but they aped the design of the early decades of the last century, featuring enormous columns, handcrafted moldings, and limestone facades.^[17]

The idea that the Gold Coast existed—then and now—as a playground for the nation’s elite serves as an elixir for New York Times readers bent on both reveling in the region’s past glories and gaining a peek inside the medicine cabinets of the rich. As a result, the uses of terms related to Fitzgerald’s novel when referring to real estate and houses has spread around the country. Whether one is on Long Island or in ritzy sections of major American cities, one almost always sees references to “Gatsby-style” or “Gatsby-esque,” particularly when dealing with upscale real estate. Given the over-the-top mansion at the heart of the 2013 film version of Gatsby, one can only imagine that the influence on real estate jargon will continue into the foreseeable future.

Selling the Dream

Capitalism necessitates producers and buyers of goods and services. The relatively young United States excelled at creating both sellers and customers: the former via an entrepreneurial culture that rewarded innovation and creation, and the latter through population growth, immigration, and geographic expansion. Based on these broad trends, America quickly developed into a laboratory for consumer culture.

The vicious cycle of production and consumption ensued, propelled by cultural ideas that tied them together. An example is the notion of how acquisition and the American Dream are linked. Status and accumulation grow hand in hand as one marches “up” toward some heady definition of success. Yet, with no real goal in sight, the earnest consumer is urged to acquire more and more. The idea came to roost: one can never have enough. There is always another rung to climb once one buys into the idea that having more than the person next door or down the street equals winning.

Companies, whether small-town grocers or burgeoning corporate entities, yearned for consumers. As a result, business leaders developed innovative methods to encourage wide-scale shopping. Advertising, long in use in European markets, emerged as the most pervasive technique for promoting the budding consumer culture. More importantly, advertising provided a means for conveying information about products and services, as well as establishing a consumer culture that accentuated the good life associated with accumulation.

According to advertising historian Stuart Ewen, business leaders and advertisers worked together to create ads designed to “turn consumption into an inner compulsion.”^[18] The burgeoning advertising industry, quickly becoming a profession alongside the corporate behemoth, worked to match business thinkers in terms of innovative and clever ways to get people to buy goods. The manufacturers developed new products and the advertisers came up with ways to sell them, a perfect circle that fed off capitalist prowess. Retailers, such as Macy’s and Wanamaker’s, for example, used scientific methods for tracking sales by department in the early 1900s, which also enabled grading the efficiency of individual salespeople. This effort at quantifying retailing mirrored the kind of efficiency studies being conducted by Frederick Taylor on the assembly lines at Ford and other heavy manufacturing plants.^[19]

Certainly, advertisements did not become ubiquitous overnight. From the earliest days of colonial America through the Civil War, most advertising meant placing announcements in newspapers and magazines, or simply handing out ad sheets. As the demand for goods took hold, advertisers devised methods for selling products, and America soon found itself awash in advertising. Photographs from many early twentieth-century cities reveal a culture saturated by ads. Signs peddling goods and services appeared everywhere—on billboards, in store windows, on the outside of buildings, and almost any surface that could be found. Magazine ads and billboards urged consumers to validate their self-worth via the products they purchased. Thus, since a person could never acquire everything, “more” became the psychological crutch that advertisers exploited.

As advertising created consumers hell-bent on accumulation, the idea grew embedded in people’s daily consciousness. As a result, class and social status even more clearly marked the difference between society’s “haves” and “have-nots” in American culture. While the demarcation between rich and poor solidified in terms of actual wealth, corporate America’s real victory centered on persuading people that they could climb the ladder of wealth, as long as they bought the right things and worked hard. Under the spell of advertising, people kept reaching for goals just beyond their grasp. Consumerism enabled people to feel good about their purchases (and lives), because they could own the same kinds of things they saw peddled across mass communication channels all around them.

Another of advertising’s goals centered on creating relationships between consumers and products, which today we call “branding.” Certainly, a great deal of branding served to create a social construct, as described above, that kept people constantly yearning for more or better products. What one discovers when reading through Fitzgerald’s correspondence with his editor Max Perkins and his agent Harold Ober is a writer who understood that his personal brand and product could be used to sell books. Unlike many writers who stay removed from branding efforts, Fitzgerald often discussed marketing ideas, such as how endorsements (blurbs) should be used in ads for his work and how his novels and story collections should be priced.

Another aspect of building the brand relationship meant explaining how consumers should use certain products in their daily lives. As such, corporations created cans, bottles, and other packages designed for practicality and aesthetic appeal. These innovations, such as wax-sealed cartons, kept foods fresh, while also providing advertisers with space to create a brand image. Advertisers realized that appealing to customers visually would enable certain products to stand out on store shelves. Brand identification and loyalty, in turn, drove sales, especially as shoppers (primarily females) looked to the familiar logos of trusted products.

A nation of consumers needs to have places to buy goods. Mass merchandisers realized the importance of creating marketplaces for shoppers to buy consumer items, so they lured people into cities by creating department stores. Gradually, these stores grew into otherworldly emporiums, designed to not only meet every shopper’s wishes, but also to provide those with disposable income and free time a place to spend leisure time.

The shopping experience itself changed people’s lives. Michael Schudson explains, “People thought of the stores as social centers and dressed up to go shopping.”^[20] In 1902, for example, both Marshall Field’s and Macy’s built cavernous new stores with more than one million square feet of floor space. These grand palaces offered almost any product purchasable and gave shoppers a new experience on each visit. In the created world of the department store, anyone could encounter a bit of glamour.

Advertisers realized that ads did not have to discuss the potential strengths of a certain product or service, but instead could sell a lifestyle that consumers coveted. “What advertising does, among other things, is manufacture desire and shape it, and thus create people who are insatiable and who have been conditioned to continually lust for more things,” says scholar Arthur Asa Berger. “And the more we have the more we want.”^[21] Advertisers interpreted the dreams and aspirations of consumers, presented them back to the public with bright-colored bows, and equated these ideas with specific products and services to ensure that buyers understood the link.

Hope and Fulfillment

Jay Gatsby yearns to relive the past. Beyond all else, he hopes that the power of his romantic visions will convince Daisy to return to him. The lethal scent of this dream is so overpowering that Gatsby even believes that they can return to Daisy’s parents’ house in faraway Louisville to marry on the front steps where they first kissed and fell in love. This vision of hope and possible fulfillment despite all the odds stacked against him is the essence of the character’s greatness. The reader either agrees or disagrees based in large part on whether or not the reader accepts this idea.

There is a duality at the heart of Gatsby that its titular character represents, which also symbolizes the American Dream. Writing in the early 1950s, scholar Marius Bewley identifies this two-headed notion, explaining, “Gatsby never succeeds in seeing through the sham of his world . . . very clearly. It is of the essence of his romantic American vision that it should lack the seasoned powers of discrimination. But it invests those illusions with its own faith, and thus it discovers its projected goodness in the frauds of its crippled world.” The battle between idea, hope, and illusion, therefore, “becomes the acting out of the tragedy of the American vision.”^[22]

Gatsby’s conception of the American Dream resided in the hope he held for its inevitability. Yet, as his plan materialized, he could not see the fragility at its foundation, nor could he envisage Tom’s desire to rise up against him, in the latter’s mind impeding the demise of the American family. According to scholar David F. Trask:

What ultimately leads to Gatsby’s death, though, is that all his hopes and aspirations are wrapped up in a woman that cannot live up to his dreams. Despite her outward charm and the pleasure she seems to feel in her fling with her long-lost lover, Daisy is too settled—even in the midst of an unfulfilled life—to risk her future on Gatsby. Writer Brian Sutton calls Daisy “corrupt” and “thus perfectly suited for marriage with Tom, with whom she shares membership in an exclusive society from which Gatsby is barred.”^[24] What strikes the contemporary reader, steeped in soap-operatic narratives and a lifetime full of dramatic story lines, is that Gatsby thought it would all be easy. This self-delusion indicates the depths of his romanticism and inability to assess the situation realistically.

Daisy, on the other hand, is a realist, even as she plays along with her lover’s fantasies of them together. When challenged in front of Tom in the scene at the Plaza Hotel, Daisy counters, “You want too much.”^[25] With that, Tom’s victory is complete, as is Gatsby’s inescapable demise. Gatsby’s idea of the perfect life together with his soul mate cannot hold up to the pressure of Daisy’s materiality, including her rich lifestyle, status in the upper class, and family ties to wealth.

Gatsby could never achieve his all-consuming goal, even though people around him may have contended that his wealth and power were the final aspiration. Most people would trade those symbols of success over getting the girl ninety-nine out of a hundred times. Certainly, Fitzgerald demonstrated keen insight into Gatsby’s real desire by making all the traditional signs of success (flashy cars, mansion, extravagant clothes, giant parties) inconsequential. For Gatsby, these trinkets only mattered if they impressed Daisy, like the rain of new, beautiful shirts that he tosses around the room when showing her and Nick his bedroom. The only time he ever seems impressed with his acquisitions is when Nick first sees his sporty automobile, but even that moment of pride is fleeting.

Only winning Daisy’s heart and erasing Tom’s place in her mind and memory could satisfy Gatsby. The character’s weakness, according to scholar John F. Callahan, is that he cannot meet Fitzgerald’s dictum postulated in “The Crack-Up” essay from the February 1936 issue of Esquire regarding “first rate intelligence,” which hinges on holding “two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain[ing] the ability to function.”^[26] Both Gatsby and Dick Diver of Tender Is the Night suffer, Callahan relates, because they “could live in the world only with a single, consuming mission.”^[27] Neither held the first-rate intelligence that may have granted them the ability to overcome their fixations.

As the narrator of the story and Gatsby’s champion, Nick also yearns for fulfillment, though the events of that summer in 1922 make it impossible for him to not undergo a transformation. After that tragic period, he exclaims, “I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever.” Even though he brags about being “privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men,” he later realizes “I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”^[28]

Nick is changed by Gatsby’s death and what the finality of his murder says about his own future. He cannot stay in the East, because New York City and the bond business cater to the wealthy, particularly the old-money rich represented by Tom and Daisy. Nick cannot stay because his hope is tied with Gatsby’s and when the latter is murdered, both their dreams die. His fulfillment will not take place in the East, which is associated with evil. Nick must return to his home, the homeland of his father and their ancestors. The tie to the place and the land is his salvation. His post-East American Dream must play out in the Midwest.

Nick tries to hold on to Gatsby for as long as possible. He watches over the mansion after its owner’s murder and records who comes and goes, including one car that Nick speculates “was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.”^[29] As the author of the book about Gatsby, Nick, however, ensures that the summer will not be forgotten, though as readers we never really know what he will or won’t say about the saga. Is it a work of fiction that Nick mentions will be titled Gatsby or a nonfiction account of those months? More importantly, is writing the book the only way Nick can put a close on the tragedy and find his own sense of fulfillment, even though he is forced to rehash Gatsby’s dashed dreams?

On the final page of the novel, Nick explains how close Gatsby was to his dream, “so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it,” yet as readers we now know that he paid for that vision with his life. By choosing to romanticize Gatsby at the expense of Tom and Daisy, Nick determines what it is we trust in his version of the tragedy. Nick equates that dream with the sense of wonder that the first Dutch sailors held on seeing the New World, “the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” By doing so, he privileges the notion that after stripping away everything else, like the teeming lands of the primitive island, having a dream is the most important thing one can hold. This is what forces us to “run faster, stretch out our arms farther,” and force the boat forward, despite the impeding current.^[30]

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, America seems angry. There is a sense—beginning with the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then carrying on through the economic hardships of high unemployment and the ongoing real estate bust—that the United States has fallen from its pedestal. Moreover, it feels like the American Dream is under assault from internal and external forces that make its achievement seem more and more remote. What, for example, is the point of attaining a great job or dream home when the global environment is being choked to death by toxic levels of carbon emissions? The media is filled with dire reports of global warming, disease, tainted or poisonous food outbreaks, and violence.

The evidence demonstrating rage within the nation is pervasive, often to the point of becoming stifling. The anger is reflected in the hateful rhetoric of America’s political leaders and media pundits, who seem more interested in stoking ideological fires than attempting to eradicate the challenges the country faces. We see the fury represented in grassroots movements against the status quo, such as the Tea Party uprising in the 2010 congressional elections and 2012 presidential campaign, as well as in the political workers’ rights demonstrations in Wisconsin and Ohio.

Most often, the struggle is depicted as class warfare with winner-take-all stakes with nothing less than the nation’s future hanging in the balance. Listen, for example, to Richard L. Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, declare, “Mass unemployment and growing inequality threaten our democracy. We need to act—and act boldly—to strike at the roots of working people’s anger and shut down the forces of hatred and racism.”^[31] The call for addressing the needs of the working class as an antidote to what Trumka views as the hatemongering of the conservatives reveals the depths of the blue-collar struggle in contemporary America.

More damaging over the long term, though, is that perhaps this ire and its consequences hint at the end of the “American Dream.” The political rhetoric essentially pitting classes against one another is a viable means of illuminating the differences in economic status, which politicians and commentators wanted to deny in the past. Certainly, one senses the clarion call of national aspiration dwindling under the weight of the around-the-clock news cycle and its hunger for sensationalism.

Perhaps the larger question is whether or not the American Dream can exist in a country that no longer considers itself exceptional. If Americans do not see a way to climb upward through the class system, or feel that they can have better lives than their ancestors, then a significant facet of what it means to be an American disappears as well.

Surprisingly, given the widespread anger, basic optimism remains, particularly among working-class whites. According to scholars Alan Abramowitz and Ruy Teixeira, it is almost as if this demographic has a split personality. On one hand, nearly two-thirds see “increasing uncertainty as coming closer to their views.” But, on the other side of the coin, “an amazing 60 percent nevertheless thought that they themselves would achieve the [American] ‘dream.’”^[32] The intersection between potential and actual is where The Great Gatsby continues as a tool in helping people, particularly students, come to an understanding of the topic and its consequences.

Each year countless thousands of students in high schools and college courses skim, read, study, grapple with, and get exasperated by The Great Gatsby. Some fall in love with the novel, while others throw it across the room in disgust. Either way, they are forced to grapple with the ideas at the heart of the American Dream. Literary critic Gail McDonald explains: “Often mentioned as a contender for the Great American Novel, Fitz-
gerald’s book owes its esteem partly to its having captured so memorably the contradictory nature of American aspiration—both the idealistic and the most debased quests of the nation.”^[33]

Fitzgerald’s ability to confront the idea of the American Dream in such a tricky manner—allowing the reader to interpret its positives and negatives—ensures that the novel remains relevant, even as its era becomes more and more removed from the world of today’s readers. By laying out various blueprints and consequences from one’s interaction with the American Dream, Fitzgerald provides a path toward comprehension and contemplation. If Gatsby is either a tool for understanding or potentially an antidote against the draw of rampant consumerism, then its application will continue to guide readers as they explore their daily lives.

“All for Love,” Time, December 31, 1965, 20, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed December 23, 2012).

“No. 9,” Time, June 8, 1962, 25, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed December 23, 2012).

Sam Hodges, “Teflon Tycoon,” Mobile (Ala.) Press-Register, December 19, 2001, http://www.al.com/specialreport/mobileregister/boykin_08.html (accessed February 23, 2013).

Sam Hodges, “Frank Boykin: The Politician,” Mobile (Ala.) Press-Register, December 17, 2001, http://www.al.com/specialreport/mobileregister/boykin_15.html (accessed February 23, 2013).

Hodges, “Teflon Tycoon.”

Lawrence R. Samuel, The American Dream: A Cultural History (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 1.

Brad Tuttle, “Southwest Airlines: We’re Not Really about Cheap Flights Anymore,” Time, March 26, 2013, http://business.time.com/2013/03/26/southwest-airlines-were-not-really-about-cheap-flights-anymore/ (accessed April 9, 2013).

Arthur Mizener, “The Real Subject of The Great Gatsby,” in Readings on F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Katie de Koster (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1998), 85.

10.

Anthony Larson, “Gatsby and Us,” Critical Horizons 4, no. 2 (2003): 285.

11.

Larson, “Gatsby and Us,” 286.

12.

Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 179.

13.

Cullen, American Dream, 179.

14.

Carolyn Kellogg, “Last Gasp of the Gatsby House,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2011, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/04/last-gasp-of-the-gatsby-house.html (accessed April 1, 2013).

15.

Kellogg, “Last Gasp.”

16.

Terry Castle, “Home Alone,” Atlantic, March 2006, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200603/house-porn (accessed March 30, 2010).

17.

Marcelle S. Fischler, “Gatsby Would Feel at Home,” New York Times, March 28, 2010, RE9.

18.

Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1976, 2001), 8.

19.

Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 204–6.

20.

Michael Schudson, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 151.

21.

Arthur Asa Berger, Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture: Advertising’s Impact on American Character and Society (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 35.

22.

Marius Bewley, “Scott Fitzgerald’s Criticism of America,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Arthur Mizener (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963), 127.

23.

David F. Trask, “A Note on Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,” University Review 33, no. 3 (March 1967): 197–202. Repr. in Novels for Students, ed. Diane Telgen, vol. 2 (Detroit: Gale, 1998). Literature Resource Center.

24.

Brian Sutton, “Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,” Explicator 59, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 37.

25.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 117.

26.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up,” in The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1965), 69.

27.

John F. Callahan, “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Evolving American Dream: The ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ in Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and The Last Tycoon,” Twentieth Century Literature 42 (Fall 1996): 376.

28.

Fitzgerald, Gatsby, 19–20.

29.

Fitzgerald, Gatsby, 153.

30.

Fitzgerald, Gatsby, 154.

31.

Richard L. Trumka, “Why Working People Are Angry and Why Politicians Should Listen,” Vital Speeches of the Day, June 2010, 269.

32.

Alan Abramowitz and Ruy Teixeira, “The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper-Middle Class,” Political Science Quarterly 124, no. 3 (2009): 417.

33.

Gail McDonald, American Literature and Culture, 1900–1960 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), 78.

Wealth and Power

Donald Trump is no Jay Gatsby—neither is Bill Gates, John DeLorean, Mark Zuckerberg, Jay-Z, or the countless other (real-life) people all over the world who have been compared and contrasted to the literary figure. Yet, for nearly a century, media wags and other commentators have made the association, particularly when assessing wealthy men who have a predilection for ostentation.

The simple explanation for why this comparison does not work is that the vast fortune Gatsby accumulated meant almost nothing to him as mere riches. His willingness to accumulate wealth quickly and by any means necessary centered on getting Daisy back, which he knew necessitated the kind of money that could support the lifestyle she demanded. In contrast, the real-life individuals mentioned in the same breath as the literary character pursued wealth for money’s sake, often purely to become rich and/or famous. Gatsby possessed higher aspirations; according to William Voegeli, “Rather, he got rich quick out of a sense of urgency and desperation and crazy hopefulness, out of refusing to get over a broken heart and give up the love of his life.”^[1]

The items Gatsby collected were to create an environment where he could win Daisy’s hand, thus fulfilling his dreams. In my reading, there are only two times that Gatsby seems showy regarding his wealth: when he asks Nick if his house looks good and then when he takes pride in his car the first time he takes Nick into the city. Contrast this to the overindulgence and extreme displays of wealth showcased in contemporary society.

One needs look no further than HGTV’s series of real estate shows where a typically upper-middle-class or wealthy family is searching for a dream home or vacation residence vastly more expensive than the average person could afford, but still usually below the $1 million range, which is the demarcation that delineates between wealth and flamboyance. These shows and others that overpopulate cable television are meant to portray the bounty of the wealthy, but in a way that its viewers (directed at middle-aged women) do not find overly ostentatious.

Ironically, when journalists and commentators use the comparison between Gatsby and actual people, the analogy possesses meaning for their readers. Audiences have been conditioned by numerous uses across mass communications channels to equate Gatsby with the kind of rich, excessive lifestyles led by people like Trump and others. Research, though, reveals that the understanding of Gatsby as a taxonomy has changed over time.

In the 1980s, when writers employed generic Gatsby terms to contextualize real individuals, the usage occurred most often to symbolize a Horatio Alger–like rise and subsequent downfall. These examples include Colorado senator Gary Hart, who seemed a likely candidate for president until a series of gaffes and an extramarital affair derailed him. Another often-cited “Gatsby-esque” character from the era was John DeLorean, the erstwhile car executive. His rise and fall ended with an arrest for drug trafficking, though he was found not guilty due to government entrapment.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the generic terms related to Gatsby shifted to be used mainly to indicate grandiose entertainment. For example, the numerous corporate party excesses that came to light in the last handful of years are almost always called “Gatsby-esque,” despite the intent of the event or its hosts. Individuals associated with these kinds of bacchanalia include former Tyco chief executive Dennis Kozlowski, who used company funds to pay for half of the $2 million birthday party he organized for his wife. Revealing that CEOs rarely learn from the past, in June 2012, Yammer boss David Sacks threw himself a $1.4 million party. Probably the only thing that saved Sacks from the Gatsby label—which was thrown around a bit—was that the party already had a theme, harking back to eighteenth-century France and the Marie Antoinette era. The portrait Fitzgerald achieved in his description of the lavishness of the wealthy created a vivid image that has lived on past the normal expiration date a distinguished novel would usually generate.

The fact that terms, symbols, and imagery from Gatsby can be used in these generic ways demonstrates the novel’s contemporary appeal. In contrast, we do not often hear people referencing or equating an item from contemporary culture with almost any other novel, if the typical American could even name more than one or two literary characters. Occasionally, one might hear some coquettish, young pop music singer compared to Nabokov’s Lolita. Perhaps a bit more frequently, a writer will refer to something ominous or heavy-handed as being like “Big Brother” from George Orwell’s 1984.

This chapter reveals the abundant ways that the novel and film versions of The Great Gatsby have influenced people’s thinking about wealth and power. Particularly significant is how Fitzgerald uses Nick to elevate Gatsby’s use of wealth in pursuit of a misbegotten dream versus Tom Buchanan’s inherited wealth and its inherent evil if threatened. The battle of old money and new money that plays out in the book has morphed into a more “us versus them” usage in contemporary America that is closely linked to our current unease at the disparity between the rich and everyone else.

As with so many aspects of Fitzgerald’s novel, Jay Gatsby represents a duality that can lead the reader to a multitude of differing views, some quite divergent. When considering wealth and power, Gatsby’s rise demonstrates that the rags-to-riches myth can be a reality. He attains both via illegal maneuverings, but perhaps in no more corrupt ways than others around him. Throughout the book, for example, Tom Buchanan drinks illegal liquor, but it is only with Gatsby that he launches into the role of moral arbiter, lashing out at the man for being a “big bootlegger.”^[2] As such, a reader could examine Gatsby’s life and view it as a model for getting wealth.

On the other hand, Gatsby’s demise—from war hero to crook to being murdered—could also be read as a censure. According to writer Alexander Nazaryan, the essential point also centers on destruction. He explains, “Destruction fuels the novel’s plot, a sort of primal American myth in its own right. A pauper from the Midwest, Jimmy Gatz scraps his commonplace identity. . . . Through the violence of World War I and the profiteering of Prohibition, Gatsby becomes the Long Island bon vivant that Nick encounters.”^[3] In other words, the quest for riches and power for the wrong reasons is doomed. Furthermore, by calling this point to question via the novel, Fitzgerald is asking the reader to rethink the American Dream itself.

From a societal viewpoint, Fitzgerald reveals that the barriers to entering the enclave of the wealthy are beyond most people, even if they seem to have made it. According to scholar David Minter, “His world, which pretends to be receptive to dreamers, in fact protects those who have been born to riches and power.”^[4] Tom and Daisy, for example, escape that fateful summer unscathed.

Yet, even here, we live in a world where some small percentage of individuals do find their way into wealth. As Tom looked down at Gatsby’s new wealth and scoffed, we find today’s media playing a similar role when a Hollywood celebrity or famous music personality enters into grotesque displays of wealth. Simultaneously, we want to know about fabulous, elite parties and are repelled by the conspicuous vulgarity.

The Triumph of Consumerism

The popular imagination regarding The Great Gatsby is a fantasy of life filled with all-night parties, overflowing champagne glasses tinkling deep into the night, and the gaudy spectacle of it all leading to some kind of boozy mysterious nirvana. The depiction of these parties served as a central element of the 1974 film version of the novel starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. The elegant portrayal featured lots of partygoers dancing in full, shimmering eveningwear, which provided the movie an added layer of glitz that captivated filmgoers and the era’s fashionistas.

Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 production starring Leonardo DiCaprio, in comparison, takes the parties and the mansion to an even more spectacular level. The house itself fills the nighttime horizon in a carnivalesque fashion—klieg lights filling the sky. The parties explode on the screen, nearly bigger than one could comprehend, and using 3-D technology to make it seem as if the galas burst into the theater. There are not dozens or even hundreds of partiers like in earlier film versions of the novel, but seemingly thousands that pulsate into the night. Finally, the recent film captures the dazzling enormity one finds in the novel. Under Luhrmann’s watchful eye, the excursions transform into spectacles worthy of Fitz-
gerald’s vision of Gatsby’s grandiosity.

When considering the novel, however, the pageantry of Gatsby’s parties almost blinds the reader to the deft criticism Fitzgerald lays at the feet of family wealth, the new rich, and strivers who hoped to pull themselves up into these ranks. The challenge is to not conflate the spectacle with supposed support or celebration of elite lifestyles. A lifelong observer of the relations between wealthy and those not in the same class, Fitzgerald understood both groups intuitively.

In a 1938 letter to Anne Ober, for example, he compared his life among the wealthy with his daughter Scottie’s, explaining that he stood “a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy’s school; a poor boy in a rich man’s club at Princeton.” Fitzgerald assessed the consequences of these experiences, saying, “I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.”^[5] This insight enabled him to convincingly develop both Tom Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson, arguably the strongest characters in the novel. Although from opposite ends of the socioeconomic scale, the merger of Tom and Myrtle demonstrates how consumer culture has become the dominant ideology in American history.

What links the rich patriarch and the poor gas station attendant’s wife even closer than their status as adulterous lovers is their representation of their respective economic classes. Tom, as an old-money aristocrat, exhibits his vast wealth through lifestyle choices that befit one at the top of the economic strata. Fitzgerald makes a case for how out of touch the inherited rich are by describing the string of polo horses Tom brings from Chicago and the $350,000 pearl necklace he gives Daisy as an engagement present. These consumer choices, as lavish as they are, provide the reader with proof of the illegitimacy of that lifestyle and the flippancy of the ultrawealthy.

Myrtle, as a member of the working poor, is essential to the book in exposing how quickly a person can be changed by money physically and spiritually. Myrtle’s New York City love nest apartment, for example, is filled with expensive tapestries and decorations that flaunt her newfound wealth to both outsiders and those within her newfound social circle. Without acknowledging the illicit nature of how she comes into wealth, Myrtle’s self-worth is wrapped up in accumulating consumer goods that will show off her rank to her neighbors and acquaintances. As a result, Myrtle can pump gas in the afternoon in the beaten-down garage in the middle of the valley of ashes but later that evening transform herself into a lady of the manor. For example, when in the apartment with Tom, Myrtle looks down her nose at the hotel staff and others now beneath her on a self-created economic scale. Her snobbery demonstrates her complete transformation. Money allows Myrtle to erect a false barrier between these two halves of her life. Exploiting the differences between Tom and his lower-class lover, Fitzgerald critiques consumer culture from the perspective of inherited wealth and the countless individuals scratching and clawing in an attempt to get rich.

As a stand-in for American consumerism, Myrtle’s posturing shows how quickly money corrupts those yearning for a better life based on nothing more tangible than naked opulence. Her demise, therefore, warns against pinning one’s dreams to materialism. Yet, in Fitzgerald’s day and our own, consumerism is a powerful force that organizes people’s everyday lives. According to historian Gary Cross, “Maintaining a reciprocal relationship between consumption and work keeps the economic system running and orders daily life.” Consumerism cannot simply be laid at the feet of producers or merchandisers, he contends, “It is a choice, never consciously made, to define self and community through the ownership of goods.”^[6] For Fitzgerald, then, as well as his contemporary readers, Myrtle’s fate is intricately tied to culture’s commitment to materialism and accumulation. We see the outcome of a blind desire for more, particularly when one’s fate is lashed to those higher up on the economic food chain. Even though Tom tells Nick that he was broken up by Myrtle’s death, he pays no price for her death, just as he escapes recrimination in Gatsby’s death. Wealth trumps all.

Furthermore, when one examines the array of guests at Gatsby’s parties, the critique again comes to life. Many of the celebrities who drink the host’s bootlegged alcohol and partake in the endless revelries attain wealth and status via the era’s fascination with fame, not traditional American values, such as hard work or through prudent lifestyle choices.

Instead, in the midst of the Roaring Twenties, certain people are hoisted up on a pedestal, essentially turning into commodities that can be bought and sold. Simultaneously, the rags-to-riches narrative used to solidify the star’s brand enabled those around them to believe that the same could happen, if in the right place at the right time. In brief snippets, Fitzgerald reveals a great deal about the newly rich and famous people that attend Gatsby’s festivities, often revealing these people to be callow and mean spirited.

What Fitzgerald caught extremely well regarding the burgeoning consumer culture is the freedoms and carefree attitudes that the merger of technology and goods symbolized. Gary Cross estimates that discretionary spending as a percentage of total expenditures nearly doubled in the first three decades of the twentieth century, which accentuated the nation’s status as an economic and military superpower. In other words, a country awash in newfound wealth could afford the gaudy spending spree Fitzgerald lived through and wrote about. Moreover, consumption as a chief facet of American culture expanded. Cross explains, “American prosperity gave quite ordinary citizens cars, electric gadgets, telephones, and ready-to-wear fashions for which European masses would have to wait until mid-century.”^[7] Fitzgerald is able to capture this transition via simply reproducing guest lists from the extravaganzas and mention how these people acquired their wealth. The presumption of wealth enabled poor guests like Myrtle’s sister Catherine to attend, as well as the poor British aristocrats searching for well-heeled rich wives.

The entire culture centralized around spending, which Fitzgerald understood would continue as class distinctions blurred, therefore giving so-called “regular” people a taste of upper-class life and the idea that they too could have more. People could make themselves feel like a part of the elite culture by hobnobbing with the wealthy or mimicking their lifestyles via consumer goods, but the actual entry into that privileged class could not be attained. Gatsby and Myrtle demonstrate how the upper reaches of the moneyed class consorted to keep the wannabes from entering. Although class distinctions did not disappear with the broad acceptance of consumerism, its arrival signaled a safe way to blur class lines enough to keep people contented. The faux fluidity of the American class system based on the false god of consumerism is a trend that has influenced people ever since.

Fitzgerald’s decision to reveal the inanities of the rich and those who strive to enter that class drives much of Gatsby’s continuing influence in contemporary society. Early in the Fitzgerald revival, for example, the novel helped readers comprehend how consumerism and expendable income had consequences, particularly as these factors changed the nation after World War II, from suburbanization and the creation of a car-based culture to increased education opportunities and a wide array of shopping outlets.

According to historian Joshua B. Freeman, those promoting consumerism “reached greater sophistication and unmatched pervasiveness after World War II . . . the national culture had largely repudiated the virtue of thrift.”^[8] While some might argue that Gatsby presents such an idyllic vision of parties that some young readers might aspire to that lifestyle, certainly readers who grasp the book realized the potential outcomes if money is one’s primary objective. Educators, in attempting to instill an ethical and moral code in their students, clearly found Gatsby a useful tool in that endeavor in the postwar years, which also remains important today.

Get Rich Quick—1920s-Style

In the late 1910s, a Cincinnati attorney named George Remus did so well as a lawyer that he made $50,000 a year (or about $650,000 in 2012 dollars). Yet he realized that some of his clients made more than he did selling bootlegged liquor during Prohibition. Always entrepreneurial, Remus decided to jump to the other side of the law, despite the fact that he did not even drink. The taste of money served as Remus’s elixir. He yearned for the drippings of wealth, including fine food, wine, art, and expensive homes. The lure of money proved all the intoxication Remus needed.

Ironically, Remus had been a pharmacist before turning to the law, so the opportunity to shift into bootlegging seemed natural. He used the drug training to set up an illegal booze empire. One reporter estimated that at his height of power, Remus operated “10 distilleries [and] employed 3,000 people” on a fifty-acre section on the city’s West Side.^[9] While it is amazing to think of this vast network, what is surprising is that three thousand people also looked the other way as they broke the law.

Remus lived a lavish lifestyle, not only buying into the rich enclave of Newport, Rhode Island, but also filling his Cincinnati mansion with rare art and books. Writer Steve Kemme estimates that Remus amassed a fortune in the “hundreds of millions of dollars.” Some have also speculated that Remus, who many considered “the king of the bootleggers,” served as Fitzgerald’s model for Jay Gatsby. There seem to be some similarities, such as Remus’s not drinking and affinity for swimming, spending $100,000 to build a pool and pool house in 1921.^[10]

Unlike Gatsby, however, Remus did not end up murdered in that pool. His extravagant lifestyle soon ended, though. Remus’s downfall began with a three-year jail stint after a Prohibition violation, which his wife Imogene Holmes unwittingly contributed to by starting an affair with an undercover FBI agent. Later, just weeks after his release, he murdered his wife in a rage after she stole everything from his mansion while he sat in jail. The murder trial gained national coverage, accentuated by Remus representing himself at the proceedings. Judged insane, the bootlegger spent six months in a mental hospital, and then lived quietly and modestly outside Cincinnati until he died in 1952.^[11]

When examining the topics of wealth and power as each relates to Gatsby, one realizes that these ideas play an important role in the novel’s lasting popularity. When one explores wealth and power, violence and immorality are usually nearby. Readers and other audiences have always found these extreme traits fascinating, which provides the novel with much of its cinematic vibe.

The 1949 film version of The Great Gatsby presented the main character as a crime boss, willing to take out his competitors with machine guns during high-speed chases through the streets of New York City. While some commentators blanched at this alteration of the novel, making Gatsby a gangster not only reflected the popular image of the 1920s but also addressed the nation’s fear of unlawfulness in the late 1940s. The two eras shared a fear of the massive upheaval that occurs during periods rife with excessive wealth and the sociocultural transformations that concurrently take place.

So much drinking takes place in Gatsby that one almost forgets that the novel is set during Prohibition. Yet much of the mystery about Jay Gatsby’s wealth and outward projection to the world centers on alcohol. Obviously, one sees this notion represented in the way the main characters constantly drink or talk about drinking, as well in the whispers about Gatsby’s bootlegging activities.

In January 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment became law, banning the manufacture, transportation, importation, and sale of intoxicating liquors in the United States the next year. Commonly known as Prohibition, the amendment stood as the culmination of more than a century of attempts to remove alcohol from society by various temperance organizations. Many large cities and states actually went dry in 1918. Americans could no longer legally drink or buy alcohol. The people who illegally made, imported, or sold alcohol during this time—like Gatsby reportedly did—were called bootleggers. Even to this day, there are still bootleggers in operation in the southern United States, those people who own and operate illegal stills to manufacture and sell alcohol.

In contrast to its original intent, Prohibition actually caused a permanent change in the way the nation viewed authority, the court system, and wealth and class. Particularly damning was the lack of enforcement, which led to the rise of the mob and notorious criminals such as Al Capone. Congress attempted to enforce Prohibition by passing the “Volstead Act” in late 1919, which created the Prohibition Bureau, but never provided the agency with the resources necessary to really back the amendment. As a result, bootlegging became big business, often as immigrants took hold of power in urban centers. Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby’s confidant and mentor, represents a figure similar to Remus. However, there are hints of a more sinister, Capone-like aura, particularly when the older man recounts his friend being gunned down outside the restaurant and his unwillingness to sit in a room with his back to the door.

What Gatsby depicts perfectly is that despite enforcement efforts by federal, state, and local officers, Prohibition actually instigated a national drinking spree that persisted until the law was repealed thirteen years later. One sees examples of the ways ordinary citizens got around the laws against drinking across popular culture, such as the films The Untouchables (1987) and A River Runs Through It (1992). Many cities proudly proclaimed that they were the nation’s wettest, directly challenging the authority of the federal law and its enforcers.

In the early 1920s, for example, Chicago had more than seven thousand drinking parlors, or speakeasies. On a person-to-person level, physicians around the nation dispensed prescriptions for medicinal alcohol, while pharmacies applied for liquor licenses. Alcohol was available for a price and delivered with a wink and wry smile. In Gatsby, despite the pervasiveness of drinking and its deleterious effects on many of the partygoers at Gatsby’s shindigs, no one seems to question or worry too much about the law.

The effects on the American national psyche were long lasting, ushering in a general cynicism and distrust. Given the pervasive lawlessness during Prohibition, bootlegging seemed omnipresent. The operations varied in size, but much of it came alive in the nation’s cities through an intricate network of smugglers, middlemen, and local suppliers. To escape prosecution, men like Remus used bribery, heavily armed guards, and medicinal licenses to circumvent the law. More ruthless gangsters, such as Capone, did not stop in their relentless pursuit of controlling crime syndicates. Capone and his gang resorted to intimidation and murder. Under these conditions, the nation’s cities were ripe for crime, and many immigrants, barred from respectable positions, acted to fill the void. In cities like Pittsburgh and Cleveland, numerous ethnic gangs fought to control the local bootlegging activities. In Chicago, eight hundred gangsters were killed in gang warfare during Prohibition, primarily due to the fight over alcohol sales.

Bootleggers counterfeited prescriptions and liquor licenses to gain access to alcohol. The most common practice was to import liquor from other countries aboard ships. The Detroit River, dividing the United States and Canada, thrived as an entry point, as did the overland method on the long border between the two countries. Bootleggers also evaded authorities by building secret breweries with intricate security systems and lookouts. In addition to eluding the police, bootleggers had to fend off other bootleggers who would steal the precious cargo for their own sale. Bootleggers began a national controversy by selling adulterated liquor, which resulted in countless fatalities and poisonings.

Bootlegging grew into a vast illegal empire, in part, because of widespread bribery. Many enforcement agents received monthly retainers (some up to $300,000 a month) to look the other way. Critics said that Prohibition Bureau agents had a license to make money through bribes from bootleggers. The corruption among agents was so prevalent that President Warren G. Harding commented on it in his State of the Union address in 1922.

Prohibition and the era of illegal bootlegging remains an interesting topic across contemporary American popular culture, not just in Fitz-
gerald’s masterpiece. Part of the attraction is the glamour of the Jazz Age and the national prosperity that accompanied it (and Fitzgerald marketed in his work). People also look back on that era and wonder how such a law could ever be passed, particularly given that issues so much more important have languished for decades or longer or are never brought to vote at all. What one cannot discount, though, is that Prohibition is a part of the American mythos. Gatsby alone ensures that visions of gangsters, glittering revelries, and the clinking of glasses spilling over with illegal alcohol will stay on the cultural radar.

Get Rich Quick—2000s-Style

Characterizing the early years of the new millennium from an economic perspective might quickly turn sinister. The era began with the dot-com crash, which caused massive downsizing and economic peril, not only knocking down the paper millionaires in Silicon Valley, but also reverberating to workers far removed from the tech bubble. The wars in the Middle East after 9/11 led to more uncertainty as many corporations hoarded cash and resources to buffet against the chaos. Critics of the wars saw the multibillion-dollar contracts awarded and resulting shabby work as a blatant attempt by corporations to pillage the federal defense budget. By the mid to late 2000s, the housing bubble burst, throwing the world into the Great Recession, which (arguably) is over by early 2013 but is still being felt by people all over the country in the form of joblessness, housing woes, and living paycheck to paycheck.

It is no wonder that the buzzwords of the 2012 presidential election between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney centered on “jobs,” and the mythical idea that all the economic misfortunes could be fixed via one party’s plan to increase job opportunities. Pandering to voters this way could be construed as a typical political ploy in an election year, but the emphasis on jobs and who might create better employment returns reveals the deep turmoil the nation faces in the twenty-first century.

While an analysis of the news coverage and chatter over the web might lead one to believe that the corporate world is more corrupt today than ever before, the counterargument might be that with more mass media channels and eyes focused on business, the stories that went unnoticed previously now take center stage. Overall, the general population is more attuned to the stock market and daily corporate maneuverings, particularly in light of the financial data one can find on just about any company or executive via the Internet. For example, three clicks on a corporate profile at Yahoo! Finance provides more information than most investors could access for hundreds of years. As a result, there is little kept behind the curtains in today’s investing world. At the same time, however, those who wish to game the system also have more weapons at their disposal.

In light of the way wealth and power occupy a central narrative in today’s culture, one could imagine that Gatsby would be marginalized—acknowledging the complexities of contemporary challenges—or alternatively, that the novel would become more handy, since it helps in grasping deep societal issues at the core of class and wealth. Examining the tens of thousands of pages of “Gatsby” references in the popular media in the 2000s and 2010s, one finds that the term is still used as a generic fill-in for numerous themes, some of them only marginally associated with what Fitzgerald intended.

For example, in late 2002, health care financier Lance Poulsen, the founder and chief executive officer of National Century Financial Enterprises, faced criminal charges and lawsuits accusing him of fraud, embezzlement, and tampering with evidence. Given the tycoon’s lavish lifestyle—including a $2 million yacht (the Enterprise) and three-story mansion in tony Port Charlotte, Florida—and connections to major Republican politicians, including Florida governor Jeb Bush (the president’s brother), the media dug into coverage.^[12]

Journalists, investigators, attorneys, and others uncovered a far-flung Ponzi scheme that enabled Poulsen to embezzle upward of $2 billion by bilking health care facilities out of Medicare payments and other criminal doings that eventually landed the former executive a thirty-year jail sentence. Poulsen’s misdeeds were so intricate and difficult to unravel that bond rating company Moody’s Investor Service and Fitch Ratings were fooled into backing its bonds, which did not change until an anonymous whistle-blower exposed the company’s wrongdoing.^[13]

Given the intrigue surrounding Poulsen’s posh lifestyle and political ties, which contrasted with his overtly criminal behavior, his rise and fall from grace captured headlines. The way USA Today reporter Edward Iwata compared Poulsen with Jay Gatsby, however, demonstrated how Fitzgerald’s novel is both central to the way people use it to interpret culture and society and how Gatsby is misunderstood. Iwata, like so many other writers using the novel as a hook for his article, gets the analogy about one-third right. “He was a modern-day Gatsby,” the reporter explains, “a smooth talker and sharp dresser who floated across the room to greet the moneyed crowd.” In this instance, Iwata gets the most insignificant point correct: Gatsby did dress stylishly, though too flashy for the old-money types who lived across the bay in East Egg. The other details—about the way Gatsby spoke and greeted guests—are way off. As a matter of fact, Gatsby rarely speaks in the novel and when he does, it is carefully considered and in hesitating patterns. Nor does Gatsby reach out to the rich hordes that fill his mansion in a sycophantic manner as Iwata suggests. His interactions with guests are minimal at best, by his own admission. He later confesses to Nick that he is not a very good host. The simple fact that no one at the parties seems to know him or ever even see him while there demonstrates the weakness of this comparison.^[14]

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, perhaps a truly “Gatsby-esque” figure could not exist. In this era, the desire for fame or wealth seems to be enough in and of itself to warrant whatever steps are necessary to achieve these twin goals. Given the preoccupation on attaining wealth and fame across modern culture, there does not seem to be a higher calling beyond self-aggrandizement. Readers do know, however, that the misuse of “Gatsby” as a substitute for “slick” or “money hungry” does not capture the essence of the character or his aspirations.

The task of assigning the moniker to someone who attained great riches without necessarily having wealth as a major objective is problematic. For example, the two great Harvard dropouts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were entrepreneurial at a young age and interested in technology. Those characteristics, though, did not necessarily mean that they wanted to be phenomenally wealthy. Each later built an empire and became a billionaire, but it would be difficult to attach some greater goal to their efforts. Subsequently, Gates’s philanthropic work may eclipse his role as the founder of Microsoft (if one could be divorced from the other), but this higher calling came after the wealth, just as Zuckerberg’s next move might be.

Interestingly, while applying the labels “Gatsby” or “Gatsby-esque” to success stories like Gates and Zuckerberg might be misleading, there is value in knowing how the novel might help us comprehend individuals who achieve great riches, or in the case of Tom Buchanan, inherit wealth and then go about building a life around their fortune. In these instances, if readers can use Gatsby as a tool for clarifying their own worldviews, then the power of the novel at nearly ninety years old becomes palpable.

The quest for wealth and power is a central narrative in American culture. It stands alone as a goal and is linked to the vision of achieving the American Dream. Some might even argue that it is the most important facet of the American Dream. People want riches so they can purchase their way to happiness. They want to win the lottery so they can tell their bosses where to go and buy the mansion with a pool and a fast car that allows them to insulate themselves from the traditional challenges that encumber daily life.

The fascination with wealth and power drives television shows like Celebrity Apprentice, hosted by the gonzo-Gatsby Donald Trump, who has turned his name and brand into a marketable product. We see it in the journey played out in competitive reality TV shows, like Survivor and The Amazing Race, where people who seem like regular people all of a sudden transform into cutthroat strategists willing to sell their mothers’ soul to win financial reward. The obsession with wealth and power and the constant yearning for more drove otherwise intelligent rich people to believe in a charlatan and con artist like Bernie Madoff, who fleeced his Palm Beach, Florida, neighbors and others to the tune of somewhere between $12 to $20 billion. According to financial journalist Daniel Gross, Madoff worked off the idea of exclusivity and “fiendishly exploiting the unique, clubby culture of [the city] and of the global jet set that congregates there.”^[15]

Fitzgerald indicts the wealthy in Gatsby. His stunning depiction provides readers with a tool to assess the class structure and its imbalances in today’s society. Yet it is hard to determine whether wealth has won and now it is Fitzgerald’s ideas that are beating on against the current of celebrity and wealth culture that is at the center of our national idea.

The forces of power, greed, and hubris are central elements of contemporary life, ingrained so deeply in our fiber that it is difficult to imagine a different way. Maybe the bad guys won. In the end, though, I see great literature as a way to another path. I agree with writer Eric Olsen when he concludes, “I suspect that if there was ever a time we needed a new Great American Novel, or at least someone to take a stab at one, it’s now,” even though he does not think Gatsby is it.^[16]

Life today is trying and difficult for the multitude of reasons presented in this chapter and plenty of others, not least of which is the always-on mentality that has gripped us in the Internet or Google age. People are now asked to fit more stuff from a broader array of channels into the same twenty-four-hour day. Olsen is right in asking that we find tools to help in this journey. I contend that meta-Gatsby offers this pathway toward possible new ways of approaching life in contemporary America.

William Voegeli, “Gatsby and the Pursuit of Happiness,” Claremont Review of Books (2003): 70.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 99.

Alexander Nazaryan, “Huge Incoherent Failures,” New York Daily News, March 9, 2011, http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/huge-incoherent-failures-doomed-mansion-great-gatsby-fitzgerald-america-article-1.120545 (accessed January 24, 2013).

David Minter, A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William Faulkner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 114.

March 4, 1938, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli with the assistance of Judith S. Baughman (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 352.

Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 5.

Cross, All-Consuming Century, 17.

Joshua B. Freeman, American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945–2000 (New York: Viking, 2012), 124.

Steve Kemme, “King of the Bootleggers,” Cincinnati Enquirer, August 1, 2011, http://cincinnati.com/blogs/ourhistory/2011/08/01/king-of-the-bootleggers/ (accessed May 4, 2013).

10.

Kemme, “King of the Bootleggers.”

11.

Kemme, “King of the Bootleggers.”

12.

Edward Iwata, “Former CEO of National Century: Man of Mystery,” USA Today, December 18, 2002, 1B.

13.

Iwata, “Former CEO of National Century,” 1B.

14.

Iwata, “Former CEO of National Century,” 1B.

15.

Daniel Gross, “Membership Has Its Penalties,” Newsweek, January 2, 2009, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/01/02/membership-has-its-penalties.html (accessed March 30, 2013).

16.

Eric Olsen, “The Great American Novel—What Is It, and Who Cares,” Portland Book Review, February 4, 2012, http://portlandbookreview.com/2-4-12-the-great-american-novel-what-is-it-and-who-cares/ (accessed January 24, 2013).

Celebrity . . . An Obsession

Icon. The word is flippantly tossed around in contemporary America. The latest one-hit wonder pop star gets tagged with the label as quickly as a legitimately splendid artist, athlete, or architect. The subjectivity of the term enables it to be used ubiquitously, whether it is in advertising tag-
lines or marketing copy for goods and services being sold or in labeling historic eras or time frames.

People fixate on terms like “icon” because popular culture drives American culture. As scholar Larry Z. Leslie explains, “Contemporary culture is, for all practical purposes, popular culture . . . what we are most interested in and pay the most attention to. Celebrities are one of popular culture’s most important products.”^[1] What Fitzgerald possessed, perhaps unlike any other writer of his era, was deep insight into the role of the burgeoning celebrity industry in the United States. His own five years of intense global stardom between 1920 and 1925 certainly intensified his comprehension of celebrity and its genesis. Even after his fall from the A-list of American celebrities, Fitzgerald filled notebooks and scrapbooks with mentions of his name, reviews, and other clippings that demonstrated his fixation with fame. He then used these pieces to gauge his place in the celebrity industry and literary history, thus equating the two, when there is no real value in linking them.

The obsession with celebrity—both the famous and infamous—and what it illuminates is a primary catalyst of the story line in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald understood the way people were obliged to fame and wealth and built the novel around those ideas and impulses. “Because celebrities are important to many of us,” Leslie says, “understanding what celebrity is all about can be useful in helping us understand ourselves.”^[2] This deep comprehension served as one of Fitzgerald’s most insightful gifts. Therefore, by analyzing Gatsby, contemporary readers may learn to more fully engage with the role of celebrity in their own lives.

Indeed, Fitzgerald’s fame skyrocketed on the back of a unique era. In the 1920s, more people across class divisions enjoyed greater leisure time than ever before. Members of the middle and working classes, for example, witnessed a steep drop in working hours—from about sixty hours per week to forty-five—while simultaneously enjoying higher wages. Quite naturally, with additional free time and more money, people searched for different outlets. These included sporting events, movies, and vacations, among others.

The addiction to celebrity culture had always existed in the United States, but the 1920s thrust it into a new stratosphere. The entertainment industry boomed in the decade. Between 1919 and 1929, American spending on recreation almost doubled to $4 billion annually, a figure that would not be eclipsed until after World War II. Successive waves of celebrity-influenced fads and trends took hold that kept the mania at the forefront, whether it was the flapper, the 1920s “new woman” who emphasized a carefree attitude and style that embodied the era, or the rise of tabloids following in the wake of the burgeoning film industry and bright lights of Broadway.

Fame and celebrity served as much more than mere distractions or tools for getting consumers’ money out of their pockets and into the hands of those dominating the entertainment industry. The language of popular culture effectively created a cultural space for people to populate with items meaningful to them. Furthermore, as millions of Americans interacted with the burgeoning mass media, whether watching the same films or listening to radio programs, a common language developed that opened lines of communication between disparate groups that might otherwise never connect.

While there were benefits that grew from this new common language based on mass culture, some critics argued that the downside led to an unhealthy devotion to popular culture. From this perspective, the commitment to entertainments and other novelties seemed to divert attention from the serious challenges the nation faced. In other words, popular culture and mass media might function like a kind of placebo, numbing people to critical issues that otherwise demanded their attention. One might wrap oneself in a bubble of mass media imagery and sounds without ever really being forced to confront critical social issues.

Fitzgerald seems to have recognized both sides in this argument. Myrtle’s preoccupation with fashion and tabloid magazines represents the potential problem in using mass media as a distraction. Myrtle fills her secret life and city apartment with fluff, which demonstrates how a person in the Roaring Twenties could keep reality at bay via the entertainment industry. She does not have to confront her grubby apartment alongside the train tracks because her illusory life in the city is filled with thoughts of Broadway stars and buying knickknacks that litter her world with faux majesty and deliver a kind of barrier to reality via consumerism.

Given Fitzgerald’s broad comprehension of celebrity culture, which he lived firsthand and wrote about in Gatsby, this chapter examines how the novel not only helped define the topic but continues to provide insight for contemporary readers. As a matter of fact, gossip (arguably the beating heart of the celebrity industry) is one of the most important topics in the book, one that Nick Carraway discusses at its very outset. Although he claims his desire is to reserve judgment, he immediately begins assessing everyone and everything around him. The entire novel, then, from one vantage could be viewed as a man’s interaction with the celebrity culture of the early twentieth century.

Interestingly, Nick is playing the role of ultimate Gatsby fan by foisting his dead celebrity up in a book that he is narrating. As a matter of fact, for all the discussion of Jay Gatsby as a proponent of the American Dream, in some ways Nick is both more romantic, nostalgic, and obsessed with the ideas at the heart of the dream theme. For example, when he finally decides to return home at the end of the narrative, Nick’s mind races back to the train rides and Wisconsin snow, which he calls “real snow, our snow.” There is a sense of longing that he never relinquishes, even as he is bastardized by the East, Yale, and the Great War in that long, hot summer with Gatsby.^[3] Nick juxtaposes this wonderful memory of a joyful past with the description of an El Greco painting featuring a woman drunk and out cold being carried away from the bacchanalia on a stretcher. No one knows who she is and no one cares, which to Nick reveals the ultimate hollowness of the East.

The cold, brutal reality that Nick comes to comprehend as Gatsby lives and dies is that people do not matter, but celebrity persists. An individual’s fame is fleeting and can be destroyed, just as after Gatsby is killed. The parties, though, they continue, simply moving on to another momentary locale where fireworks will fill the nighttime sky and music will roar through the din.

What makes this chapter so compelling is the combined effect of Fitzgerald’s personal interaction with fame and the way it is presented in the book. He is not only presenting his living experiences with the topic, but in doing so, providing readers with a tool for understanding how fame works in modern society. Fitzgerald’s audience in the 1920s certainly comprehended the growing importance of fame in their time, but that fascination has only increased across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

As a result, Fitzgerald and Gatsby have fused into Americana. According to cultural scholar Marshall Fishwick, “Icons are symbols and mindmarks. They tie in with myth, legend, values, idols, aspirations . . . icons, like everything else, adapt accordingly. Objects are the building-blocks; ideas the cement holding them together. Modern man is starved for ideas and objects that give coherence to electric-age culture.”^[4] What we find over and over again is that Gatsby grants readers the ability to discern what its themes mean in their own times. Given the polemic that passes for discourse in contemporary America, it is a gift to have literature that enables a broader, more intellectual manner of thinking through life’s challenges.

Young, Glamorous, and Carefree

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the opulence of newly rich young professionals in Silicon Valley and New York City begat images of Gatsby’s immaculate parties for journalists and magazine writers who needed a way to demonstrate the link between the new crop of tech millionaires and those from the industrial past. In these instances, using “Gatsby” as a way of inferring luxury or opulence meant more to the curious reading public than the real-life characters from the 1920s, such as J. P. Morgan or John D. Rockefeller. These great industrial titans certainly lived in splendor but were essentially stodgy old men in the national consciousness—images of Morgan’s bulbous nose and Rockefeller’s hollow, ghostly presence would not sell magazines or newspapers at the end of the twentieth century.

Jay Gatsby, however, a figure self-created and who had arisen from nothing, now this was a character who not only embodied what people wanted to believe possible via the American Dream, but also possessed glamour and good looks (with the young Robert Redford providing an example of the character based on the 1974 film). For the would-be titans of the 1980s and 1990s, who flourished in a blossoming celebrity age driven by increased access first through technology and later the web and other booming mass media channels, the idea of Gatsby served as a kind of role model. The newly minted Internet millionaire, for example, had little or no training in how to act once rich, but he or she might certainly remember reading of the high times embodied in Fitzgerald’s novel or seeing a clip of the affluence represented in the film.

In early 1998, New York Times writer Michael Specter called those celebrities/icons who possessed the largest egos “giga-egos.” The group, including Bill Gates, Martha Stewart, Ted Turner, and others, according to Specter, “somehow managed to convince themselves, and millions around them, that the American Dream rises and falls with every breath they take.”^[5] Although this notion centered on the unmatched arrogance of America’s ultrawealthy class, Specter duly notes that without an audience that agrees, this level of self-importance cannot be easily reached. Just as Gatsby needed the throngs of partygoers to question his background and raise his profile, the megalomaniacs of the 1990s, whether Turner and Stewart or some twenty-something Internet whiz, had to have onlookers willing to buy the hype. While Gates and the others were not necessarily “young” giga-egos in the late 1990s, they were considerably younger than other business tycoons who found themselves writ large across the national consciousness.

Similarly, at the height of the Jazz Age, the synergy created when technology intersected with celebrity enabled Fitzgerald and others to become central figures in the public’s conception of fame. For a time, Scott and Zelda stood as two of the most talked about celebrities of the era. In comparison, they were as big or bigger than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie or similar famous couples whose dual place in the spotlight both magnifies and intensifies the glare. Audiences in the 1920s simply had fewer mass culture distractions, which made the attention that much more concentrated.

What is so easy to forget today is exactly how young the Fitzgeralds were when they stormed New York City in 1920. They were a stunning couple in an age that recognized the growing power of the youth market. The success of Scott’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, at the time a revelation and tribute to the young people of the post–World War I generation, pushed them onto the front pages of magazines everywhere. Even writer Dorothy Parker, hardened to the shimmer and shine of celebrity, realized their allure, saying, “They did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun; their youth was striking. Everyone wanted to meet him.”^[6]

What took place in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom seemed—in retrospect—eerily similar to what happened during the early 1920s. As a matter of fact, both eras were a kind of speculative ruse, allowing the truly wealthy to move in and out of the game at will with little at stake, but then leaving the masses to pay the price when the scheme came tumbling to earth. The gold rush centered on the high-tech industry created paper millionaires who rode that notoriety to instant fame in numerous publications that existed to hype the Internet, such as Red Herring, eCompany Now, Upside, Business 2.0, and Fast Company.

At the height of both the Roaring Twenties and the dot-com “revolution” a kind of national euphoria swept the country, capturing Wall Street, corporate America, the general public, and the media. In the later period, the Internet and the use of innovative technology genuinely exhilarated people. Yet, as the mania took hold, the financial picture grew shakier, fueled by an “Internet bubble” of market speculation and frenzied investment, primarily small investors who could use web-based trading sites to easily buy and sell stocks online.

The ensuing stock market boom revolutionized the way businesses operated by providing the capital to invest in new technology. Perhaps more important, the dot-com revolution fundamentally changed the way people communicated through Internet-based technologies, such as e-mail, message boards, chat rooms, and others. Thus despite the failure of most dot-com companies, the transformation continued through the use of technology and the Internet for business purposes.

In its broadest sense, the dot-com revolution served as a massive growth engine for the American economy. For the first time in recent history, the power and mystique of small, entrepreneurial companies began to dwarf that of established corporations. Given the public’s willingness to invest in Internet-based startups, their valuations soared.

Finally given the chance at riches gained from stock options and participation in initial public offerings (IPOs), workers flocked to dot-coms, despite the risk involved. Added to the possibility for quick riches, the quirky, decentralized culture of web companies drew generation X workers (born 1965 to 1980) in droves. The media added fuel to the mass exodus from the Fortune 500 by reveling in stories of office foosball tournaments and game rooms, company-sponsored espresso machines, and a constant state of “business casual” clothing.

Tech entrepreneurs also promoted work as a way of achieving a more spiritual or fulfilling state, which appealed to the sullen masses of workers awash in endless rows of drab, gray cubicles in the nation’s large companies. Startups were seen as antiauthoritarian and laid back, mirroring the lifestyle exuded in Northern California since the 1960s. Some of the early companies included PayPal, pets.com, eToys.com, dot-com “incubator” Internet Capital Group, and a slew of service firms to publicize and advertise these entities, such as Organic Online, Scient, and USWeb/CKS. The list of now-defunct dot-coms reads like a comedy sketch, ranging from fashion site Boo.com, which “burned” through its $135 million investment before declaring bankruptcy, to online toy retailer eToys, online newspaper LocalBusiness.com, and the self-descriptive FurnitureAndBedding.com. Online grocer Webvan may be the biggest failure in Internet history, churning through an estimated $1 billion before shutting down.

The companies that flamed out at the tail end of the New Economy bubble were like kindling for the recession wildfire that gripped the United States at the dawn of the new century. Over the course of one month (March 10, 2000, to April 6, 2000), the NASDAQ stock market lost $1 trillion in value; the figure then jumped to nearly $1.8 trillion by the end of the year.^[7] The tsunami destroyed the dreams of many dot-coms in its wake and startled tech investors back to reality. For employees at startups, from the CEO on down, stock options ended up “underwater,” worthless scraps of paper that would never regain their luster.

Even after NASDAQ crashed in spring 2000, investors rushed in to buy shares of depressed stocks, many of which would rebound slightly before falling for good. The media (fueled by business cable stations, like CNBC, which turned Internet CEOs into celebrities, and the plump ad-soaked tech magazines) made folk heroes out of people like Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos and Yahoo!’s Jerry Yang. So many Internet legends were tales of rags-to-riches glory or college students coming up with an idea in their dorm rooms that by focusing on them, the media made it seem easy.

By the end of 2001, thousands of dot-com companies went bankrupt and countless tens of thousands of employees lost their jobs. The massive failure of the New Economy and the subsequent trickle of new investments in technology companies, combined with corporate governance scandals and the September 11 terrorist attacks, sparked a recession that plagued businesses in the early years of the twentieth century. High-tech centers, such as Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., New York, and Austin, Texas, were especially hard hit by the demise of the dot-com revolution.

Despite the meltdown, the high-tech revolution continued, though on a more modest scale, as traditional businesses used e-commerce and the Internet to meld online and physical storefronts. Companies used web-based services and technologies to become more efficient and profitable. It is nearly impossible to find an industry that has not been improved through Internet-based technology, whether it is in education and nonprofits or financial services and manufacturing.

The dot-com revolution ended in early 2000, but innovation continued to propel companies into novel areas that mix business and the Internet. Figures released by the United Nations revealed that there were 655 million registered Internet users worldwide in 2002 and that global e-commerce topped $2.3 billion, doubling the figure from 2001.^[8]

Linking the earlier period with the end of the twentieth century, a mix of venture capitalists and company leaders served as the era’s new Scott and Zelda. The tech and business media filled countless posts and pages of stories hyping these individuals, fitting many of their narratives into either rags-to-riches journeys from humble beginnings to dot-com paper millionaire status or profiling the shenanigans of these young people as they got their first taste of wealth and fame. A great deal of the news coming out of Silicon Valley, New York City (dubbed “Silicon Alley”), and other tech hot spots seemed like a mixture of Jay Gatsby and Scott Fitzgerald tales updated for the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Fitzgerald and Fame That Roared through the Twenties

The challenge with celebrity is drawing a line between it and everything else. In the case of the Fitzgeralds, fame grew exponentially and engulfed their fragile psyches beyond what they were capable of handling. The alcohol-fueled antics and reckless way they spent money are two obvious examples of their inability to deal with the chaos that flies alongside celebrity.

Ever since the rejuvenation of Gatsby and its incredible subsequent life as an important novel, public perception of Scott and Zelda is inextricably tied to the way people view the novel. Interestingly, what surely links the lives of the couple and the novel is the centrality of celebrity in their lives and those of the characters in the novel. We now know that the young couple attended opulent parties on Long Island that set the tone for the book. And, like so much of Fitzgerald’s work, the intensity of the desire Gatsby feels for Daisy is a composite of Zelda and several other early loves in the author’s life.

Regarding Fitzgerald, however, the common and historical view of him as a celebrity rather than an artist detracts from accepting his brilliance. This backlash has not gathered enough steam to be considered a revisionist movement, but there has been a more concerted effort at portraying Fitzgerald more fully as a serious writer and artist. As literary scholar Ruth Prigozy explains, “The evolving popularization of the Fitzgerald icon was shallowly concerned with sensationalism and fleeting celebrity, much more so than with the reality of Fitzgerald’s art.”^[9] Prigozy’s distinction between Fitzgerald the icon and the author as artist is spot on and demonstrates the balance and care one should take in examining the contrasting viewpoints of the author’s persona and life.

Perhaps more challenging is differentiating between Fitzgerald’s fame, his work, and the way he and Zelda were engaged by the mass media to essentially sell the Jazz Age. For example, the recklessness, self-indulgence, and faux-celebrity antics of the flapper transformed the women who lived by this code into one of the era’s most lauded symbols. As such, it is easy to understand why the glamorous Zelda Fitzgerald is often considered the first great flapper.

Although her dashing young husband fueled her fame, the couple grew notorious as they caught the eye of the nation’s tabloids, newspapers, and gossip hounds, a veritable industry that sprouted up to cash in on the thirst for such chatter. American corporations and advertising agencies pushed forth in this area as well, featuring slick, artistic ads that sold glamour along with products. By the late 1920s, for example, Hollywood stars such as Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, and Clara Bow appeared in fashion ads that peddled the latest designs to middle-class buyers. As a matter of fact, Scott and Zelda looked like they could have emerged from the pages of a print ad, both exemplars of the age in grace and appeal.

Advertising agencies and marketing firms also facilitated the development of America’s consumer culture both in Fitzgerald’s day and in contemporary society. Thus, with each leap, whether based on some new innovation or tick upward in standard of living, corporations and advertisers benefited by linking efforts in both the physical accumulation of goods and the metaphysical feeling that acquisition instilled.

In other words, advertising and business prospered as the idea of the American Dream melded with the desire to consume. Actually, advertising created and then molded people’s basic yearning for accumulation and consumption. Much of this effort required celebrity and fame as conduits for making the system work effectively. A consumer might need a new pair of shoes, but actually desire the same shoes worn by Swanson or Bow. Expanding the idea of a need into a deep longing effectively transformed the way people thought about consumer goods.

The resulting mix between selling, celebrity, and instilling culture formed a foundational tenet of modern capitalist America. Historian Jackson Lears explains, “Advertisements did more than stir up desire; they also sought to manage it—to stabilize the sorcery of the marketplace by containing dreams of personal transformation within a broader rhetoric of control.”^[10] The inside-outside control ultimately came to reside within corporate management initiatives, according to Lears. In other words, there is a structure underneath the vision of life advertising promotes based on the value system of the business world.^[11] Advertising helped the nation define its consumerist dreams, while the industrial world worked diligently to ensure that such products were readily available.

Historian Stuart Ewen viewed the 1920s, in particular, as an era driven by the marriage of mass consumption and advertising, which resulted from the need for an ever-expanding consumer base in a mass-production-centered economic system. On its own, however, mass production did not present a compelling narrative that would capture the public’s imagination. In response, by glamorizing industrialization and its products via advertising and celebrity endorsement, corporations and their agencies gained a foothold in creating culture.^[12] The vision of what consumer goods a person or family needed to be living “the good life” fell to the advertisers who worked in concert with corporations to present that ideal image to American shoppers.

Whitman’s Chocolates, for example, ran the first four-color ads in the Saturday Evening Post, capitalizing on the magic of chocolate, not the assembly lines that produced the product. A 1925 ad featured a golfer on the putting green in a bucolic rural setting and a group of flappers and their male chaperones divvying a box of chocolates while standing next to a beautiful, shiny blue automobile. Although the ad hopes to actually sell boxes of chocolates, it is clear that aspirations are on sale, too, since there is nothing inherently stylish, modern, or cool about eating chocolate or buying Whitman’s. Eating “fresh” chocolates, according to the copy, however, provides the “pep” one demands within a busy schedule of summer play.^[13]

Whitman’s advertising announced to consumers that it stood as a hip product, reflecting the hot styles of the day with an aura of prestige: flappers with the customary low-slung hats and young men in natty suits or golf attire. Consumers who purchased the product, in essence, bought into a lifestyle the chocolate company created for itself via advertising. The demographic Whitman’s targeted is specific. These are society’s elites, as evidenced by their summer filled with frivolity, not those hapless souls toiling away at low-paying factory jobs or working as clerks. The Whitman’s Chocolates ads did not feature a celebrity directly but rather played off the hottest fashion styles of the day to create composite characters consumers might emulate.

Rather than portray the era via illustrations or paintings, a 1930 ad for Sunkist California lemons designed by legendary firm Foote, Cone & Belding used real Hollywood actresses in an attempt to get women to rinse their hair with lemon juice. Each star had her picture in the ad, along with a short quote plugging the product. Starlet Constance Bennett, for example, tells female consumers, “If I were making a list of beauty suggestions, I would place the lemon rinse right up close to the top.” One might notice that the voice attributed to Bennett is folksy and nonthreatening, appealing to the reader hoping to replicate the fashion sense of a Hollywood actress. Other stars who appeared in the ad included Betty Compson, Marian Nixon, and the ill-fated Mary Nolan, whose career exploded and then quickly fizzled due to relationship and drug challenges.^[14]

One of the most interesting tidbits regarding Fitzgerald’s past is that he attempted to launch a career in the advertising business in New York City just after his stint in the army ended. Although he failed, as he would in Hollywood much later, because he simply could not write to other people’s dictums, he obviously gained some insight into marketing and branding that he later put to use for himself. His letters to Perkins over the decades showed a keen interest in marketing and branding, though neither writer nor editor used the terms as we do today. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald, even at the early points of his career, comprehended how his personal brand could be used to boost his career.

For example, Fitzgerald walked both sides of the fence when accused of writing autobiography and passing it off as fiction. Scholar Kirk Curnutt contends: “Despite Fitzgerald’s claims that he was chronicling generational uncertainties, it remain inarguable that he capitalized upon his early success to fashion a personal mythology that the media eagerly promulgated.” These efforts included writing his own ad copy, “puff pieces about himself” for newspapers, and appearances in gossip columns. Later, as his fame intensified, Curnutt explains, Fitzgerald also wrote sarcastic nonfiction essays lampooning the celebrity status he and Zelda attained, including the popular “How to Live on $36,000 a Year.”^[15]

What Fitzgerald’s efforts in personal branding reveal is an astute comprehension of celebrity and the burgeoning mass media industry. Although the popular image in today’s mind is one of him on a decade-long bender, the young author could be quite shrewd. Often, for example, he would attach his name to essays Zelda wrote to force the editors to pay his freelance rates, rather than hers, since he stood as one of the highest-paid writers in the country. While the term “calculating” might be too judgmental to affix to Fitzgerald’s marketing efforts, he clearly realized that this work had meaning in a world increasingly looking to the stars on Broadway and in Hollywood.

Gatsby-esque Celebrity Culture

Drawing on his own experience with meteoric fame, Fitzgerald anticipated how intricately wound the vision of success is with celebrity in America. As a result, readers are about a third of the way through the novel before they encounter Gatsby in any meaningful way. Even here, though, it is indirect, taking place in a conversation among strangers at one of his extravagant parties. The anonymous guests, a handful of the hundreds or more on hand, speculate about their host’s past because that is what people do at such events. They gossip and react to gossip, which merely fuels the desire for more information.

After one woman confesses that she heard he “killed a man,” the tone of the conversation shifts to both wonder and awe. In some respects, the nameless guest, merely referred to as “the first girl,” is a pseudocelebrity for the moment, playing the valued role as keeper of information, another vital cog in a society obsessed with celebrity. “A thrill passed over all of us,” Nick explains. “The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly.”^[16] Fitzgerald realized that keeping the novel’s namesake cloaked in secrecy would reveal deeper meanings about the quest for celebrity and the disparity between the growing importance of the surface sheen and inner person.

Fitzgerald’s sophisticated awareness of fame also enabled him to portray what it is like for people to be near celebrity, to essentially be in the presence of wealth and myth and the thrill it delivers, even among those who are also rich and otherwise successful. The many partygoers do not really care that they do not know Gatsby. Instead, they accept, or perhaps even ingest, his aura by attending the parties. Whether or not he is a murderer, German spy, or war hero does not really matter to the throngs at the party. Representative of America in the 1920s, they just want to be where the action is and bask in the glory of Gatsby’s largesse.

Being rich affords the wealthy with an opportunity to basically rent celebrity or buy into its trappings, which automatically excludes anyone who cannot pay the fee. Gatsby imports gaudy representations of wealth, ranging from inanimate items like crates of lemons and oranges and exotic liquors to people themselves, whether famous orchestra leaders or Broadway cast members. Money grants access and confers fame.

In the real world, supermarket checkout lanes and magazine racks are filled with homages to the nation’s celebrity obsession: bursting with full-color exposés and intrigue enveloping Hollywood’s elite. Myrtle Wilson’s copies of Town Tattle strewn around the New York City love nest bejeweled with Tom Buchanan’s money were replaced by the real thing: People magazine, the National Enquirer, and dozens of similar glossies. The thirst for celebrity news surged when the television program Entertainment Tonight launched in September 1981. Melding the focus of the tabloid with a news format ushered in a new desire for all things celebrity.

The culture industry alive in the twenty-first century did not just spring to life with the advent of the grocery store tabloids, entertainment news shows, or the Internet. The fascination with celebrity took hold at the dawn of the last century, when the great rivers of technology, media, and spending power melded to form a powerful American popular culture stronger than it had been before people were inextricably linked by these forces. The huge, transformational cultural waves were fortified by the nation’s burgeoning strength as an economic, military, and political force globally.

People used popular culture as a guidepost in these early days, essentially navigating among one another using its signs, symbols, representations, and ideas to makes sense of the changes taking place around them and the larger world that seemed nearer than ever before. Popular culture, then, proved to be a kind of common language that crossed many of the socioeconomic and race-related barriers that often divided people. American music, literature, style, consumer products, and technology—certainly unique from its European counterparts and roots—gave people new means of engaging with one another and the ideals altering the nation.

Contemporary culture bursts with similar examples of the ultrarich mingling with celebrities, each side hoping some of the other’s magic dust will rub off. The rock band Kings of Leon, for example, performed at a 2012 New Year’s Eve party hosted by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. The party, held on a yacht off the resort island St. Barts, included numerous additional celebrities, from actor Jake Gyllenhaal to Star Wars creator George Lucas.^[17] Even those less fantastically wealthy can mingle with actors, athletes, and other celebrities by playing golf at charity pro-am and celebrity tournaments. These events typically carry entry fees for noncelebrities in the $5,000 to $10,000 range, though the fabled AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, part of the PGA Tour and televised globally, costs in excess of $25,000.^[18] Expectedly, most of the people who enter these tournaments are high-powered corporate CEOs, local business leaders, and other pseudocelebrities.

What these kinds of pay-for-play events demonstrate is that everything is for sale in a capitalist economic system. With enough money, one can get an audience with a U.S. senator or hire a pop star to play at a child’s sixteenth birthday celebration. Fitzgerald anticipated the inauthentic moment that enabled people to live vicariously through celebrity and wealth, which sullied the romance of the moment.

The parties in the novel are all external, intended to demonstrate Gatsby’s wealth, while he himself hides away, purposely removed from the scene. Yet, in hiding from the guests, Gatsby intensifies his exclusivity and position above them. He represents the ultimate VIP section, roped off spiritually by the labyrinth mansion and physically by bodyguards and lackeys who do his bidding.

In 1935 Fitzgerald was at a low point financially and spiritually. Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich suggested that he write something—anything—that would justify an advance from the magazine, which at the time was essential in keeping the writer from eviction or starving. The result was three essays published in Esquire for February, March, and April 1936: “The Crack-Up,” “Pasting It Together,” and “Handle with Care.” In this series, Fitzgerald develops a key theme: his concept of emotional bankruptcy, the idea that it is possible to use up one’s capacity for emotion and be left with nothing.

In Fitzgerald’s era, many people (perhaps led by his ultramacho, sometime friend Ernest Hemingway) found such confessional writing a sign of weakness. Literary greats—most thought—should not position themselves as fragile or possessing insecurities. In retrospect, however, one might reinterpret Fitzgerald’s memoir/essays in Esquire as an early indicator of what currently fuels much of the contemporary publishing industry. Today’s readers want to see into the minutiae of those deemed famous, even if the celebrity industry has created them.

Much of the modern obsession with celebrities and their lives is driven by obtrusive investigation into their daily habits. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the outlets for the tidal wave of celebrity clutter grew as technology enabled television to expand from a handful to thousands of stations, then grew exponentially as the Internet provided countless new vehicles for disseminating celebrity-focused images and information.

Interestingly, Fitzgerald had an eye on this possible future, at least the aspect of investigation and its consequences. In the novel, what started as gossip among partygoers about their host’s riches, for example, later led to Tom leading an investigation into Gatsby’s past. In addition, a newspaper reporter shows up at Nick’s door, snooping around after rumors of the mysterious Gatsby filtered to him.

The cycle at work in Fitzgerald’s book: from seemingly innocent gossip to more pointed rumors to real investigation, both private and media driven, is one at work in modern celebrity culture. Today, though, the media wolves are always ready to pounce, even if rumors cannot be substantiated. Sensationalism sells, while the potential for retraction gets buried to the degree that it is not a concern among those on the chase for dirt. The challenge has become more disconcerting as the formal media increasingly gives way to citizen journalists and others with little or no training in journalistic ethics. Given the number of outlets the web presents, anyone with a cell phone camera and the ability to type can self-identify as a journalist.

The real media firestorm activates, however, if rumors turn into reality. Stampede mode occurs, like when Tiger Woods knocked over a fire hydrant with his SUV in the middle of the night near his home. The oddness of the incident subsequently set off a string of investigations into the golf star’s private life that turned his seemingly charmed existence on its ear. Jordan Baker is portrayed as one of the nation’s top female golfers, appearing on the front of the sports page enough that Nick thinks he recognizes her when they meet. Although Nick seems a casual fan, he has heard rumors of her cheating. In today’s age, there are good odds that someone would have caught the indiscretion on tape—maybe a video recorder on an iPhone—and the resulting story would lead on countless thousands of websites, video sites, news programs, and ESPN.

Across popular culture mediums, ironically, early death is another avenue for celebrities to become iconic. Fitzgerald as the angelic star of the 1920s fits this bill similarly to the Doors lead singer Jim Morrison or Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain. Fitzgerald’s resurrection at the hands of readers and the academic community is another link to celebrities who die but are kept in the public eye by fans who will not let them fade completely from the spotlight.

Gatsby also slides into this category. Nick’s book with him at the center will ensure that the legend will live on as the narrator sees it, not necessarily tied to reality. Fitzgerald saw the dark side, too: according to critic Clive James, the author had special foresight when it came to fame, explaining, “Fitzgerald guessed where celebrity, if pursued for itself, was bound to end up: as a dead body in the swimming pool.”^[19] What he could not have foreseen is that early death might serve as a boost, potentially transforming a celebrity into something larger and more important than he ever achieved in life.

Gatsby is in some senses fueled by celebrity—the famous and infamous individuals that flock to his West Egg mansion in search of fleeting fun and bootlegged whiskey. Scholar Stephen Gundle explains that Jay Gatsby “is not just an ambitious individual but a man who has a dream, a dream that can be seen as the American dream of success and personal happiness.” In an era of illusion like the one Fitzgerald unraveled into its essential bits, one sees the clear ties between celebrity and publicity. Or, as Gundle proclaims: “He is a New Man who represents his age.”^[20] The old-moneyed elites balked at such base efforts, but as Fitzgerald demonstrates, image and celebrity are quintessential American traits.

Weaving all these connected threads together, one realizes that there is an unbreakable tie between Fitzgerald as celebrity author and his work, particularly Gatsby, since it deals so explicitly with fame and wealth. Whether avid readers and we scholars agree with the link or not, it is bigger than our individual concerns, emerging as part of Americana. Writer John Updike, whose alternative career as a literary critic stands alongside Edmund Wilson’s as one of the most brilliant in history, summarizes, “The life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in the half-century since it ended, has become more celebrated and paradigmatic than any of the lives found in his fiction.”^[21] Given his keen comprehension of life as a celebrated author and literary standout and its marketing component, Updike sees the mixture of legend and reality as it pertains to the whole as Fitzgeraldian folklore. As a result of Fitzgerald’s literary output and ever-evolving fame, Updike concludes, he joins Hemingway and Faulkner as “the third of a sacred trinity.”^[22]

What I exert, though, in adding to Updike’s thought is that the popular image of Fitzgerald and his place in popular culture makes him the dominant member of this trinity, even though Hemingway also graces culture across various channels. In a culture always concentrated on celebrity and fame, Fitzgerald has risen to the summit of the nation’s literary greats. The elevation above his rivals and colleagues, however, has been on this mix of quality and celebrity. No one could have imagined at the time of Fitzgerald’s death that this nearly forgotten author would transform into a national icon. In true American fashion, Fitzgerald attained this station via talent and stardom.

Larry Z. Leslie, Celebrity in the 21st Century: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2011), xiii.

Leslie, Celebrity in the 21st Century, xiii.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 150.

Marshall Fishwick, Introduction to Icons of America, ed. Ray B. Browne and Marshall Fishwick (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1978), 4.

Michael Specter, “The Age of the Sage (or Is It Money Talking?),” New York Times, January 4, 1998, WK5.

Quoted in Nancy Milford, Zelda: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 67.

“The $1.7 Trillion Dot-Com Lesson,” CNNMoney, November 9, 2000, http://money.cnn.com/2000/11/09/technology/overview (accessed November 15, 2000).

“UN Report Cites Global Internet Growth Despite Economic Woes,” USA Today, November 18, 2002, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2002-11-18-global-net_x.htm (accessed November 19, 2002).

Ruth Prigozy, “Introduction: Scott, Zelda, and the Culture of Celebrity,” in The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Ruth Prigozy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 24.

10.

Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 10.

11.

Lears, Fables of Abundance, 10–11.

12.

Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1976, 2001), 51.

13.

Charles Goodrum and Helen Dalrymple, Advertising in America: The First 200 Years (New York: Abrams, 1990), 106.

14.

Goodrum and Dalrymple, Advertising in America, 131.

15.

Kirk Curnutt, ed., A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 5.

16.

Fitzgerald, Gatsby, ed. Bruccoli, 50.

17.

“Kings of Leon Play at Billionaire’s Caribbean New Year’s Eve,” WRTV Indianapolis, January 3, 2013, http://www.theindychannel.com/entertainment/kings-of-leon-play-at-billionaires-caribbean-new-years-eve_22646991 (accessed January 8, 2013).

18.

Brian Kendall, “Golf with the Stars in a Celebrity Pro-Am,” Canadian Golf Traveller, November 5, 2012, http://canadiangolftraveller.com/golf-with-the-stars-in-a-celebrity-pro-am/ (accessed January 8, 2013).

19.

Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (New York: Norton, 2007), 210.

20.

Stephen Gundle, Glamour: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 156.

21.

John Updike, More Matter: Essays and Criticism (New York: Random House, 1999), 538.

22.

Updike, More Matter, 539.