Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago . . . what I had almost remembered was incommunicable forever.—Nick Carraway, The Great Gatsby
History is filled with events that initially seem like accidents but ultimately transform from calamity into a significant innovation. In a similar vein, certain people find themselves falling into great crisis situations and then performing heroically. Sometimes, in a world filled with unintended consequences, a confluence takes place that leads to a future tidal wave. When the unanticipated outcomes are positive, we attach positive labels to them, such as luck, serendipity, or destiny. Such is the case with Fitzgerald’s revival, which began on several (often unrelated) fronts relatively shortly after his death and gained steam as the 1940s and 1950s rolled on. The micro- and macrolevel catalysts sparked a Fitzgerald wildfire that not only established him as one of America’s great writers, but also led to the reexamination and exaltation of The Great Gatsby.
Undeniably, many aspects of the Fitzgerald revival took flight based on deliberate efforts on the part of his proponents to elevate him, so we certainly cannot claim that the resuscitation occurred solely based on luck. However, analyzing the many fronts taken together as a whole, it does look like destiny played a role in the revival. Reassessing his work, critics, commentators, and scholars could not overlook Gatsby’s magnitude or Fitzgerald’s word-by-word and line-by-line skills. As the old saying goes, “the cream rises to the top,” so one can imagine some form of Fitzgerald restoration occurring at a future point, but certainly the concentrated efforts of many key players hastened the outcome.
Examining the series of serendipitous events and cultural changes taking place in the 1940s and 1950s, we see that these unintended consequences sprouted up in odd places. For example, if it were not for the need to ration paper in the 1940s, the publishing industry may never have figured out the public’s interest in buying mass-market paperbacks. At the same time, if American GIs during World War II did not have so much free time on their hands on bases at home and abroad, then they might not have turned to reading to fill idle hours. Luckily, however, these disparate sparks came together to ignite the rise of cheap paperback copies of great books. Simultaneously, publishers realized the sales potential and pushed mass-market renditions as a method for making money on products without having to expend funds on new content. As a result, many books stayed in print that otherwise may have been lost to history’s dustbin.
During the latter stages of the Second World War, for instance, servicemen could read the Armed Services Editions of both The Great Gatsby and a story collection that featured “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” one of Fitzgerald’s best short stories. The military distributed about two hundred thousand free copies, which promoted Fitzgerald’s reputation beyond measure. For other important writers, such as Hemingway, the military versions opened up their works for new generations of readers and book purchasers, but given Fitzgerald’s untimely death, he needed the boost to stay in the limelight. The exposure to reading swelled book club memberships after the soldiers returned from the war, as did the push for attaining an education based on the GI Bill. One could argue that reading for pleasure probably reached its all-time pinnacle in the mid to late 1940s before television burst onto the scene.
Perhaps for the first time in American history, publishers had to devise new ways to get books into the hands of literature-starved readers. The postal system had the capacity to handle a book order business, so publishers set up book clubs that mailed books to readers based on their specific interests. Soon, more than a million books a month were sold through the dozens of book clubs across America. At the same time, the rising affluence of American households and the establishment of life in the suburbs pushed young parents to not only buy books for themselves but also to invest in their children’s education by purchasing book sets. What one sees is that books developed into a kind of showcase for suburban couples and a form of decoration for filling wall space in formal living rooms, family rooms, and dens.
For example, the Great Books Program, an intensive reading course devised by University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins and professor Mortimer J. Adler, promised to teach the reader everything that the “well-read” person should know, from Aristotle and Plato to Milton and Shakespeare. Whether people were actually diving into Dante’s Inferno or the political writing of Rousseau, the hardback or leather-bound sets soon became accessories in the stylish living rooms of 1950s homes. Book sets enabled suburban couples to make a statement about who they felt they were or imagined themselves to be.
Moving from war rationing to publishing inexpensive paperbacks and the influence of the suburbs and push toward higher education in the postwar nation seems somewhat scattershot, yet these examples comprise just a small sliver of the impulses that converged to launch Fitzgerald’s comeback. We also cannot undersell the author’s early death and roller-coaster ride with fame in determining how and why his work came back into vogue.
The United States emerged from World War II in a different place, physically and emotionally stronger. Technology, education, military and economic power, and new ways of living led to an era that demanded more. Fitzgerald became part of this call. Gatsby helped literature professors and high school teachers explain the nation to their growing classes, filled increasingly with returning war veterans and the first glimpses of the baby boom. Readers yearned for great books. The slim novel seemed the perfect fit—it even had the word “great” in the title. Gatsby’s timeless themes worked in a world emerging from the horrors of world war and nuclear carnage and transitioning to a new brand of military strength and economic prosperity.
In addition to the needs of readers and publishers, the entertainment industry also demanded content as film, radio, and television fought for audiences. The great Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli is an example here. Publishing scion Charles Scribner III recounted Bruccoli’s story of his first interaction with Fitzgerald, as a high school student listening to a 1949 radio broadcast of the sci-fi fantasy “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” as he and his parents drove between Connecticut and New York City.[1] Hearing the rendition on air of the famous short story first published in 1922, the young man experienced an epiphanic moment. He immediately set out to find more about the mysterious author, which set off a lifetime of scholarly work on Fitzgerald. As the Bruccoli case reveals, radio, film, and the stage helped deliver Fitzgerald to countless new readers in the two decades under review in this chapter.
Taken together as a whole, from the scholarly and general interest in Fitzgerald’s work to the cultural and technological changes transforming the nation, one sees a nation casting about for ways to reinterpret and reimagine itself. The ambiguity of the novel seemed right for the times, enabling readers to either see themselves and their country reflected in its pages, or experience it as a way of questioning the new era. Quite frankly, as America rebooted in the postwar age, Gatsby became an important part of the cultural imprint.
***
This chapter demonstrates how Fitzgerald’s untimely death sparked a revival of his work, particularly The Great Gatsby. A number of the author’s friends and other supporters initially orchestrated a campaign to solidify his place in American literary history simply by remembering his work and pointing to its value. As momentum toward this effort expanded and intensified, soon readers, commentators, critics, and scholars responded. At the same time, the changes affecting the nation helped spur interest in the book.
The arrival of the United States as a military and economic superpower in the post–World War II world fundamentally altered the nation. These changes impacted every facet of life, from the number of children young couples produced to the way people spent their newfound leisure time and discretionary income. Many of these parallel influences converged to utterly transform the way people thought about spending. Suddenly, emerging from the scarcity of the Great Depression and the rationing of the Second World War, people had more time, extra money, and the willingness to spend it on shiny new things. No small percentage of time or effort went into self-improvement efforts, which included expanding the national education system and offering more opportunities via nontraditional education programs, like television talk shows and community-based curriculums.
What the evidence reveals is that during this tumultuous period, both Fitzgerald and Gatsby took root in our national culture. “Along with Hemingway and Faulkner he became the writer’s writer for the post–1945 generation, revered and widely imitated,” explains scholar Morris Dickstein. “The Great Gatsby was canonized not simply as a document of the Jazz Age but as a key to the American psyche and the national experience.”[2] As the nation emerged from the Second World War and confronted a new epoch, people searched for tools that might help them make sense of the quickly changing world. Based on the concerted effort by a handful of critics, admirers, and friends, therefore, Gatsby grew into an instrument for examining and comprehending society, not only for rethinking the 1920s, but for reexamining the postwar time frame as well.
The most surprising aspect of the “Fitzgerald revival” in the 1940s is that the author never really slipped out of the public eye, at least an informed reader’s eyes, in the years leading up to his death. In other words, many scholars and commentators conflated the fact that his novels no longer sold well with his general decline and disappearance from the literary scene. It is true that his novels were not selling, but that does not automatically mean that the part of the public one would call “literary” had forgotten him or his work.
Taking a contrarian position, I posit that Fitzgerald remained both a public figure and in the cultural mind-set throughout the 1930s and definitely through the first major events of the revival, most often dated to the 1945 publication of The Crack-Up, edited by Edmund Wilson. This is not just idle speculation or a desire for revisionist history. Instead, today’s researcher simply must use the tools at one’s disposal to get a fuller picture of the cultural scene in these years and then look at the archival records.
Taken all together, research demonstrates Fitzgerald’s continuing ubiquity among the nation’s educated readers. Obviously, his star did not shine as it did in his 1920s heyday, but ever since the publication and disappointing sales of Gatsby in 1925, Fitzgerald’s iconic status went into slow descent. In contrast to the washed-up portrayal usually put forth to account for the late 1930s to his death at the end of 1940, however, we see that he never fully disappeared, though the common perception is that he rotted away on some gin-soaked Hollywood side street just inches from the gutter.
We cannot discount the pressures Fitzgerald faced, from paying for Zelda’s care to his own (often self-induced) medical maladies and constant financial strain. These difficulties, though, do not equate to a skid row existence. By some measures, one could ably argue that Fitzgerald had turned a corner as the 1940s began, if only his failing health could have been averted.
A search of the New York Times database from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s reveals that Fitzgerald often served as an intellectual fulcrum for reviewers and critics as they assessed other authors. This initial search is supported by the clippings in Fitzgerald’s own scrapbooks, The Romantic Egoists, published by Bruccoli and Scottie Fitzgerald Smith in 1974. Here we see Fitzgerald and his work being compared to that of John O’Hara, Louis Bromfield, and others. Most frequently, the critics use Fitzgerald as a stand-in for coming-of-age novels (reminiscent of This Side of Paradise) or as a counter to those novelists trying to capture the meaning of an age (like Gatsby).[3]
Looking at the Times, one finds that there were at least half a dozen mentions of Fitzgerald in 1940 alone prior to his late December death, which is a pretty good showing for a writer thought to be obscure. Of the six articles, two are Hollywood reports. The second, published in the Times on August 27, 1940, announces that Twentieth Century-Fox hired Fitzgerald to work on the screenplay for the Emlyn Williams play The Light of Heart. According to Bruccoli, he worked on the screenplay until October 15, producing three versions, but ultimately the studio rejected it.[4] He did not receive credit in the film version, retitled Life Begins at Eight-Thirty, released in 1942. Most of the other Times articles use Fitzgerald as a point of comparison in book reviews examining the work of Philip Atlee, Martin Flavin, and Katharine Bush, all popular novelists and writers of the era. Flavin went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his novel Journey in the Dark, while Atlee went on to great fame writing detective and mystery novels.
Although some of Fitzgerald’s obituaries undercut his lasting significance by focusing on the celebrity aspects of his life or recent difficulties, his death (like the deaths of all celebrities in our celebrity-obsessed world) got people talking about him again. The flurry of activity related to his death led to tributes published in the New Republic in March 1941 by some of his most famous colleagues and friends, including John Dos Passos, Malcolm Cowley, and others. According to scholar Jackson R. Bryer, “This flurry of attention . . . was not only a harbinger of what was to come; it also was a reprise, if abbreviated and more limited, of the sort of coverage Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda had received during the 1920s and early 1930s.”[5] While the hyperbole surrounding the restoration of Fitzgerald’s place in literary history may have gone a bit too far, one could certainly argue that the revival may have never taken place without the intensity of his early proponents. At the very least, it needed the spark from these supporters to really catch hold.
The New Republic essays were followed later that year by the publication of The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel, edited by Wilson. Although the book was not a hit in terms of sales, some observers deemed it Fitzgerald’s best and most mature work. The critical spotlight kept Fitzgerald on the mind of the nation’s intelligentsia. The Last Tycoon also featured several outstanding Fitzgerald short stories, which enabled readers to once again assess his significance in that genre. In an often-quoted review of The Last Tycoon, writer Stephen Vincent Benét noted, “This is not a legend, this is a reputation—and, seen in perspective, it may well be one of the most secure reputations of our time.”[6]
An interesting aspect of the Fitzgerald posthumous comeback is that it almost immediately cut across academic and general readership lines. This is due, at least in part, to the prominent role of public intellectuals in that era. Writers like Wilson and John Peale Bishop served as the nation’s literary and artistic arbiters, keeping the public informed via national magazines and newspapers. In the pretelevision age, public intellectuals had great influence. In Fitzgerald’s case, many used their power to resurrect his reputation.
The consensus, however, did not fall wholly in support. In those early years, critics wrangled over his place among the other writers of his day. Not everyone agreed that Fitzgerald stood among the greats. For example, in an April 1944 essay in College English, Leo and Miriam Gurko built a case for Fitzgerald’s “minor” status relative to Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos.
The Gurkos admit to Fitzgerald’s skill as a stylist, but find his worldview stifling and debilitating. They surmise:
Yet, for all the peculiar excellence of the style, the range of his ideas remains hemmed in by the singular negativism of his view of the world and the dogged, unvaried way in which this is repeated from story to story—which further tends to pin Fitzgerald in the ranks of the minor writers.[7]
Surprisingly, in this example, the authors do not distinguish very much between Fitzgerald’s first three novels, essentially lumping them together, since they featured “adolescents in sequential stages.”[8] From the perspective of Leo and Miriam Gurko, Gatsby bears close resemblance to Fitzgerald’s earlier protagonists and is a lesser character than Dick Diver of Tender or Monroe Stahr of Tycoon. With the latter, the Gurkos conclude, “Before this, Fitzgerald never attempted anything half so difficult and never succeeded in welding a full-grown adult into a full-grown, man-sized adult world.”[9]
On the other hand, in 1942, critic Alfred Kazin, who would soon become one of the nation’s preeminent literary authorities, pointed to the author’s style and perception, explaining, “Fitzgerald always saw life as glamour, even though he could pierce that glamour to write one of the most moving of American tragedies in The Great Gatsby.”[10] If Fitzgerald and his work served as intellectual fodder in the early 1940s, however, the arguments for or against took place in the background of World War II. The chaos and desperation of the war took precedent over literary battles and pushed most other topics to the background. Not until after the war’s end would a major volley be fired in support of Fitzgerald and his long-term reputation, again at the hands of Edmund Wilson and the edited collection, The Crack-Up.
In 1945, while the military gave away a couple hundred thousand copies of The Great Gatsby, both Wilson’s The Crack-Up and Dorothy Parker’s The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald appeared. Together, these books sparked a more intense reaction to Fitzgerald, not only putting his work on full display, but placing it within its historical context. Surely, too, postwar readers found something in Fitzgerald that helped them better comprehend their current struggles, whether it centered on a new version of the American Dream or how individuals might live ethically in a consumer society.
The sales of both The Crack-Up and Portable were strong. Portable sold some twenty-nine thousand copies, according to scholar Elaine P. Maimon, who conducted pioneering work on Fitzgerald’s sales in the early 1970s. Exact sales for Wilson’s volume are not available, but the book sold out its first edition in three days and its second in advance of publication. Maimon indicates that in addition to these formal sources, the 1945 to 1950 period also witnessed various inexpensive paperbacks by publishers other than Scribner’s. Also, many of his short stories and novel excerpts appeared in numerous anthologies. Altogether, these many channels for buying or accessing Fitzgerald’s work must be assessed as a whole to give the contemporary reader a full understanding of the early revival.[11]
Playing up the gangster element and violence popular in movies of the late 1940s,
Paramount released a new adaptation of The Great Gatsby in 1949, starring Alan Ladd as Gatsby and Betty Field as Daisy. Cyril Hume and Richard
Maibaum wrote the screenplay, an amalgamation of Fitz-
gerald’s novel and the play version written by Owen Davis. For clues about the film’s
direction, one needs look no further than the marketing poster, which signals its
focus. In it, a realistic painting shows Ladd front and center in a tan trench coat.
Ladd’s Gatsby looks more like a private eye or criminal than the suave character from
the novel. As he stands tensely looking off to his right, a quartet of scantily clad
women surrounds him, each looking up eagerly. At the bottom right, a small picture
of a large car slamming into a woman is presented, though a blink of an eye before
impact.
The opening scene deviates from the novel, picturing Nick twenty years older and placing a bouquet of flowers at Gatsby’s gravestone with Jordan on his arm. She remarks at how small the gravestone is, with Nick replying that it would not be his style at all—“He’d have fancied something more like Grant’s tomb.” Immediately implying that Gatsby is the kind of person who needs a large, showy tomb sets the movie off on bad footing and demonstrates that the film is not going to be faithful to Fitzgerald’s central character, who took little interest in wealth outside of how Daisy would interpret it.
Even more egregious for an audience that might actually desire an adaptation more attuned to the novel, in one of the first scenes that we see Gatsby, he is shown in a car chase with guns blazing. While a machine gun fires at his car from close range, Gatsby calmly sits in the front passenger seat and kills the two men firing at him, forcing their car off the road and headfirst into the side of a building. Such looseness, according to eminent film historian Wheeler Winston Dixon, leads to “a curiously tedious, flat, and unimaginative film, with little visual or thematic resonance.”[12] Ladd’s Gatsby is a man surrounded by henchmen and is much more sinister than the novel version. And since the 1949 film is a star vehicle for Ladd, director Elliott Nugent focuses on him at the expense of the story.
Reviewing the film for the New York Times, Bosley Crowther pointed to its inherent weaknesses, but did so without fully comprehending the power of the Fitzgerald revival about to be in full swing. He explains, “Paramount selected this old tale primarily as a standard conveyance for the image of its charm boy, Alan Ladd. For most of the tragic implications and bitter ironies of Mr. Fitzgerald’s work have gone by the board in allowing for the generous exhibition of Mr. Ladd.”[13] Subsequent film versions of the novel would repeat the mistake in the 1949 film—not realizing that Gatsby is a novel of ideas, not characters, thus rehashing it as a star vehicle for a male lead necessitates that any faithfulness to the novel must go by the wayside.
Although the 1949 Gatsby looked and felt more like one of its era’s gangster flicks, the Ladd vehicle kept the Fitzgerald train rolling regardless of its comparison with the novel. As a matter of fact, the movie even featured some modern marketing efforts that bolstered Fitzgerald’s newfound ubiquity. For example, the publisher Grosset & Dunlap issued a 1949 edition of Gatsby that featured a “wraparound band” advertising the film. The cover of the book shows a flapper dancing wildly as a group of partygoers watches. The back cover reveals a still from the film of Daisy, Nick, and Gatsby. Bantam Books also put out a dust jacket featuring Alan Ladd in a scene from the film.[14] In addition to typical press materials, like photo stills from the movie and a press book, the film also had international marketing materials, including a British edition with a special dust jacket and an Australian poster featuring “head and shoulder portraits of [the] three main characters.”[15]
One may not be able to find a starker contrast than the eras before and after the Second World War. In the 1930s, people battled a series of ills, beginning with financial misery and ending with global anxiety caused by the military turmoil and ensuing warfare in Europe. As the unrest overseas mounted and seemed more and more likely to include the United States directly, Americans turned to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to lift them from the economic chaos and guide them militarily as the nation prepped for war via its industrial base. Ironically, the answer to people’s Depression-era prayers came in the form of firing up the arsenal of democracy to win World War II. Despite the misery it caused, the war also righted the nation economically and initiated the shift to a thorough and comprehensive consumer culture.
The Great Depression and the war fundamentally altered American society and forced changes in its culture as well. The national popular culture machine responded to the twin crises on a number of fronts, from the use of advertising and marketing as a tool to increase nationalistic feelings to creating entertainment that alleviated the stress felt by workers at home and soldiers abroad. These efforts were especially fruitful at a time when people thought their darkest days still seemed ahead of them.
Hollywood, for example, responded to World War II by producing films that emphasized American heroism and patriotism. Although these efforts seem overly propagandistic to contemporary eyes, the movies gave people hope in an era filled with darkness. The film industry also kept citizens informed by creating a variety of newsreels, special reports, and documentaries about the day’s issues. Although films had always fascinated American audiences, the attraction deepened in the 1940s. In 1946, for instance, more than one hundred million people went to the movies each week, about two-thirds of the total population.
The 1950s symbolized a new beginning for the United States, but many of the primary tenets of the decade evolved from the previous decade, including the move to a consumer-based economy. The launch of the “American century” delivered unprecedented prosperity for much of the nation. When soldiers returned from the war, they had money to spend, as did those who worked on the home front during the war and had little to purchase because of rationing programs. Driven by innovation and new technologies, the subsequent abundance of consumer goods transformed life.
The cause of national anxiety changed dramatically in the two eras, from real war in Europe to Cold War across the globe, primarily fought in the minds of politicians and diplomats in Washington, D.C., and Moscow. Yet, at home, Americans looked to establishing lives much different than their parents and grandparents. The booming economy and college aid programs gave young people—particularly returning veterans of World War II—opportunities to either work at high-paying jobs or go back to school for little or no money.
While changes were underfoot in the 1950s, there were large segments of the population denied its benefits. Certainly, the nostalgic feelings later generations held regarding the 1950s glossed over a darker, troubling time, fueled by rapid cultural changes and emotions still fresh from World War II. As writers William H. Young and Nancy K. Young conclude, “Depending on one’s focus during the fifties, the decade could seem complacent and conformist, or it could be filled with threatening change and shrill individuals who turned their backs on anything held dear by generations of Americans.”[16] Many of these challenges would explode to the surface in the 1960s. However, for those willing to view the postwar world as a new beginning, particularly in the growing middle class, the future looked dazzling.
In terms of the burgeoning Fitzgerald revival, the momentum gained in the decade since
his untimely death gained speed in 1950 and 1951. Arthur Mizener’s biography, The Far Side of Paradise, for example, sold some 20,000 copies in just five days and 42,287 by the end of
1951, according to scholar Elaine P. Maimon, whose early work on Fitzgerald’s sales
statistics and those of authors writing about him served as the foundation for understanding
the author’s reach and budding importance. The era’s book clubs also played a pivotal
role in expanding interest in Fitz-
gerald. An additional 30,000 copies of Mizener’s biography went out via the Book Find
Club.[17] Ironically, the resurgence in Fitzgerald led to his biographer selling many tens
of thousands more copies than the author did when Gatsby first appeared some twenty-five years earlier.
The 1951 study F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work, edited by Alfred Kazin, also helped establish the tone for studies regarding Fitz-
gerald. The collection featured reviews and other pieces that demonstrated Fitzgerald’s
place in the literary canon. The growing “rediscovery” of Fitzgerald and his work
in the early 1950s served as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. The more scholars
and critics wrote about discovering Fitzgerald all over again, the more that work
served as news itself. Each story or article that approached Fitzgerald served as
kindling for the larger fire set ablaze by each successive critic. New books and stories
about Fitzgerald in turn led to even more coverage.
Mizener’s biography, along with Budd Schulberg’s novel The Disenchanted (1950) helped keep Fitzgerald in the spotlight. However, Fitz-
gerald’s own work went into relatively soft mode through 1958. The appeal that later
year, as with the sales increases in the early years of the decade, was spurred by
another biography, this time Sheilah Graham’s Beloved Infidel.[18] Graham, Fitzgerald’s girlfriend during his later era in Hollywood, would later
go on to write several other best-selling memoirs of her time with him. The 1950s
ended on a positive note in terms of Scribner’s sales of Fitzgerald works, with nine
editions available in 1958 and 1959, selling 57,351 and 56,063 copies, respectively.[19]
In addition to the work of specific individuals in bringing Fitzgerald back from obscurity, one cannot overlook how both Scribner’s and Harold Ober Associates orchestrated the revival as well. Fitzgerald’s publisher, according to scholar James L. W. West III, “continued to manage his work responsibly, keeping the already published writing available and bringing out, from time to time, editions of Fitzgerald’s letters, his non-fiction, and his better uncollected short stories.” Indeed, West notes, Scribner’s worked with Ober’s agency “hand-in-glove” to manage Fitzgerald’s literary estate.[20]
The news on the mind of many Americans as the new decade of the 1960s came into focus centered on the dramatic changes in everyday life during the preceding decade and how that transformation set the nation on a course for further growth. In a fascinating article contrasting 1900 versus 1960, for example, writer Bruce Bliven revealed the great strides the nation achieved, from its percentage of the production of the world’s total goods to the vast increase in the number of people who received a high school and college education. While acknowledging a great deal of inequity still existed, he nonetheless concludes that the United States in late 1960 is basically a “classless society” featuring a “homogenized population.”[21]
Certainly, in Bliven’s estimation, increased overall wealth across the country raised the lot of the emerging middle class. He cites a significant increase in median income from 1950 to 1960, from $3,300 to $5,050 annually. As the economic outlook brightened for the growing middle class, the newfound wealth then fueled cultural change. Bliven saw many concrete shifts occurring that essentially recreated the nation physically and mentally, from the mass migration of fifteen million people to the suburbs after World War II to the three million students in college in 1960, a figure that he estimated would double by the end of the decade. The latter, which established the United States as the world’s leader in “self-improvement,” Bliven calls “one of the wonders of the world” and “without precedent.” Part of the self-improvement trend meant that more Americans were watching television—possessing both good and bad in Bliven’s mind—and that sales of paperback books reached 333 million, some of it dreck and some of it classic. For example, he claims, “Shakespeare’s plays sell more than a million copies annually.”[22]
The reason for concentrating on Bliven’s thinking and its consequences is that it helps unravel the reasons why Fitzgerald’s sales of Gatsby grew so astonishingly over the course of the 1960s. Numerous economic and societal threads came together in the late 1950s and early 1960s that pushed Gatsby from the status of admired novel to cultural lynchpin.
Some of these impulses might be difficult for contemporary readers to comprehend given the popular culture portrayal of the 1960s as a transition from Camelot to Kennedy’s assassination to the summer of love and hippies. This vision of the decade more or less obfuscates much of the foundational transformations that we now take for granted. Bliven identifies many of these strains, including the large increase in high school– and college-educated people and the huge number of paperbacks in circulation. Exploring these topics, for example, causes one to contemplate the increase in government funding for education, the outcomes of the GI Bill, the centrality of education linked to fulfillment of the American Dream, and others that demonstrate how a novel like Gatsby could get swept up in the sociocultural machinery of the age. Each piece of the puzzle in determining why the novel reached such mass approval and acceptance could be unraveled in a similar manner, given access to the right kind of data.
In addition, Fitzgerald’s masterpiece developed into the kind of “classic” that people needed to know or be able to discuss as part of what was generally accepted as an educated person’s intellectual framework. For example, also in 1960, on the thirty-fifth anniversary of The Great Gatsby, literary critic Arthur Mizener wrote a laudatory essay in the New Yorker that analyzed the way Fitzgerald’s reputation changed over that time. Given its placement in one of the nation’s cultural cornerstones, Mizener’s piece set the tone for future Fitzgerald studies by offering new ways for readers, scholars, and critics to interpret the book as the Camelot era unfolded. Noting the important scholarship of Fitzgerald’s supporters, like his college friend Edmund Wilson and critic Malcolm Cowley, to firmly establish the book’s reputation, Mizener turned to thematic concerns, which he felt were important in the next wave of studies.[23]
Two areas the critic identified centered on “the book’s realization of the fluidity of American lives” and Fitzgerald’s “voice.” The latter, Mizener explains, enabled Fitzgerald to create “an image of The Good American of our time in all his complexity of human sympathy, firm moral judgment and ironic self-possession.” Tying these ideas together produced a profound vision of the “American experience.” For decades, critics and other commentators both argued and confirmed Mizener’s early verdict on Fitzgerald, setting the tone for the wave of academic criticism that soon followed the commercial revival.[24]
As mentioned earlier, Mizener’s Fitzgerald biography The Far Side of Paradise contributed greatly to the renewed interest in the previous decade. More importantly, though, Mizener’s book and several other key texts had a cumulative effect and were being read by new readers as they engaged with Fitzgerald’s writing as high school and college students. As a result, sales of Fitzgerald’s novels and short story collections skyrocketed in the 1960s.
The reach of the revival can be seen in sales data obtained from Scribner’s by Elaine P. Maimon. The 1950s began with one volume of Fitzgerald’s work selling 866 copies, but ended with nine editions in print, selling in excess of 56,000 copies. Clearly the 1950s solidified Fitzgerald’s place in literary history. Ever since Fitzgerald died, a small but growing number of supporters, friends, critics, and scholars worked to keep the author’s legacy alive and thriving. Over the years, the renaissance took hold as the level of critical attention increased and then drove rather respectable sales. By the mid-1950s, one could be relatively certain that Fitzgerald’s place among American greats had been secured.
Andrew Turnbull played a significant role in Fitzgerald studies in the age of Camelot by writing a biography, Scott Fitzgerald (1962), that countered Mizener’s earlier work by focusing on the writer’s personality and adding information about his friendship with Fitzgerald as a young boy (the author rented a house on the Turnbull estate in Baltimore when Fitzgerald was thirty-six and Turnbull eleven). He also helped build the critical reputation by editing The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1963), which provided scholars with the primary source material to further explore the writer and his work.
What no one could have foreseen, however, is how central Gatsby would become in the 1960s, which cemented Fitzgerald as both a critical favorite and a sales force. Maimon’s statistics reveal that from the 56,000 figure at the end of the 1950s, sales more than tripled in 1960, reaching 177,849 copies. This tidal wave only grew, though, with 1968 sales hitting 448,420, the last year included in her study.[25] The overall increase from 866 copies in 1950 to almost half a million in 1968 is mind boggling and must be attributed to many influences, both on a personal level and as society and culture evolved.
Writer Richard Anderson explains that increased sales and readership resulted from “the combination of paperbound technology and the growth of school-age readers during the post–World War II baby boom [which] led Scribner’s to concentrate on reprints aimed at students.” The company published a reprint edition in 1957 that prompted additional versions. Three years later, Gatsby served as the first volume in the Scribner Library series, which the publisher aimed at the high school and college market. In 1961, another high school edition appeared, this time with reader’s guide materials focused on helping young people comprehend and assess the novel.[26] These efforts on the part of Scribner’s to get Gatsby into America’s classrooms played a critical role in getting the book into the literary canon. The millions of future teachers and college faculty reading the novel as students in the early 1960s virtually guaranteed that it would be a mainstay through the present day.
Another point that cannot be overlooked is that the Fitzgerald rebirth had significant
financial and reputational aspects as well. On one hand, once the revival took form,
the sales figures skyrocketed, which had real bottom-line consequences for Scribner’s
and other publishers who put out inexpensive paperback editions of Fitzgerald’s back
catalog. The other factor is that commentators, scholars, and critics had a stake
in the Fitz-
gerald rejuvenation taking hold. In many cases, careers were launched or solidified
on the basis of one’s writing and research about the author and his work.
For example, in early 1960, Scribner’s launched “The Scribner Library,” a collection of twenty-one “great modern works” that included Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. In the promotional copy that covered a page of the New York Times, the publisher claimed, “Unprecedented public demand has caused us to release this select list . . . in inexpensive paper-covered editions.” With a fancy logo and uniform spines, Scribner’s intended the collection to both sell books and serve as a kind of cultural indicator for those who wanted to demonstrate themselves as well read and trendy. One wonders how the publisher determined “unprecedented pubic demand,” and if that claim merely served as convenient marketing copy to sell the collection, priced at a little more than $30 in total, or about $230 in 2012 dollars.[27]
The twenty-one-book collection, then, targeted those middle-class homeowners with discretionary spending who were interested in cultural tastes and a certain degree of sophistication. Selling Gatsby for $1 to $1.50 a copy not only ensured that more people would buy the book, but tying the novel and other works to decorating one’s home meant sales would increase whether the buyer planned to crack the spine or not. Scribner’s also published several Fitzgerald collections in the early 1960s that expanded the amount of material by Fitzgerald in the marketplace, including Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories (1960) and The Pat Hobby Stories (1962).
For those scholars and commentators who were reading Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s wider catalog, the revival provided new ground to cover. Certainly, Mizener’s fame grew as interest in Fitzgerald germinated. In the mid-1960s and through the end of the decade, Mizener would be joined by a handful of others who had more or less staked out Fitzgerald as their primary research topic.
In 1961, New York Times columnist Lewis Nichols also sparked a bit of Fitzgerald mania by mentioning the existence of a Fitzgerald Newsletter. He received mountains of mail on the subject, so in a follow-up piece, he explained that the four-page quarterly was published by Matthew J. Bruccoli, then a young scholar at the University of Virginia. The story contradicts Bruccoli’s famous tale of hearing a short story performed on radio as a teen, rather pinning it to him seeing a film version of Gatsby, which then led to his interest. As a side note, for those who would come to know, appreciate, and be thankful for all Bruccoli would later do to promote Fitzgerald scholarship, Nichols notes that the young man “thinks that in its depth, his collection [of Fitzgerald material] may be the best in the world.”[28] Readers may be interested to know that Bruccoli did, in fact, continue to build the greatest private collection of Fitzgerald materials in the world, estimated to be worth millions of dollars. The Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald is housed at the University of South Carolina, where Bruccoli spent his later career.
As early as July 1963, commenting on this seeming army then following Fitzgerald,
critic Charles Poore explains, “A thousand and one criticasters are forever contemplating
the spectacle his life presents: they alternately wail over his wasted genius—and
proclaim its lasting excellences.” Much of the work, he concludes, “[An] inky comet’s
tail of commentary masking as biography and biography masking as commentary now follows
the Fitzgeraldian orbit. It, too, helps keep writers, critics, lecturers gainfully
employed.”[29] Furthermore, evidence of Fitz-
gerald’s place in academe is noted by his inclusion in American Literary Scholarship in 1963, an annual published review of the topic by the American Literature Section
of the Modern Language Association.[30]
***
Beginning almost immediately after his death in 1940, the Fitzgerald rebirth launched when his friends, supporters, and other commentators publicly reassessed his writing. The entire episode could not have gone better if Fitzgerald himself had orchestrated the event. One can only imagine how vindicated the author would have felt at finally seeing his work widely read and studied—not only his novels, which he loved, but also many of the short stories, even the ones he claimed were written for a fast dollar.
Soon, the confluence of critical praise and general interest in Fitz-
gerald’s writing led to innovative avenues—many linked to new technologies—for extending
the revival, from the 1949 film starring Hollywood icon Alan Ladd to the improvement
in mass-paperback quality, which gave countless readers the opportunity to purchase
the novels at affordable prices.
In addition, there were able managers at the lead of the Fitzgerald rejuvenation. These included executives at Scribner’s and Harold Ober’s literary agency, who quickly realized that the interest could be marketed until it became a kind of industry in and of itself. Countless people became cogs in the Fitzgerald machine, from scholars and professional literary critics to teachers and faculty members. The revitalization could not have taken hold the way it did if not for the way Gatsby served high school and college curricula. In addition, many careers were established and reputations solidified as Fitzgerald mania swept the 1960s as both academics and critics spent time and effort reassessing the writer and his work.
At the heart of the Fitzgerald revival stood the author’s brilliant writing, which any sustained interest in his work would demand. However, to experience the kind of rebirth that took place in the four decades since Gatsby’s publication and twenty-five years since Fitzgerald’s early death, the author and the novel needed help that in retrospect one wishes he had received while alive. Numerous individual and connected sociocultural influences merged and spread, many on the strength of the growing nation and its transformation economically and culturally. Taken together, these trends enabled Gatsby to pave its way into the national consciousness.
Charles Scribner III, “Publishing—Past Imperfect,” in The Professions of Authorship: Essays in Honor of Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed. Richard Layman and Joel Myerson, 68–77 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 72.
Morris Dickstein, ed., Critical Insights: The Great Gatsby (Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2010), 3.
Matthew Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr, eds., The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 216.
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2nd revised ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 484.
Jackson R. Bryer, “The Critical Reputation of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” in The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Ruth Prigozy, 209–34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 210.
Quoted in Bruccoli, Smith, and Kerr, Romantic Egoists, 240.
Leo Gurko and Miriam Gurko, “The Essence of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” College English 5, no. 7 (1944): 374.
Gurko and Gurko, “Essence of F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
Gurko and Gurko, “Essence of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” 375.
Alfred Kazin and Ted Solotaroff, Alfred Kazin’s America: Critical and Personal Writings (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 121.
Elaine P. Maimon, “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Book Sales: A Look at the Record,” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 5 (1973): 168–69.
Wheeler Winston Dixon, “The Three Film Versions of The Great Gatsby: A Vision Deferred,” Literature Film Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2003): 290.
Bosley Crowther, “The Great Gatsby (1949),” New York Times, July 14, 1949, http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9502E6DC123CE53
ABC4C52DFB1668382659EDE (accessed February 14, 2013).
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Arlyn Bruccoli, and Park Bucker, The Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald at the University of South Carolina: An Illustrated Catalogue (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 31.
Bruccoli, Bruccoli, and Bucker, Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 240.
William H. Young and Nancy K. Young, The 1950s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2004), 21.
Maimon, “Book Sales,” 169–70.
Maimon, “Book Sales,” 170.
Maimon, “Book Sales,” 173.
James L. W. West III, “Fitzgerald’s Posthumous Literary Career,” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 28 (1997): 98.
Bruce Bliven, “The Revolution of the Joneses,” New York Times, October 9, 1960, SM28.
Bliven, “Revolution of the Joneses,” SM120.
Arthur Mizener, “Gatsby, 35 Years Later,” New Yorker, April 24, 1960, http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/24/specials/fitzgerald-gatsby60.html (accessed December 19, 2012).
Mizener, “Gatsby, 35 Years Later.”
Maimon, “Book Sales,” 173.
Richard Anderson, “Gatsby’s Long Shadow: Influence and Endurance,” in New Essays on The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 25.
Scribner’s, Advertisement, New York Times, February 14, 1960, BR23.
Lewis Nichols, “In and Out of Books,” New York Times, January 8, 1961, BR8.
Charles Poore, “Two New Views of Fitzgerald and His Works,” New York Times, July 20, 1963, 17.
Bryer, “Critical Reputation,” 210.
Again the old ache of money. Again will you wire me, if you like it [short story, “Pat Hobby’s Christmas Wish”]. Again will you wire the money to my Maginot Line: The Bank of America, Culver City.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich, October 14, 1939
Some ironies are so devious that they are nearly impossible to contemplate. Fitzgerald’s life and afterlife seem filled with these incidents, like the revelation that the film rights to the 1974 movie version of The Great Gatsby sold for $350,000 or that the movie spurred book sales to about one million copies that year, up from about three hundred thousand in 1973.[1] Any one of these figures would have been incomprehensible to the author.
However, the saddest aspect of the Fitzgerald renaissance is how it contrasted with his life, which in his later years proved so much darker. He spent a great deal of time and energy begging friends and acquaintances for money, trying to cobble together funds to keep his extended family running. In the years after the commercial failures of both Gatsby and Tender, he often wrote and wired his agent, Harold Ober, and Scribner editor Max Perkins with urgent pleas for advances just to get by and pay his daily living expenses, just as he had when his fortunes were more promising and the glossy magazines frequently bought his short stories. The situation turned dire toward the end of Fitzgerald’s life when the big circulation market evaporated. Eventually, his persistent appeals damaged the relationship with Ober, though they kept an uneasy alliance until the end.
The level of groveling and pleading makes the sensitive reader more than a little uncomfortable when examining Fitzgerald’s collected letters. The documents reveal his complete disregard for either saving money or budgeting himself. The constant state of financial insecurity and mounting debt constantly weighed on the author’s mind, as well as the real-world consequences of facing eviction, having little money for food, or facing down the bill collectors and administrators looking for payment for Zelda’s care. To his credit, though his wife’s stays in top facilities taxed him to no end, Fitzgerald always took pains to ensure that she received the best treatment possible.
A professional writer, Fitzgerald could only attempt to write his way out of these troubles, which became increasingly more difficult as the years progressed. The tough economic days of the Great Depression were not kind to freelancers, which forced him to turn to low-paying gigs, like Arnold Gingrich’s Esquire. If it were not for Gingrich, Fitzgerald may have withered away in the late 1930s, particularly after the movie studios cut their losses and did not renew his contracts. Although the initial work paid handsomely, an enabled Fitzgerald could not stay in the game. Eventually, the studio managers got wind of his drinking or rumors of his binges. Coupled that with his basic inability to work in the studio system that by its very nature necessitated many hands working on scripts, not the lone auteur he fancied himself, and one realizes that the end of his work life was not satisfying. Maybe Sheilah Graham would have supported him, but without selling his work, he may have instead died of a broken spirit.
Imagine, then, that this broken-down, old-before-his-time author actually lived to 1974, the year the Robert Redford version of Gatsby came out, when he would have been seventy-eight years old. Fitzgerald would have been rich and perhaps as famous as his brightest heyday of the early 1920s. The burgeoning celebrity industry and mass communications system would have catapulted Fitzgerald to new heights. He could have afforded multiple financial managers to ensure that his money got socked away for potential darker days.
Imagine . . .
There would have been spiritual rejuvenation as well, because Fitz-
gerald would have seen his work earn the acclaim it deserved. In addition to selling
about five hundred thousand copies of all his books collectively each year, according
to New York Times reporter Richard Severo, Fitz-
gerald would have benefited from knowing that some 2,400 colleges in the United States
had his work as required reading, in addition to the eight to ten thousand high schools.
From the figures that Severo gathered, it is certainly clear that the revival of Fitzgerald
studies that took place and steadily gained momentum had worked. In the early 1970s,
Fitzgerald and Gatsby were firmly entrenched in American popular culture and in the K–16 education system.
As a result, Fitzgerald’s famous phrase about writing for the youth of one’s generation
and the schoolmasters ever after turned out to be prophetic. Within thirty years of
his death, a case could be made that Fitzgerald stood as one of America’s widest-read
authors, if not at the very top of the chart.[2]
The rationale for making the new film version of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, according to then president of Paramount, Frank Yablans, revolved around the connections between the 1970s and the 1920s. “We thought people were quite fatigued with the pressures of contemporary living,” he explained, “and that nostalgia was a safety value . . . the only way of getting perspective.”[3] Given the state of the contemporary world in the early 1970s, from the horrors of Vietnam to the national morale-destroying tales of Watergate, it is not difficult to understand the need to break from the stress and strain of everyday life. However, approaching Gatsby as a nostalgia piece is taking liberties with Fitzgerald’s vision.
Looking at other major motion pictures from the early 1970s, one sees a pattern of nostalgia-based films, though not all dealt with uplifting subjects or themes. In 1970, for example, Patton won the Academy Award, featuring George C. Scott as the all-American military hero General George S. Patton. Clearly, Patton served as a kind of boost for the country’s morale, given the hangover of the 1960s and the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. From a much different perspective, The Godfather (Academy Award 1972) and The Godfather, Part II (Academy Award 1974) operated in a nostalgic framework, though presenting a distorted version of the American Dream via the criminal underpinnings and brutality of the Mafia. Interestingly, famed film writer and director Francis Ford Coppola is connected to all three films mentioned above, as well as the Gatsby adaptation. He wrote the screenplays for Patton and Gatsby and wrote and directed the Godfather films. Not a bad few years for Coppola in terms of filmmaking history.
Scottie, Scott and Zelda’s daughter and caretaker of her father’s work, approved of the 1974 film and had glowing comments about its stars Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, particularly after visiting the set in Rhode Island. In a magazine article, she discussed the way the film represented the present day, saying:
There seemed to be a hint of violence in Coppola’s version, above and beyond the book. Gatsby is so subtle, and today everything is sex and violence. There is lots of implicit sex in the book, but I have an old-fashioned horror of what’s going on in movies today. And I surely didn’t want Gatsby turned into that sort of thing.[4]
Certainly, Scottie’s reaction could have just been a generational difference, but she had faith in director Jack Clayton to create a wonderful film. She lamented that films in the era were driven by violence, noting that her father would have been aghast at the content of another big movie of the time, The Exorcist.
***
This chapter explores a pivotal era in American history that spans from post-JFK to pre-Reagan. At the center of the time frame are both the Vietnam conflict and the battle for civil rights, but the era also includes the malaise of the 1970s and Watergate. Given the tumult of this period, one might imagine that the nation had little time or concern for a fifty-thousand-word novel published in 1925 by a long-dead author. Yet, amid the chaos and uproar, what the researcher discovers is that Gatsby solidified and broadened its place in the cultural milieu during this time.
The central question this chapter addresses is this: How did the Gatsby revival transform from a primarily academic event to a part of the broader culture that swept through the national psyche in the mid to late twentieth century? What we find, I contend, is that numerous threads must be explored to fully answer this query, some more evident than others, but all combining to fuel the novel’s magnitude. If there is a central facet from a thematic perspective, one could argue that Gatsby’s ambiguity is key, since this trait enables readers, teachers, instructors, and others to constantly reevaluate and reinterpret the novel, even though the country continues to change. One also cannot overlook the novel’s brevity, which makes it more palatable within K–16 curricula.
Together then, I believe, Gatsby is like a concentrated dose of history, literature, and culture wrapped in a tight little package that virtually explodes with meaning when unwrapped. As the initial readers and audiences grew to understand as they were exposed to the novel in the 1950s, many pertinent questions on the national consciousness could be addressed in Fitzgerald’s work. As these early groups became teachers, professors, and cultural influencers, they passed on this knowledge to the titanic generation following them. The cycle continued over the decades, punctuating Gatsby’s importance.
Although the most common popular culture representation of people in the 1960s probably centers on anti-Vietnam protesters and those battling for civil and equal rights, in reality many aspects of the decade seemed just like those that preceded it and would later follow. It is not as if the 1950s were as dull and devoid of controversy as some commentators and historians might have us believe, but many disparate strains of unease came together in the 1960s that taken in total fundamentally changed American society. When the 1950s gave way to the next decade, however, a handful of transformations could not be denied. These included the emergence of a more critical examination of society and the blossoming of the baby boomer generation that would soon enter college in great waves.
The critical and sales revival of Fitzgerald and his 1925 novel in the early and mid-1950s led to further interest in the book in the 1960s. Academics assigned Gatsby in college courses swelling with students from the combined tsunami of the post–World War II baby boom and those who hoped to stay in school to keep out of the Vietnam draft. As the opportunities for acquiring education expanded, particularly at the college level, more young people used their budding critical and contextual thinking skills to question American society, particularly the ethical consequences of being a global superpower and the nation’s place in Southeast Asia.
The sheer size of the population between fifteen and twenty-four years old in the 1960s had profound effects on just about every aspect of daily life. Some people found this growth terrifying and either urged or enacted official and unofficial rules for both institutions and parents to use to keep them under control. Others saw the enormous size as an opportunity and created new ways for consumer goods to be marketed and advertised to young people.
While this bulging demographic transformed mass culture with its size and purchasing power, it had a similar effect on higher education. The federal government, furthermore, acted as a catalyst in this regard, urging more young people to college as a means of combating the perceived lead by Soviet students in math and science. As a result, in the United States the number of young people in higher education degree programs more than doubled from about 3.5 million to almost 8 million by decade’s end.[5] The student growth caused increased demand for faculty and resources. Many of these changes were curriculum based, which necessitated that canonical texts like Gatsby, already widely available because of the improvements in paperback publishing technology, be purchased in even greater numbers.
Although one could argue about the quality of Fitzgerald studies in the 1960s versus the 1950s, there is little doubt that scholars in the latter decade used the era’s challenges to place Gatsby in a broader context. For example, writing about the novel in the late 1960s, scholar David F. Trask sees the failure of the American Dream as a battle between the nation’s agrarian past and urban future. He claims that the billboard Eckleburg with the haunting eyes represents “none other than a devitalized Thomas Jefferson, the pre-eminent purveyor of the agrarian myth.”[6] The valley of ashes, then, is the dream defiled and destroyed, burned out and blurred beyond all reality. “Fitzgerald,” Trask explains, “thus presents a remarkably evocative description of the corruption that had befallen Jefferson’s garden.”[7] Nick, who witnessed the carnage of World War I battlefields and returned restless, needed the pace of New York City, but in Gatsby and his dreams found a representation of all that he left behind in the Midwest.
This loss of innocence and its tie to the nostalgic past propelled some of the late 1960s’ most important popular culture works. Although it is difficult to prove a direct correlation between Gatsby and some of these creations (for instance, the hit film Planet of the Apes), the popularity of the novel and its broad readership did mean that such ideas were part of the mainstream. People were contemplating these issues in their entertainment and simultaneously addressing them in the broader experience of America’s intervention in Vietnam and Southeast Asia within the larger backdrop of the Cold War with Soviet Russia.
Given the domestic challenges of the 1960s, from violence and civil rights to inequality and radicalism, many people also began questioning how the nation should address these issues. Gatsby’s link to status, wealth, aristocracy, and the place of the American Dream in the contemporary world made it a worthy tool in examining how the country should proceed. Again, it is not as if commentators were announcing, “I just read The Great Gatsby and now I understand how to fix [insert social problem],” but the fact that the novel was read by hundreds of thousands of people as a part of high school and college courses meant that its themes and designs resided within their mental toolboxes as they searched for answers.
The revolution in college education played a critical role in how young people learned to question authority. The number of people studying grew beyond capacity, thus the search for texts that could be used to teach higher-order thinking skills would ease some of the burden for professors and instructors faced with enlarged classes bursting at the seams with students. In this respect, Gatsby served as a kind of literary protein bar—small and edible quickly, but carrying a great deal of nutrients to keep one’s mind racing. The movement toward standardization also played a role here. As standardized tests became more of the norm for high school students, a simultaneous effort had to be put forth for developing a curriculum that had similar aspects nationwide. Again, Gatsby fit here. Fitzgerald’s reputation and utility grew up alongside the standardized test industry and within the growing high school and college student populations.[8]
Writing in July 1967, Andrew Turnbull explains how Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe each experienced highs and lows in their lifetimes but established literary reputations within the handful of American greats.[9] Yet, though Hemingway and later William Faulkner were the ones anointed as artists through the late 1930s and 1940s, it is Fitzgerald after his death whose reputation and personal life mixed in a way that sparked interest in his work that his literary colleagues could not match. One could see that even in the 1960s, when Hemingway’s death was still fresh on the minds of the general public, he would never strike the same nerve as Fitzgerald, even as mythic and important as Hemingway’s legend eventually became. Hemingway’s writing style might be widely imitated, but few are referencing him or using his ideas in the classroom like they do with Fitzgerald and Gatsby. Both men sprouted veritable academic industries focused on every bit of minutiae that could be unturned and mountains of scholarly analysis and criticism, yet within the broader culture, Fitzgerald has bested his old friend and rival.
Although Hemingway and Wolfe both consistently outsold Fitzgerald by huge margins when they all lived, by the mid to late 1960s, Fitzgerald pulled ahead when one considered Gatsby’s sales over time. In 1966, for example, when Fitzgerald and Hemingway were published as slightly higher-priced paperbacks, Gatsby sold 300,000 copies. In contrast, The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway sold 220,000. One might also note that Hemingway had two other novels on the list: A Farewell to Arms (140,000 copies) and The Sun Also Rises (135,000 copies). Thus, while I contend that Gatsby had more effect on mass communications and greater sales as an individual title, Hemingway still bested him if total paperbacks sold are calculated.[10]
For comparison’s sake, that same year there were forty-three lower-priced paperbacks that sold more than five hundred thousand copies, ranging from the top-selling novel Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman (2.45 million copies) to the semifictional The Green Berets by Robin Moore (3.1 million copies). The book would later be turned into a movie starring Hollywood legend John Wayne and feature the No. 1 Billboard hit “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” which Moore cowrote with Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler, a medic wounded in Vietnam. Not only did the most popular titles dwarf Gatsby, but these top sales figures seem stunning, since they provide hard evidence regarding people’s reading habits during that era.[11]
The next year, Gatsby sales jumped to 350,000; however, The Old Man and the Sea also climbed to 275,000 copies. Even in the higher-priced paperback category, however, these masterpieces of American fiction could not compete with lesser works that caught the popular fancy. For example, My Secret Life by Anonymous sold 800,000 books, while Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz sold some 495,000. The former, a frank memoir and exploration of sex in the Victorian age (though probably fictionalized to some degree), appeared after being suppressed as obscene, published by the notorious Grove Press. More or less at the other end of the spectrum, Maltz’s book served as a form of self-help tome, stressing the importance of positive self-image and goal setting as a means to a better, healthier life.[12]
In 1968, Gatsby dropped to sales of 286,000, a sharp decline from the previous year. Conversely, each Hemingway title increased: A Farewell to Arms, 160,000; The Old Man and the Sea, 240,000; and The Sun Also Rises, 153,000. Despite the fall, Gatsby still placed second in its category, behind Albert Camus’ The Stranger (295,962 copies). Like 1966, the next report witnessed popular paperback titles trounce these numbers. For example, Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin, on the strength of its box office success, sold 4.2 million copies in 1968, while The Arrangement by Elia Kazan rang up 2.58 million. Again, although these figures are mind boggling, even they pale in comparison to the publishing juggernaut of Charles M. Schulz. The New York Times reported that four of his books published in 1968 had print sales of at least seven hundred thousand copies. However, when looking at all eighteen “Peanuts” books put out in the 1960s, the total sales reached thirty-six million.[13]
What these sales figures reveal is a fascinating portrait of the United States in the midst of all the global and domestic turmoil that plagued this era. For a literary text, Gatsby clearly sold well, but merely hit humble figures compared to the biggest of the best-sellers. Topical books, those tied to hit films, and the cartoon antics of Charlie Brown and Snoopy reached sales figures that are astounding, similar to the seemingly unprecedented numbers of current juggernauts, including the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling and the last several Dan Brown novels.
From my perspective, the most telling ideas to emerge from the sales information is
that American readers—much like they always have—turned to reading material that either
shielded them from the day’s socio-
economic or political chaos, or conversely, dug into books that provided deep detail
on these events. What I posit is that these two groups probably had very little overlap.
A self-categorization took place based on the types of books a person selected and
read.
Second, while many titles in both categories dwarfed Gatsby sales, Fitzgerald’s novel remained relevant and influential long past these work’s expiration dates. So, while for decades kids have had Peanuts sheets on their beds or watched Charlie Brown holiday television specials, no one is using the characters to establish their worldview or understand their cultural world. Again, we must point to Gatsby’s classroom usage, which elevates its status, more or less serving as a validation of its importance. The themes Fitzgerald addressed continued to be the ones that teachers and faculty members wanted to assess and evaluate; thus, the nifty little book provided a natural avenue for accomplishing this task.
In March 1974, a little more than three decades after Fitzgerald’s death and nearly fifty years since the publication of his masterpiece, a third film version of The Great Gatsby debuted. Unlike the earlier films, however, this installment burst onto the scene, demonstrating the vast changes in the entertainment industry since Fitzgerald’s death. In the early 1970s the growth of Hollywood and its reliance on national marketing campaigns meant that The Great Gatsby would have product tie-ins designed to play off the film’s hype and be a catalyst for launching waves of Gatsby-related merchandise.
A behind-the-scenes article in the debut issue of People magazine revealed that the Paramount picture served as the fulcrum for a broad campaign, which the studio felt it would deliver on, given that advanced bookings reached $19 million. According to the piece, “big-business marketers” also bet on the film’s success, putting $6 million into promotion of numerous products, including “a Gatsby-linked line of sportswear, whisky, beauty products and even cookware.”[14] The new adaptation, in the minds of marketing execs, had all the hooks necessary: major Hollywood stars, a universally known story with large themes, and a kind of glamour that both carried on and set new trends.
The film served as a star vehicle for Robert Redford, who played Gatsby, and who stood at the time as one of Hollywood’s top draws. His fame grew in the late 1960s, certainly after starring with Jane Fonda in Barefoot in the Park (1967) and pairing with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Redford’s star rose even higher with Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and teaming with Newman again in the 1930s caper picture The Sting (1973), then one of the highest-grossing films of all time.
Fitzgerald himself may have found the $6.5 million budget for the production ludicrous, if he could have even fathomed such an outlandish figure in his own day. However, he may have found a home away from home among the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, where production began in early June 1973.[15] Producers combed the surrounding area for people who owned antique automobiles and lined up a brilliant mansion to serve as stand-ins for Gatsby’s West Egg enclave.
What Fitzgerald might have found most humorous focused on the extras casting call that took place early in production. Director Jack Clayton and his assistants picked out potential extras; each paid the whopping sum of $1.65 an hour for a guaranteed twelve hours minimum daily. According to Bruce Bahrenburg, the author of an insider’s account of the film’s creation, the wealthy sophisticates of Rhode Island clamored to attain these positions: “It has become a matter of social prestige to get into the film, especially among the summer colony in Newport, and those rejected look as if they had been handed their walking papers from the Newport Country Club.”[16]
The important role of turning the novel into a screenplay initially fell to Truman Capote, but Paramount executives found the writer’s work too scattered to be used. In response, Robert Evans, the company’s production boss, asked Coppola to write a screenplay, particularly since he experienced such great success with The Godfather in 1972. Evans tasked Coppola to write a more faithful screenplay, which he turned out in about five weeks. Clayton then used Coppola’s work with little modification, except to add additional scenes from the novel.
In Coppola’s view, the additions hurt the film at the box office, making it seem “interminable.”[17] According to scholar Gene D. Phillips, the changes Clayton made “eventually resulted in a motion picture that in the last analysis seems at times slow-paced and overlong.”[18] Ironically, though, the film was deemed a commercial success based on Redford’s star appeal.
There is no doubt that the allure of the Redford-driven film sparked new interest in Fitzgerald and the novel. In an early 1974 essay for the Saturday Evening Post prior to the movie’s release, journalist George Frazier wrote a glowing assessment of the author and the book’s important place in American history. He examines the dichotomy between Fitzgerald as writer and celebrity, explaining, “A perfect sentence would go unnoticed by all except admirers of his prose, while the whole of sophisticated New York would be titillated by his and Zelda’s midnight dips in the pool in front of the Plaza.” No other literary celebrity ever had the charisma and public’s eye quite the way Fitzgerald captured it, or as Frazier says, “Fitzgerald was sui generis, which is to say that, for all the wallowing in the gutter, there was a certain fashionable playboyishness to his drunken disorderliness.”[19]
Accompanying the article (representative of the Gatsby craze the movie stirred up) were large, full-page, color photographs taken of a Nashville, Tennessee, couple dressed in the clothes from a themed Swan Ball held in a 1920s mansion, later donated to the community to house the Tennessee Botanical Gardens and Fine Arts Center. In one photo, the couple looks confidently at the camera, the wife sitting in a 1920s convertible, while her husband holds the door open, white summer pants and white patent leather shoes showing his Jazz Age style. In the other, she sits atop a grand piano, adorned in a feathery white shawl and clutching a cigarette in a long holder. Perhaps attempting to emulate Zelda, she looks off into the distance, disinterested in the man. He, however, gazes up at her lovingly, decked out in a tuxedo and with a dainty pinkie ring on his hand.
The cultural symbols at work in the Saturday Evening Post article (once Fitzgerald’s highest-paying short story market) portray the common idea of how the wealthy lived in the Roaring Twenties. Whether they understood what they conveyed in the photos, the couple (listed as Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Darling Pickslay Cheek Jr.) definitely seems more like Tom and Daisy than Gatsby. There is a smugness about them, as if they are wealthy and thus can make the effort to dress up for a charity ball. An editorial note at the beginning of the article notes that the mansion is the former home of the couple’s family, dubbed “Cheekwood.”[20]
Frazier acknowledges the impact of the movie and renewed interest in the author and era, saying that it stands “more than a mere novel . . . almost fifty years after its publication, a way of life among the young.” He notes that “elegance” is becoming fashionable based on the excitement surrounding the film, ranging from Gatsby-style haircuts to “the soft Southern Belle type.”[21]
Notwithstanding the great care that Clayton and his team took in creating the film,
The Great Gatsby stirred up quite a bit of interest in Fitz-
gerald and his era but did not meet the level to be considered a great film. Roger
Ebert, one of the nation’s major film critics, called it “a superficially beautiful
hunk of a movie with nothing much in common with the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
novel.” From his perspective, the film version got the look right but failed in “penetrating
to the souls of the characters.”[22]
Ebert, perhaps speaking to the cultural tone of the early 1970s, criticizes Clayton for not getting top performances from his stars. The critic views Redford as too stilted and formal, rarely connecting with the audience or the novel’s emotional core. Even worse, Farrow plays Daisy as “all squeaks and narcissism and empty sophistication,” according to Ebert. The performance diminishes the audience’s comprehension of why Gatsby would risk so much for her.[23]
Reducing the 2013 and 1974 film versions of The Great Gatsby to one word each would result in “action” and “romance,” respectively. With Leonardo DiCaprio as star, the film is exploding fireworks, violence, and intensity, all operating under a pulsing, beat-driven twenty-first-century sound track. On the other hand, the earlier version centered on scenery and authenticity. In this instance, the relationship with Daisy is at the fore. Plot took a secondary place behind the chemistry between Redford and costar Farrow. In both cases, however, a reader who has enjoyed the novel is left with a sense of longing or wanting more due to the change in emphasis from page to moving picture. Either film would be more enjoyable if one had never actually read the book, which is a common refrain among readers, but particularly apt in the case of Fitzgerald’s novel.
The great film critic Vincent Canby cut to the heart of the problem with the 1974 screen version of Gatsby, explaining that by filling the holes in the plot with sentimentality, the filmmakers failed to address the novel’s intensity and why the young man would so obsessively pine for Daisy for all those years. Instead, Canby says, “The movie . . . treats us to shots of Gatsby and Daisy picnicking, holding hands, behaving like models in a soft-focus hair dye commercial.”[24] In its attempts at authenticity, the film emerges as overly sentimental, without the heft at the core of Fitzgerald’s work.
As a result, the film looks beautiful and is shot brilliantly, yet still collapses in on itself as the depiction of romance takes precedent over the idea of romance. The former is what filmmakers create in an assessment of what filmgoers want to see, but the latter is what Fitzgerald actually produced and has kept readers returning to the novel. Certainly the Hollywood star system has an impact here. Movie producers cannot hire actors like Robert Redford and Leonardo DiCaprio for millions or tens of millions of dollars to play iconic roles and then keep them offscreen for two-thirds of the film, as Fitzgerald does in the novel. Thus, adapting the book to film necessitates that Gatsby become the central figure in the story, much more concrete and “real” than the author ever intended.
The distance between a novel of ideas and a novel of action is what makes Fitzgerald’s
masterpiece so elusive and difficult to film. Gatsby’s place in the action is at the
core here. Fitzgerald keeps the titular character submerged, while Hollywood requires
that his story be central. For some readers, too, this dichotomy either results in
one loving or hating the book. People simply do not realize that Gatsby is a novel of ideas masked within a novel of action. The cloaking that occurs is
the result of Fitz-
gerald’s ability in managing the intricacies and his beautiful writing style. Using
Nick as a narrator enables Fitzgerald to emphasize the storytelling aspects, while
concurrently casting the unreliability in that recounting. Because Nick is all over
the place in retelling the story and weaving it with his own judgments of the action,
the reader finds room for interpretation that other novels try to force. Thus, Gatsby lives on into the twenty-first century in a way that other books of that era have
not.
***
The launch of a Fitzgerald revival shortly after his death gradually gained steam, keeping him in the public eye through the first wave of biographical work published in the early 1950s. After that, Fitzgerald studies took on a life of its own as more readers and more academic studies combined to transform the author and his work into something larger and more significant than 99.9 percent of the writers and books ever published. As a matter of fact, one reviewer claimed in 1965, “The general interest in the person of Fitzgerald has persisted to such a degree that it can be said today that he is the most intimately known of American writers.”[25] The key phrase here is “intimately known.”
Many writers are brand names in a nation that commoditizes knowledge, yet few people
could provide a brief sketch of a writer’s life and era. While many authors have had
exciting or interesting lives throughout literary history, Fitzgerald came to represent
an era and idea that people could employ to make sense of their own time. No other
writer could mirror this synergy, not even greats who became public or popular culture
figures as well as authors, such as Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, or Ernest Hemingway.
The latter, as accomplished and prolific in output and sales as he was, could not
stake out a place in people’s hearts like Fitz-
gerald did.
Even writers and books that had more policy implications, such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, could not sustain their influence like Gatsby. Since Theodore Roosevelt and other politicians used Sinclair’s work to reform the meatpacking industry and transform the way people ate after 1906, one could argue for The Jungle’s importance over Gatsby. Yet, despite the sensationalism of the former and its use in creating policy, Fitzgerald’s book seeped deeper into mass culture.
As this intimacy with Fitzgerald and Gatsby persisted, the images and ideas represented by the writer and his novel spread across popular culture. As a result, both were used to symbolize a variety of positions, mind-sets, and concepts, whether contextually in a newspaper or magazine article or on television as a story arc. Therefore, one is not surprised (necessarily) to find that Nick Carraway is used as a lead in a 1966 financial story about surging bond interest rates in the New York Times or that novelist C. D. B. Bryan satirizes Gatsby in his 1970 novel The Great Dethriffe, a kind of 1960s version of Gatsby that constantly references the novelist and work as a way of paying homage. Bryan’s version of Nick, a successful writer named Alfred Moulton, explains the premise at the beginning of the story, saying, “What was important to me about Fitzgerald was the myth. And when one was used to dealing with myths, one seldom let truth stand in the way.”[26] For Moulton, Fitzgerald and Gatsby dictate the way life should be lived in the 1960s. Fitzgerald’s 1920s is his past and his family’s past, which he reveres and respects.
If sales figures alone do not convince the reader that Fitzgerald mania had hit the nation by the 1960s, then the release of the 1974 film starring Redford and Farrow certainly adds credence to that declaration. As a result of all these individual threads weaving in and out, Gatsby grew in significance as the novel and its author also zigzagged through people’s lives. Exposure to the novel might come in the form of it being forced on a person within a high school or college curriculum, which could also include using any number of scholarly studies to decipher the text and its symbols. Yet this did not end the interaction, which might also include reading about or seeing the film and purchasing products that resulted from its popularity and role in making the Jazz Age fashionable again.
Through the chaos of the 1960s and the anxiety of the 1970s, Gatsby prospered, even though the heady days of the Roaring Twenties had slipped into the distant past. As the generations of students who studied the novel in the 1950s and early 1960s moved on to family lives and careers, they may not have been focusing on the novel directly, but its meanings were part of their intellectual platform. Furthermore, as lesson plans were built and college syllabi created with Gatsby as a learning tool, K–16 students found themselves indoctrinated with the novel’s ideas, themes, and images. All these cycles continue churning, thus creating a work that transcends its status and becomes a channel for multilayered thinking.
Americans have always been notorious for self-analyzing and exploring the inimitability of the nation. As such, scholar Robert Gorham Davis writing in 1969 reasons:
Our public credos are not false or irrelevant. Insofar as they are in contradiction to reality they maintain a constant energy-creating tension that has been socially productive . . . between seaboard and frontier, paleface and redskin, European past and American future. . . . Somehow Americans nearly from the beginning have been able from this strange composite to achieve an underlying consensus that is more than verbal, that gives us our national character and makes us immediately recognizable despite the diversity of our backgrounds, almost anywhere that we go in the world.[27]
Davis identifies a key to Gatsby’s success in this regard—its tensions mirror those that individuals and organizations faced in this period stretching from Kennedy’s assassination through the dawn of the Reagan era. We repeatedly come back to the ideas Fitzgerald presented: the dichotomy between the rich and everyone else, living an ethical life, the evolution of American Dream, and navigating personal experiences and relationships in the modern world. In essence, these topics are eternal. Fitzgerald presented them in such a moving portrait of his age that the beauty of the written language and the heady content merged to create a timeless work of art.
Richard Severo, “For Fitzgerald’s Works, It’s Roaring 70’s,” New York Times, March 3, 1974, http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/24/specials/fitzgerald-roaring.html (accessed December 20, 2012).
Severo, “It’s Roaring 70’s.”
Quoted in Severo, “It’s Roaring 70’s.”
“Mia’s Back And Gatsby’s Got Her,” People, March 4, 1974, http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20197613,00.html (accessed January 2, 2013).
Edward J. Rielly, The 1960s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2003), 24.
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.
Trask, “Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.”
Joshua B. Freeman, American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945–2000 (New York: Viking, 2012), 188–90.
Andrew Turnbull, “Speaking of Books: Perkins’s Three Generals,” New York Times, July 16, 1967, 2.
“The People’s Choice,” New York Times, February 26, 1967, BRP18.
“The People’s Choice,” New York Times, February 26, 1967, BRP18.
“The People’s Choice,” New York Times, February 25, 1968, BRA26.
“The People’s Choice,” New York Times, February 16, 1969, BRA28.
“Mia’s Back.”
Bruce Bahrenburg, Filming The Great Gatsby (New York: Berkley, 1974), 8.
Bahrenburg, Filming The Great Gatsby, 21.
Quoted in Gene D. Phillips, “The Great Gatsby (1974),” in The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclopedia, by James M. Welsh, Gene D. Phillips, and Rodney F. Hill (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 121.
Phillips, “The Great Gatsby (1974),” 121.
George Frazier, “Scott Fitzgerald: The Gatsby Legend,” Saturday Evening Post, May 1974, 60.
Frazier, “Scott Fitzgerald.”
Frazier, “Scott Fitzgerald,” 62.
Roger Ebert, “The Great Gatsby,” Chicago Sun-Times, January 1, 1974, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19740101/REVIEWS/401010315 (accessed January 31, 2013).
Ebert, “The Great Gatsby.”
Vincent Canby, “They’ve Turned Gatsby to Goo,” New York Times, March 31, 1974, http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/24/specials/fitzgerald-gatsby74.html (accessed December 19, 2012).
Donald A. Yates, “The Tragic Experience,” review of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait, by Henry Dan Piper, New York Times, November 21, 1965, BR14.
John H. Allan, “Interest Rates Surge for Bonds,” New York Times, August 7, 1966, 1; C. D. B. Bryan, The Great Dethriffe (New York: Dutton, 1970), 30.
Robert Gorham Davis, “Is Our Past Becoming Irrelevant?” review of The Urgent West: The American Dream and Modern Man, by Walter Allen, New York Times, March 16, 1969, BR4.
Nowadays when almost everyone is a genius, at least for awhile, the temptation for the bogus to profit is no greater than the temptation for the good man to relax . . . not realizing the transitory quality of his glory because he forgets that it rests on the frail shoulders of professional enthusiasts.— F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to Ernest Hemingway, June 1926
“Greed is good.”
The immortal phrase ushered from the lips of the fictional tycoon Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s masterpiece Wall Street (1987) drips with symbolic meaning for a nation in the throes of a capitalist orgy. But it is more than just the words themselves that sustained power. The image of Gekko as portrayed by Hollywood star Michael Douglas—impeccable suit, slicked-back hair, evil smirk—came to represent the economic offenses of both the 1980s “me” decade and the dot-com bubble that swelled and then burst in the mid-1990s through the early years of the next century.
The confidence and exuberance of these times, as a matter of fact, seemed to be an intricate replay of Fitzgerald’s Roaring Twenties. Like the 1920s, mass media and popular culture encouraged the money mania, but whereas Gekko seemed to get his in the end, representative television shows like Dynasty and Dallas depicted worlds in which the rich routinely got richer on the backs of everyday, “good” people.
As is usually the case, the media and culture industries fostered a change in attitude. Soon, the general populace got caught up in the mania, which expanded geometrically when what had been dubbed the “Reagan Recession” of the early 1980s swung around to the “Reagan Recovery” later in the decade. Between 1982 and 1987, for example, some $20 trillion in new wealth flowed into the nation’s pocketbooks.[1]
Reagan himself sounded a bit Gekko-ish a year before the film’s release, asking in the 1986 State of the Union address: “The magic of opportunity—unreserved, unfailing, unrestrained—isn’t this the calling that unites us?”[2] Ironically, the American Dream or some other blind allegiance to success must have been at work during this era. Despite cheerleading for Reagan and Gekko, the vast majority of the nation’s workforce suffered through losses in real wages in the 1980s. Simultaneously, the wealthiest 20 percent of the population saw its income increase by 33 percent under Reagan’s economic policies.
The president’s “calling,” however, soon transformed into the disaster of the Black Monday Wall Street market crash on October 19, 1987, when total stock value plummeted $500 billion in one fell swoop. Although the crash did not cause a global depression, as many commentators feared (and would have put the final exclamation point on the comparison between the 1920s and the 1980s), the tottering economy doomed the presidency of Reagan’s successor, former vice president George H. W. Bush. Not until the good times heyday of President Bill Clinton would the economic gold rush again take hold, this time in the form of the Internet and other innovative technologies that sparked the “information age.”
Returning to Gekko as a symbol of these economic upheavals and the potential consequences, however, it is not surprising that people found points of comparison between Stone’s fictional mogul and Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby. Film historian Jack Boozer sees Gekko as a “new version of the American dream.” The character has similarities to Gatsby but has been remolded for the 1980s. Boozer explains: “The impossible romantic longing of a Great Gatsby . . . has become Gordon Gekko’s tyrannical lust for financial adventurism and power in the era of Reagan-Bush.” The move from idealism in the novel becomes the film character’s “worship of the almighty dollar for its own sake. Idealism has been reduced to the raw omnivore of monetary power.”[3]
With Wall Street shenanigans and economic power and intrigue as cultural backdrops in the 1980s and 1990s, the ostensibly all-purpose use of The Great Gatsby and its titular character also shifted. The use of the term “Gatsby” fluctuated across a number of themes, usually as a synonym for any wealthy person that rose from humble beginnings or perceived unassuming origins to economic or political power, extravagance, or over-the-top behavior that might better be laid at Fitzgerald’s feet.
Gekko, in particular, served as a kind of contemporary Gatsby—what might have become of the character if he rose to power some fifty years later. For Gekko, the pursuit of wealth held no sacred mystery. Instead, one simply fulfilled the destiny of a corporate raider by using any means necessary to achieve fantastic wealth regardless of legalities that would stop a less-driven man. Although Fitzgerald kept the lengths of Gatsby’s own underhanded dealings a mystery, there are many examples of a Gekko-like drive, from his connection to the Mafioso Meyer Wolfsheim (“He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919”) to hanging Tom Buchanan’s friend Walter Chase out to dry on a bootlegging charge.[4] Gatsby and Gekko have different ends, but they willingly operate outside the law in hopes of getting what they want.
In the next decade, when the stock market seemed merely a conduit for wealth driven by the aggressive speculation around Internet startups and technology, Gatsby continued to be misinterpreted, mangled, and turned generic, as media types and others used the novel and its characters in an attempt to explain vicious, no-holds-barred capitalism in simple terms.
As early as November 1990, a New York Times reporter conflated “Gatsby” with top executives in investment banking who faced declining salaries and potential downsizing based on the aftershocks of the Black Monday crash and withering economy. The mergers and acquisitions firms, which the writer claims “create[d] a legion of modern-day Gatsby’s,” essentially collapsed. Even a casual reader can see that this usage devalues the novel. Though some M&A executives got rich based on illicit junk-bond trading, the shorthand for opulent living and riches is far removed from what Fitzgerald wrote.[5]
***
The ideas contained in Gatsby remained important in the 1980s and 1990s, but the use of the terms around it were watered down to fit the sound-bite celebrity culture. For instance, why establish that Fitzgerald actually meant to chastise the rich for their self-centered behavior and willingness to smash up and destroy lives around them on a whim, when one could simply look on Microsoft founder Bill Gates’s $100 million high-tech mansion and label its owner and the house itself “Gatsby-esque”? Based on one’s perception, the manner in which people held Gatsby up as a cultural barometer in the 1980s and 1990s is either incredibly significant or a basic diminishing of the collective intelligence, which this chapter examines in greater detail.
This chapter examines a tumultuous era in American history that encompasses the era of the Reagan administration and ends with the nation in frenzy over the dot-com boom. Arguably, for the first time since the publication of Gatsby in 1925, the nation lived through boom times that resembled the 1920s, first in the “me” decade of the mid-1980s and later in the heady days of the Internet bubble in the late 1990s.
In response, reporters, commentators, and other media types needed terms to contextualize what the nation experienced, which had many of them leafing through or rereading Fitzgerald’s novel, which so eloquently described the bacchanalia they witnessed and reported. And, since most people read Gatsby at some point in their high school or college years, the examples were convenient, since the lexicon around meta-Gatsby stood firmly among our most-used cultural references and symbols.
Sometimes historical periods get named after an individual because that person symbolizes or dominates a given age. At other junctures, it is a cultural or socioeconomic matter that defines an era. Sometimes, people are merely searching for a way to make meaning via a universally understood or convenient sign system. Various contenders spring to mind when examining the two-decade run from 1981 to 2001. These include the obvious political leaders, such as Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, to more sublime signals, like our burgeoning interconnectedness based on computer technology or the roller-coaster economic fluctuations that turned average people into stock market junkies and led to fortunes won and lost in what seemed like a blink of the eye.
As far as we know, Fitzgerald did not possess a crystal ball or clairvoyant abilities that enabled him to see into the future. Whether one believes he signed some kind of Faustian bargain exists only in the outer reaches of that person’s mind. Yet, when reading The Great Gatsby in light of the twenty-year period from 1981 to 2001, it seems as if the author had his sights set on the era when writing the novel. Many of the narrative and thematic arcs of the book line up pretty well with the fluctuations in American history during the 1980s and 1990s. Over and over again, commentators, journalists, and others would invoke Gatsby in attempting to define the leaders and cultural themes that ran through these tumultuous years.
Looking back with history’s twenty-twenty gaze, it seems clear that the ideas central to understanding the period mirrored the novel. Repeatedly, commentators and others attempted to use Gatsby and its topics to provide context for the chaos and uncertainty surrounding this period. Gatsby’s utility as a way of explaining the issues at the head of society’s churn is commensurate with scholar Arnold Weinstein’s thinking when he explains, “A living work of art actually possesses a bare-bones practicality, indeed a utility, that we need to recover: it helps us toward a richer grasp of our own estate.”[6]
Fitzgerald’s novel is an interesting case study in proving Weinstein’s point of “a living work of art.” By the late years of the twentieth century, Gatsby surely had a strong foothold on the nation’s imagination. On one hand, the novel had national distribution based on decades of high school teachers and college faculty forcing it on students, who themselves had been forced to read the novel while students in the 1960s. Whether these readers found that experience an irritation or pleasurable adventure, anyone paying attention could at least outline the novel’s main concerns, more or less reinforcing its potential efficacy. As readership grew with the novel’s centrality within the literary canon, its usefulness as a tool for understanding one’s life and society broadened, too.
Simultaneously, social structures changed in the 1980s that enabled Gatsby to play an interesting role as a tool for interpretation. In that decade, the corporate structure took on a more central position as those working within and for large organizations found themselves in rigid hierarchies. The merger of corporate life with the wider culture had been taking place for as long as large business enterprises existed, but solidified and expanded during this era. Scholar Simon J. Bronner explains the melding of these two realities, saying, “The public has become more accustomed to hearing about the worlds of power, organized worlds that were creating cultures of their own. . . . The organizational model of business seemed more prevalent in society.”[7] With the rise of corporate culture and its increasingly central position, more traditional aspects of organizing one’s life, such as community, family, and region, took a backseat.
Perhaps this is why Reagan could gain broad support for “family values” while at the same time, the corporation gained power across society and in people’s lives. This disparity between propaganda and reality enabled politicians to use culture as a touchstone. In these times, when truth seems elusive or murky, there is solace in knowing that texts exist that might help one establish insight, particularly when the national conversation is built around persuasion, rather than the search for veracity.
Weinstein’s vision of literature’s broader service to society played out in mid-1987, for example, when Reagan’s top speechwriter Anthony R. Dolan penned a highly controversial and widely publicized op-ed for the New York Times in support of his boss. Although not altogether common in the Times because it was clearly such a proadministration puff piece, the article—written in an era when newspapers mattered deeply in establishing the nation’s mood—touched off a national reaction. At the end of the essay, after Dolan spent considerable time explaining why Reagan would rebound (and arguably had already rebounded) from the controversy regarding the Iran-Contra hearings then taking place, he finished by comparing the president to Jay Gatsby.
Dolan singled out Reagan’s “steady self-assurance” in making the point that the president shared this trait with the fictional character, who he deemed “inescapable” and a “symbol of American optimism.” Another Reagan turnaround in fortune, despite appearing beaten down by the anxiety and bad press of his late second term, Dolan reported, “reminded [us] once again that we have always been Nick Carraways to his Gatsby.”[8] In making the comparison, Dolan heightened the aspects surrounding optimism and used the literary reference to make Reagan seem more heroic.
Who, Dolan implied, could doubt a figure that held such optimism, particularly when it translated into policy? He cited several of Reagan’s “historic moves” as examples, such as the Strategic Defense Initiative (the then-new formal name for the “Star Wars” missile defense system), the Grenada invasion, and the Republican view on taxes. In Dolan’s mind, Reagan’s ability to bounce back demonstrated “a President who sticks to his issues, keeps smiling, refuses to fade—the political matinee idol of the 80’s not fussing about his disappearing fans but getting laughs; the President whose Teflon didn’t crack.”[9]
Columnist Anthony Lewis answered Dolan’s essay with a scathing indictment of his use of The Great Gatsby to pump up Reagan’s popularity. In countering Dolan (and in effect Reagan, too), Lewis pointed to the darker side of the Fitzgerald character, his ties to organized crime and desire to make money by any means necessary as a way to fulfill his dreams. Invoking famed social critic H. L. Mencken, Lewis highlighted the vacuity of Gatsby and the corruption of America in the 1920s.
From this vantage point, Lewis saw a very different set of Gatsby-like traits, explaining, “Of course Ronald Reagan is not Jay Gatsby. The comparisons are not to be forced. But there are themes—values—that echo.” Among these, the columnist pointed to the president’s willingness to fixate on an end, regardless of the means in attaining that goal. “Like Gatsby, too, Mr. Reagan has created his own world,” Lewis says. “In it facts yield to fantasy and obsession. . . . Someone else will have to clear away the wreckage.” The president also shared with the fictional character a falsity that privileged charm and “a marvelously winning personality” over substance.[10]
Splashed in newspapers all over the country, the feud between Dolan and Lewis continued when the former answered Lewis’s rebuttal with a letter to the editor in the Times. While lambasting Lewis for his “hard-edged liberalism,” Dolan also cautioned the writer to enjoy “the great sweep and excitement of modern conservatism” along with the “greatness of Jay Gatsby and Ronald Reagan.”[11]
Clearly, the use of Fitzgerald’s central character as a political football at the tail end of the Reagan administration speaks to the way literature and literary figures can be used to establish context in debates that seem far removed from the era in which the work appeared. Not only did Dolan and Lewis engage in a high-profile battle, they also demonstrated the ways Gatsby remained open to conflicting interpretations. Their spat revealed that the novel continued to move the nation’s collective intellectual compass. The fight also showed, as Weinstein relates, “Great art lives in a way that transcends its moment, reaching something more universal, gesturing toward life experiences that are at once time-bound and timeless.”[12] As a result, Jay Gatsby could inhabit a number of guises in the late 1980s—from optimistic rogue to inauthentic gangster—and each side invoking the character could provide quotes, bullet points, and other information to back their thinking.
There seemed to be a basic disconnect in the 1980s in the way people blurred the lines between illusion and reality. For example, large segments of the population simultaneously believed in the real-life Reagan (the former actor turned politician who spent a lifetime reciting other people’s words) and the movie character Gekko (the evil antihero who business school students worshipped). This continual mixture between reality and illusion—mixed with widespread celebrity and fame obsession—resulted in the public developing conflicted ideas about trust, morality, and authenticity.
While one could argue that this divide always existed, I contend that the increase in mass media channels in the 1980s spawned by the rapid expansion of cable television and the growing film industry increasingly influenced and essentially transformed the way people behaved and made decisions about the world around them. As technology pushed into new areas in the 1990s, the resulting boom in communications not only expanded the potential interactions between people and institutions but also revolutionized the way people think. Discussing Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, “The medium is the message,” writer Nicholas Carr expands the idea, explaining:
What both enthusiast and skeptic miss is what McLuhan saw: that in the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act . . . a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it—and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society.[13]
For Carr and many other thinkers, the Internet as it has developed since the mid-1990s has fundamentally altered the way people (an “engrossed and compliant audience”) approach the world. The screen has won, according to Carr, and while his statement takes us slightly beyond the chronology of this chapter, such ideas were birthed on the technology and tabloid culture that developed in the 1980s and early 1990s. He concludes: “The computer screen bulldozes our doubts with its bounties and conveniences. It is so much our servant that it would seem churlish to notice that it is also our master.”[14] The Internet, then, from my perspective, is the latest tool in the merger of technology and communications. With cell phones, tablets, and other handheld devices, its ubiquity is established.
Looking back on the origins of the merger of reality and illusion, one sees examples in the political world, which has a long history of its denizens making rash, insensitive, or ignorant comments. The 1980s certainly seemed rife with obtuse statements by politicos who seemed utterly clueless to the realities people faced in the broader society. During the Christmas holiday season in 1983, for example, Reagan administration counselor Edwin Meese III, the future attorney general, raised the nation’s ire when he told reporters that there are no hungry children in America. When pressed on the issue, Meese responded that some anecdotal evidence existed, but “I haven’t heard any authoritative figures . . . we’ve had considerable information that people go to soup kitchens because the food is free and . . . that’s easier than paying for it.”[15] A photograph in this writer’s possession taken within days of Meese’s comment shows a homeless man sleeping at the White House front gate. Furthermore, several blocks away, a soup kitchen served the poor in the nation’s capital, including entire families who had been swept under the rug in Reagan’s trickle-down economy.
Writing in 1983 about the neoconservative rise in politics embodied by the corporatist Reagan administration, literary critic Alfred Kazin wrote about a conservative conference held at Fitzgerald’s favorite New York City haunt, the Plaza Hotel, which has a prominent role in Gatsby. One session Kazin attended, titled “Politics and the Arts,” featured several thinkers who criticized the contemporary literature of the decade for its anti-American attitudes. Since this panel served as a snapshot of conservative literary criticism, Kazin lamented the decline of satire, which the group (Kazin calls them “Plaza patriots,” which foreshadows the Tea Party rise some three decades later) equated with anti-American views. Sitting in Fitzgerald’s old stomping ground, Kazin recalls talking with one panelist about the Plaza scene in Gatsby. To his surprise, the person responded, “What’s a Gatsby?”[16] The irony is staggering, but that more or less encompasses the 1980s.
The long history covering the era spanning the 1980s through the 2010s taken as a whole demonstrates the ubiquity and growing importance of popular culture and mass communication vehicles on the way people create their individual worldviews and engage in their cultures. If one then accepts the notion that Gatsby is a mainstay in mass culture, not only as a novel, but also as a referent for multiple ideas encased in that wider socioeconomic system, then the blurry line between reality and pseudoreality has significance on the way the book is understood and applied. Nowhere is this intersection of Gatsby as an idea and a tool more vivid than in Fitzgerald’s construction and portrayal of the wily, erratic, and deceptive narrator, Nick Carraway. His trickster persona, enveloped in a cloak of self-delusion and self-righteousness, seems perfectly suited for contemporary America as it unfolded in the late twentieth century.
Writing in 1984 about Nick’s unreliability as a narrator, scholar Kent Cartwright distinguishes between an earlier group of critics who assumed that Nick merely served as Fitzgerald’s fictional surrogate, a kind of stand-in that enabled the author to harshly criticize the flagging American Dream. This initial set came under fire as later literary critics and commentators took Nick to task for any number of character faults, from being a hypocrite to a sycophant.
Instead, Cartwright finds Nick not a double for Fitzgerald, but a character with multiple flaws that make his telling of the story unique. “Such a view of Nick’s weaknesses,” Cartwright explains, “must challenge the traditional assumption that Nick generally doubles for Fitzgerald.” He continues, “It might, indeed, reveal that Nick’s closing asceticism is more a preference than an imperative, that his assessment of the dream is not conclusive, and that the novel is far more open-ended than some critics have suggested.”[17] Nick’s confusion, in a sense, mirrors the bewilderment of his own age, as well as the later twentieth century.
The narrator’s ideas about the distinction between the old America and the new, as personified by New York City, continued to demarcate the intellectual and spiritual lines running through the nation. One could witness this disparity most clearly in the way presidential elections unfolded. When Democrats won, for instance, their victories were driven by the nation’s urban centers in the Northeast and West, concentrations of voters that countered the Republican strongholds in the Midwest and South.
Tellingly, given the pervasive mix of image with reality and flash over substance in the 1980s, Cartwright’s analysis speaks to the era and pulls a thread tight between the 1980s and the 1920s. He says:
To whatever degree Gatsby has won Nick over, he has won him not by an appeal to evidence but by an appeal to imagination. Because of his impressionability, Nick grasps an image and decks it out with his own bright feathers. But through this submersion, Nick’s belief has in some measure grown. Fascination breeds credulity. Indeed, Gatsby is such a cliché that on the flimsiest of bona fides he becomes a miracle.[18]
The idea that a person can win the day with flash and meager proof encapsulates the 1980s. The era seemed to be another in a seemingly long string of American time frames that could be labeled the “me” decade.
According to Cartwright, Fitzgerald portrays Nick getting duped by the “great” Gatsby, yet the sinews of believability compel him to accept the man’s tales. “Nick’s confusions, then, become values in the reader’s portrait of Gatsby,” Cartwright explains, “making him powerful even as he is remote; plausible yet strange; possible. Thanks, curiously, to the distance Fitzgerald establishes between Nick and his reader, even Gatsby can happen here, without any particular wonder.”[19] So, Gatsby can be borne on half-truths and a pretty gloss, just like an actor/cowboy could become president of the United States or the son of wealth and privilege who is able to transform himself into a man of the people.
In The Great Gatsby, Nick’s fawning narration—despite our disbelief in an awful lot of what he says—ensures that Gatsby will remain great. Just as he served as Gatsby’s surrogate and friend after the murder, he will immortalize the man in the novel he is writing. In an era that thrived on public relations and glitzy marketing campaigns, Nick turns into Gatsby’s main publicist and historian, writing the book about him, even though he claims to want no more of the East or its wildness after that year in West Egg.
The point here must be that the victors (or possibly survivors) are the ones permitted to write a land’s history. We might not trust Nick, nor even like him based on his wispy mannerisms and willingness to watch as all these different threads unraveled, yet there is something there that compels us to root for him and his mysterious friend. We believe the hype.
The end of each decade leads to a sometimes insightful, sometimes ponderous probing of what the last ten years connoted and what might be forming at the dawn of the next ten. As the 1980s swept out to sea, commentators noted the dichotomy in the way Americans thought of themselves versus the way they acted.
For example, Charles Bremner, a correspondent for the Times of London, told readers that while Americans congratulated themselves for jailing Wall Street manipulators, mainstream consumers “shopped on, flocking to the air-conditioned suburban malls where for a few hundred dollars you can enter Ralph Lauren’s world of polo-playing old WASP-dom, or buy into Laura Ashley’s dream of English pastoral serenity.”[20] As soon as the economic chaos of Black Monday slipped into memory and consumers regained their buying power, they hit the stores in search for the goodies and gadgets they denied themselves in the wake of the Wall Street downturn.
Alas, according to Bremner, in the postcrash nation, conspicuous consumption went out of fashion. Instead, buyers looked for “plush frugality,” which he explains as a way of downplaying one’s wealth. Here Bremner’s thinking predates that of writer and newspaper columnist David Brooks, who would shoot to best-sellerdom with Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000), a snappy sociological examination of the baby boomers’ ideological mix of 1960s bohemian idealism and the consumerism rampant in the 1980s. Bremner satirized this new breed as those who were “cruising Park Avenue in a four-wheel-drive Jeep while attired as a backwoodsman or woman” or “in favor of the pseudo-worker look, as embodied in Soviet chic.”[21]
Bremner, Brooks, and other commentators sensed a change in the air, but virtually no one thought that America would curb its excessive spending spree unless forced. The Times foreign correspondent reported the results of a national poll examining heroic traits people coveted, which revealed that they yearned for a nostalgic 1950s-era father figure. Not surprisingly, though, the new hero had to make enough money to live comfortably in late 1980s and 1990s America. The idea of getting by modestly had essentially vanished at the hands of the decade’s excesses. Like Pandora’s box, the consumer demons unleashed in the 1980s would continue to haunt the country unabated.
Humorist Russell Baker caught the air of indignation the public let out after reading about the multimillion-dollar birthday bashes thrown for tycoons Malcolm Forbes and Saul Steinberg, which featured jet-setting guests, celebrities, and more excess than even Gatsby could have imagined. With heavy satire, Baker has a typical American wife wondering about such events and why she had to throw a backyard party for her own husband: “A sensible woman, she knew that despite its inanity the rich-and-famous crowd performed a vital public service. They provided people with daydreams and poisonous envy and entertained them in TV bromides and supermarket headlines.”[22] Next, the female character (via Baker’s sharp wit) rails against trophy wives, old age, and the disparity between the ultrarich and regular people.
Famed journalist Tom Wolfe turned a kind of Gatsby for the 1980s into a literary best-seller in 1985 with The Bonfire of the Vanities, a thick social history of the decade filling some nine hundred pages. In the novel, Wolfe chronicles the interlocked worlds of Wall Street finance, Brooklyn politics, and Harlem’s disadvantaged African Americans. The main character is Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street broker who sees himself as a “Master of the Universe.” McCoy’s limited perspective from his $10 million Park Avenue apartment and his office suite downtown prevents him from objectivity. He allows his spoiled wife and child to pamper themselves while he conducts an affair with Maria Ruskin, a trash-talking Southern belle married to Arthur Ruskin, a corporate mogul who made his money offering discount trips to the Holy Land for Jewish families.
Picking Maria up at the airport one night, Sherman makes a wrong turn toward the Bronx, where he mistakes two black youths for gang members. In escaping the scene, Maria, driving the car, hits Henry Lamb, one of the teens, knocking him into a coma. Suddenly, the “Master of the Universe” finds himself embroiled in a scandal when Maria refuses to take responsibility. Wolfe uses this centerpiece to craft a story around greed, corruption, the changing state of journalism, and race relations.
One of the novel’s most brilliant moments follows Sherman through a socialite party, peopled with “Lemon Tarts” (the youthful, vapid, very blonde female dates of elderly men) and “Social X-rays” (the wives of the other elderly men, so thin one could see the light through their skin). Wolfe’s keen eye and sharp pen assist the reader in understanding this outrageous world of excess as Sherman watches his wife interact within “the hive” of this social order. Wolfe shows that Sherman comprehends the superficiality of the culture, but he realizes that this is what he deserves, as he will not extract himself from it. A savage indictment of Reagan’s America, The Bonfire of the Vanities is a powerful novel that exposes corruption in an effort to prove that very little separates the “haves” and the “have-nots.”
Perhaps for a brief slice in time, the great Jay Gatsby would have been ridiculed and jeered, just as Fitzgerald found himself in the 1930s, too old and broken to relive youth’s wildness and unable to mentally break from the glamorous days of yore. Those who bought books not only overlooked the exquisite Tender Is the Night, but they basically forgot about the author as a symbol of the heady past that was no more. For the first time since the Fitzgerald revival hit its stride in the mid-1940s, the end of the 1980s may have squelched its significance if people actually bought into the notion that the 1990s would signal a return to simpler ideas about living a good life.
On the large landscape of American culture, the 1990s launched with the economic baggage of the 1980s. For most observers, it seemed the gaudy, money-is-no-object aura of the previous decade ended. Commentators cautioned the public to expect more conservative times ahead. In this transitional phase—prior to the economic fireworks set off in the Clinton administration—the term Gatsby-esque equated to one’s dream of having an endless amount of goods and money.[23]
This idea would fizzle for a while during Clinton’s early years but would later come roaring back to life as the technology age took over the nation. Suddenly, twenty-year-olds creating Internet companies turned into paper millionaires, followed closely by a trail of venture capitalists, the Svengali figures whispering in their ears about going public and doing deals. Everyone was a celebrity and magazines reportedly about business started catering to the rumored Gatsby-like parties raging deep into the night on the nation’s coasts.
The Great Gatsby is filled with popular culture, not just real-life characters, but also caricatures of invented celebrities, which Fitzgerald employed to provide historical context. As a result, the tale glimmered with snapshots of Broadway actresses, gossip rags, wild parties, and slick cars. It is no surprise, then, that the focus on culture links Gatsby with the celebrity obsession that came to its full fruition in the 1990s, then carried on at an even faster pace in the 2000s. The decade earned this distinction based on the introduction and promulgation of the Internet. The web provided the public with an additional screen filled with all the tabloid-like minutiae it desired, both replicating and expanding on the star-filled world of the 1980s.
By the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, popular culture transformed
from a part of the overall cultural scene to its foundation—an omnipresent part of
the typical American’s day-to-day life. While readers saw the earliest inklings of
this change in Gatsby and the silent films of the era (the first film version of Gatsby appeared in 1926, starring Hollywood icon Warner Baxter), its full appropriation
took place as technology brought more entertainment into people’s lives. In Fitz-
gerald’s day and for many decades after, one could choose to disconnect from popular
culture. With the spread of the web—like the faux machine-created reality of The Matrix—no one could escape.
Using Gatsby as a kind of benchmark, careful observers can recognize the way popular culture infiltrated modern society in the 1920s and the similarities to the 1990s and 2000s. The fundamental transformation led to complete totality. Not only are people in today’s world unable to stop the pop culture noise; increasingly they are taught to believe that an “always on” mind-set is typical. Rather than criticize people who carry on a variety of simultaneous conversations and odd jobs at once, “multitasking” is applauded. This situation echoes the feelings of chaos and despair that course through Gatsby. Syndicated columnist George Will captured this notion, explaining:
Fitzgerald was born with ragtime, movies and airplanes, amidst an expansive sense of possibility. Production soared; speculation soared more. Producing goods lost stature next to marketing, advertising, salesmanship. The new virtues were poise, self-assurance, personality. . . . Gorgeous, if you overlook the fact he was a gangster.[24]
In the novel, the latest technologies that were widely adopted—automobiles and telephones—are constant presences. The shrill sound of the telephone causes a jolt for characters already on the edge, particularly Daisy, who sees the calls as a nail Tom drives through their marriage. Gatsby seems to be on the telephone more often than not, the persistent interruptions by some butler telling him that some distant caller awaits provide a kind of cover that camouflages the man, allowing him to hide from both the people at his parties and the reader going through the text. Remarkably to today’s readers, so many of the characters in Gatsby simply cannot drive well. Sometimes, accidents are the result of too much alcohol consumed, but others take place when the power and speed of the mighty automobiles are too much for the driver to control. This occurs when Jordan clips the button off a workman’s jacket and in the harrowing scene when Daisy accidently kills Myrtle Wilson.
In contemporary times, the pervasiveness of technology has had a similar consequence, basically numbing people to everything outside technology’s grasp. For example, children barely able to reach the mouse are urged to learn computer skills and do K–3 lessons on an iPad. For many preschoolers, going online to Nickelodeon or Disney and interacting virtually with the characters they watch on television is a natural act.
At its essence, however, popular culture is about context. Studying the actions of political or corporate leaders provides the framework for understanding shifts in popular culture over time. It is impossible, for example, to quantify Bill Clinton’s or George W. Bush’s impact on the cultural developments of the 1990s and 2000s, but understanding them as leaders working within the mass communication structure enables one to grasp the broader meaning of culture during their time as president.
The ability to examine the actions of the government or a particular leader or group of leaders is arguably the most positive aspect of popular culture. Rooted in free speech, the rise of mass media enabled Americans to criticize their leaders and institutions, thus opening new opportunities for collective education and information. At the same time, free speech allows for humor. As a result, Jon Stewart can openly mock the president on The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live’s Darrell Hammond could impersonate Clinton weekly on the hit show without concern over his personal safety.
The Great Gatsby also seemed big game for would-be aspirants to literary greatness. They stalked Fitzgerald’s turf, presenting Nick-like unreliable narrators and quasi-heroes in the Gatsby vein. In 1996, for example, Carter Coleman ripped Jay McInerney’s novel The Last of the Savages for attempting Gatsby heights but ultimately falling short. Even if the novel is good, as Coleman claims McInerney’s is, the book “suffers by comparison, as almost any novel would.”[25] Ultimately, Fitzgerald set the bar so high that anything similar seems at least derivative and slightly off.
As millions of Americans interacted with mass media, whether watching the same movies or listening to radio programs, a common language developed that opened lines of communication between disparate groups. The downside to this unintended focus on mass communication, some argued, was that a growing fascination with pop culture actually diverted attention from important challenges the nation faced, ultimately serving as a kind of placebo. Therefore, popular culture enabled people to feel good about the world around them without really forcing them to directly confront critical issues.
Arguably, no president in history blurred the line between the office and popular culture more than Bill Clinton. He served as a kind of walking symbol of how society changed over the last several decades. After Clinton, for example, any vestiges of regality or luster the office held virtually disappeared. However, he was an incredibly popular president, routinely receiving high approval ratings.
Clinton was still “Mr. President,” but for most people and the media, he was “Bubba” or “Slick Willy,” a down-home, good ol’ country boy from Arkansas—the kind of guy you would want to drink a beer with, listen to tell jokes and stories, but never leave alone with your sister—wink, wink. Clinton’s homespun image emerged despite ties to Washington, D.C., and education at Georgetown University, Yale Law School, and a Rhodes scholarship to University College, Oxford. Acknowledged as a masterful politician, both critics and admirers wondered which was the real Clinton. In hindsight, however, Clinton seemed simply too complex to put in a tidy box. He embodied traits of both and used them strategically to achieve his goals.
U.S. history is filled with stories of political, financial, and sexual misconduct. The general public has always had a curious fascination with the lives of those in power, including politicians, entertainers, and business leaders, particularly when these people fall from grace. Before Watergate, the mainstream media did not rush to expose the shortcomings of influential people. Presidents and entertainers were often protected from national scandal by a media that looked the other way. Beginning in the 1970s and intensifying with the advent of the information age, the national media has stopped covering for public figures. Instead, under the guise of dishonesty or hypocrisy, the media has focused on sensational, scandal-ridden stories, ultimately making misconduct and public scandal a part of everyday life.
The dual-headed media monster of Vietnam and Watergate changed journalism forever. The combination of an unpopular war and criminal behavior in the president’s office expanded the scope of what broadcasters chose to expose about their leaders—the floodgates were opened. The Internet has fueled the sensationalist aspects of society, since people now have almost instantaneous access to news and opinion. People no longer expect movie stars, politicians, athletes, chief executive officers, or even the president of the United States to remain scandal-free. The idea that everyone has skeletons in their closet waiting to be exposed is pretty much universal.
Political scandal remains a constant reminder of human frailty. After Watergate forced President Richard M. Nixon to resign from office, investigations into political misconduct expanded. The Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s not only destroyed the careers of several high-ranking officials in the Ronald Reagan administration, it caused a national crisis of confidence in the democratic system.
A variety of scandals during the presidency of Bill Clinton, from the Whitewater real estate scheme to the president’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky revealed the way public opinion about misconduct changed. Initially, scandal focused primarily on criminal or financial wrongdoing. During the Clinton years, however, presidential scandal turned more intimate as the press reported on the president’s numerous sexual liaisons, including blunt discussions of oral sex and semen-stained dresses. Many pop culture experts agreed that salacious television programs, such as The Jerry Springer Show, which featured crude behavior, incest, fistfights, and the glorification of the lowest common denominator, fueled the public craving for this kind of intimate detail.
As a result of ever-intensifying media coverage and instantaneous access to information, the United States now thrives on a culture of scandal. As a matter of fact, many individuals ride to great heights of fame based on disgrace. Infamy now seems part of an overall scheme to increase the “buzz” around a given entertainer, politician, or public figure as part of a campaign to make the person even more famous. Depending on the severity of the scandal, many infamous people are eventually welcomed back into the limelight.
The outcome of the scandal culture is an increase in public distrust and cynicism. As a result, there are fewer heroes in the world for people to look to in times of crisis. In an increasingly competitive media landscape and twenty-four-hour information age, however, it seems a culture of scandal is here to stay.
After the decadence of Wall Street greed in the 1980s and the superficial laid-back corruption of the dot-com boom, Gatsby’s popular culture influence seemed to reach a new zenith. As discussed above, there were novels that aped its themes and films that presented new versions of Nick and Gatsby as the movie and fictional industries presented audiences with mirrors on their own worlds. The terms associated with the novel even entered the political lexicon, let alone the ubiquity of such taxonomy in the business and entertainment press.
Given the times, it is no wonder that the 2000s began with a high-profile version of Gatsby, starring Toby Stephens as the title character, Mira Sorvino as Daisy, and Paul Rudd as Nick. The fourth attempt at filming Fitzgerald’s novel, this one was a television movie coproduced by the A&E cable network.
Several changes from the novel are readily apparent, beginning with the opening scene of a seagull flying over water and a barren shoreline. Setting the tone for the film, this shot establishes that what follows will be pastoral. The Long Island setting seems more remote. As music plays in the background, Nick narrates over it, emphasizing the words “criticize” and “advantages” from the infamous opening monologues. The mention of Gatsby is changed from a book Nick is writing in the novel to “story” that he will retell.
The A&E version moves the murder/suicide to the beginning of the action. First, Gatsby appears from an overhead perspective, so the viewer is looking down on him in the pool. He seems agitated or upset, examining cuff links he holds tightly in his hand. In the next frame, shot from underwater looking upward and out of the pool, the shooter appears, his image bouncing on the shimmering water’s surface. He draws the gun up from his side and fires. Two shots ring out.
Given that the television film could not compete with the resources allocated to a Hollywood film, the 2000 adaptation (debuting in January 2001) is scaled down considerably. The Buchanan mansion, for example, is not as ostentatious as one would imagine. Director Robert Markowitz also shoots the film in a tighter frame while the actors are speaking. As a result, the actors’ facial features are more noticeable. Tom is more oafish, slurping his soup like a commoner at the initial dinner with Nick. Later, he swigs from a flask outside Wilson’s garage, playing to the Prohibition era.
The valley of ashes, a key aspect of the story, is done well in the Markowitz version. It is appropriately desolate, industrial, and decrepit. Myrtle is a rougher character than in the novel. For example, the minimal decorum Fitzgerald had them exhibit is completely gone in the film. Tom and Myrtle are more overt and sexually aggressive.
When Gatsby finally appears, the character is revealed to be a huckster or salesman type. Nick even makes fun of him when he uses “old sport,” then openly chuckles while Gatsby recreates the story of his life. Central, however, is the romance between Jay and Daisy.
In the film, the core of their romance centers on their love and mutual longing for one another in their younger years. They act as coconspirators before he goes off to war. She knows that he is poor yet attempts to conceal this from her family and attempts to fool them into believing he is in the same social class. In a flashback, Daisy thinks about her first encounter with the young army officer, one where she mistakenly calls him “Gatsby.” He then adopts the name.
After they reconnect, Daisy swoons at the size of his house. They stop to dance in the orchestra room and he is shown overcome with emotion. Yet, later, in the confrontation between Tom and Jay at the hotel in New York City, the actors play the scene with little feeling.
Accenting Gatsby’s criminal behavior, a detective searches the mansion for missing bonds and questions Nick, since he is a bond salesman. When Nick answers the telephone call from Slagle (which in the novel provides a glimpse at Gatsby’s illegal activities), the man is sinister and tells Nick that the cops are onto them about the missing bonds. After the police have turned the mansion upside down, Nick then finds the missing bonds Gatsby forged in a secret compartment in a trunk—direct evidence of Gatsby’s underhandedness. Before leaving West Egg for the last time, Nick burns the bonds down at the shoreline, as well as Gatsby’s clippings of Daisy. Then, he throws the monogrammed cuff links out into the water toward Daisy’s.
Given the timeliness of Gatsby at the dawn of the new millennium, one would have expected more from this version, but the cast simply seemed unable to rise to the occasion, like a soggy sandwich left out after a midafternoon summer rain. Writing for Variety, Steven Oxman says that the A&E adaptation “demonstrates once again how this breezily told tale can be transformed into a languorous affair, replete with visual attractiveness and yet somehow dull to its core.” Rather than focus on the layered storytelling, the film turns the narrative into a “whodunit,” which Oxman calls “a bizarre, and clearly poor, choice which robs the story of a truly dramatic twist.”[26] In the end, however, the weight of the summer setting and expectations surrounding the novel weighed the movie down, essentially turning a Jazz Age barnburner into a Model T with a flat tire.
In an interview, director Markowitz seemed to understand the novel and its themes, explaining that from the film, the viewer should “better understand the nature of the country we live in in regards to the pursuit of the American Dream and the price we have to pay for it—sometimes to lose your own soul. . . . It’s about all of our lives as we pursue a dream defined by other people.”[27] Markowitz realized the place of meta-Gatsby as a cultural touchstone for Americans, but he could not find a way to adequately bring that to life on film.
***
In 1998, an esteemed group of novelists, historians, and publishing insiders who served as the editorial board for publisher Modern Library compiled a list of the one hundred best novels of the twentieth century. Gatsby came in second to James Joyce’s Ulysses, after a reshuffling took place when five different novels tied for first. While many panelists and other commentators argued for or against works in the top five or ten, Ulysses and Gatsby were virtually unanimous at the top.[28]
Ironically, the life of these two novels is full of hullabaloo, chaos, esteem, and ultimate redemption. Although Joyce is considered one of the greatest writers of all time, Ulysses was banned in the United States and deemed obscene. The book could not be purchased legally until a judge interceded in 1933. Gatsby, though not judged indecent or banned, nevertheless hit critics and book buyers with a resounding thud, not living up to the publisher’s or Fitzgerald’s expectations of its potential.
Fast-forward to the end of the century, though, and the two stellar works stood at the top of the literary mountain, demonstrating that sales at publication and critical perspectives that go along with it do not necessarily establish long-term importance. (As an aside, one wonders how Hemingway would have reacted to the Modern Library list given his long-standing competiveness with Fitzgerald. His great book The Sun Also Rises placed at a distant forty-five.)
Gatsby’s effectiveness as a tool to assess the American Dream is critical in the novel’s long-term utility. A tangential equation here that is less frequently discussed is how this notion relates to trust, because if the populace does not trust that the American Dream is still possible, then the whole idea implodes. What the 1981 to 2000 era revealed is that trust served as a kind of token, gambled back and forth in high-stakes games across global, socioeconomic, and cultural lines. One could certainly argue, for example, that each presidential election in the United States in this period hinged on trust, whether contemplating one’s feelings about patriotism or the current economic status. Or, one could simply look at television shows, like The Cosby Show in the 1980s or Frasier in the 1990s to see how the idea of trust disseminated.
Meta-Gatsby offers readers and viewers, whether actively engaged in critical thinking or just passively listening to a lecture or watching a film, the opportunity to contemplate trust as a cornerstone of our world, since the entire novel is built on conviction and disbelief existing simultaneously. I contend that meta-Gatsby took on an increasingly important role in our national discourse in this era since the boom and bust economic picture melded with the increasing obsession regarding entertainment and celebrity culture. The result seemed to be a kind of Gatsby-on-steroids world that needed all the tools at its disposal to make sense.
Bob Batchelor and Scott Stoddard, The 1980s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2007), 10.
Quoted in Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 209.
Jack Boozer, “Wall Street: The Commodification of Perception,” in Cultural Power/Cultural Literacy: Selected Papers from the 14th Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film, ed. Bonnie Braendlin (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1991), 76–77.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 72.
Kurt Eichenwald, “Wall Street Cutting Muscle Now,” New York Times, November 9, 1990.
Arnold Weinstein, Morning, Noon & Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages through Books (New York: Random House, 2011), 6.
Simon J. Bronner, American Folklore Studies: An Intellectual History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986), 125–26.
Anthony R. Dolan, “Don’t Count the Gipper Out,” New York Times, July 10, 1987, A35.
Dolan, “Don’t Count the Gipper Out,” A35.
Anthony Lewis, “The Great Gatsby,” New York Times, August 6, 1987, A27.
Anthony R. Dolan, “An Ascendant Conservative’s Advice to Grim, Rejected Liberals,” New York Times, August 25, 1987, A20.
Weinstein, Morning, Noon & Night, 6.
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2011), 3.
Carr, The Shallows, 4.
Quoted in “Reagan’s ‘Scrooge’?” Newsweek, December 19, 1983, LexisNexis Academic (accessed December 23, 2012).
Alfred Kazin and Ted Solotaroff, Alfred Kazin’s America: Critical and Personal Writings (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 485.
Kent Cartwright, “Nick Carraway as an Unreliable Narrator,” Papers on Language and Literature 20, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 218–32. Repr. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, ed. Linda Pavlovski, vol. 157 (Detroit: Gale, 2005). Literature Resource Center.
Cartwright, “Nick Carraway.”
Cartwright, “Nick Carraway.”
Charles Bremner, “Is the American Party Over?” Times (London), September 30, 1989.
Bremner, “Is the American Party Over?”
Russell Baker, “Too Far from West Egg,” New York Times, August 23, 1989, A21.
Lynne Helm, “Timeless Treasures,” Baltimore Sun, October 14, 1990, 17.
George Will, “Fitzgerald Conjures Echoes from Jazz Age,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 20, 1990, 3C.
Carter Coleman, “Riding a Ghost Train, Gatsby-Style,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 9, 1996, 10. Repr. in Contemporary Literary Criticism Select (Detroit: Gale, 2008). Literature Resource Center.
Steven Oxman, “A&E Finds Gatsby Elusive,” Variety, January 15, 2001, 60.
Quoted in Lewis Beale, “Great Gatsby Expectation,” New York Daily News, January 14, 2001, 6.
Paul Lewis, “Ulysses at Top as Panel Picks 100 Best Novels,” New York Times, July 20, 1998, E1.
I never blame failure—there are too many complicated situations in life—but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.—F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to his daughter, 1940
Bewildering questions about The Great Gatsby remain, even as the novel approaches its one hundredth anniversary and eclipses sales figures in the tens of millions, not to mention readership reaching into the hundreds of millions. Primarily, one must wonder, despite Fitzgerald’s profound hopes (and keen internal knowledge of the book’s significance), how did Gatsby transform from mixed reviews and lackluster sales to become one of the most important novels ever written? Why are audiences and readers still transfixed by this slim volume that on publication seemed to most people as little more than a time capsule of the Roaring Twenties by a writer of great promise, but one who had still not completely realized his skills?
In an attempt to answer this question, I contend that Gatsby is not only the most important novel in our literary history, it is the “Great American Novel.” Exhibit A in supporting these pronouncements is today’s world. Fitzgerald’s book—by exploring the timeless elements of love and romance, personal transformation, wealth, and the pursuit of the unattainable—achieves the coveted title, and, more importantly, explains to students, scholars, and fans alike what makes Gatsby so great.
Are there more than a handful of novels that could even be considered the “Great American Novel”? Yes, there are many phenomenal literary works that go a long way toward understanding the nation at various times in its history or even illuminate a topic in new and innovative ways. Yet none of them are employed to address the concerns of contemporary times like Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. In this regard, Gatsby is like a race car with an extra gear that enables it to remain applicable well past the limitations on significant competitors. Here and throughout this book, I dub this extension of the novel as a cultural touchstone meta-Gatsby.
Why do we still care about this novel? More importantly, how does Gatsby help us make sense of our own lives and times? Think for a moment, do great works like Lolita, The Sun Also Rises, The Grapes of Wrath, The Naked and the Dead, Rabbit Run, White Noise, Beloved, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, or American Pastoral even get similar consideration or any of the dozen or so others one could list as possible contenders for Great American Novel?
Outside the academic world of scholars highly attuned to critical analysis, very few people are attempting to interpret the contemporary world via the important books mentioned above. Despite the power and critical acclaim these novels rightly deserve, each serves to capture a moment in time or an important foundational topic, yet there is no lasting power as a tool to maneuver modern times. Thinking about these works in light of Fitzgerald’s quickly validates the significance of Gatsby.
Try to make a similar list yourself. See if you can find anything that compares—not Huck Finn, The Scarlet Letter, nor anything written in the middle or late twentieth century. Nothing . . . just The Great Gatsby.
While many of his friends and colleagues sold more books and seemed to have more secured literary reputations, Fitzgerald wrote a book that is essentially timeless. Part of this immutability centers on the themes and ideas at the heart of the book. Much of its endurance is also based on the author’s technique, in other words, crafting a tale within a tale that enables the reader to both advocate and question the themes and issues fundamental to life as an American in the modern world. It is this basic freedom that Fitzgerald champions in Gatsby that makes the novel a persuasive device for understanding essential aspects of our national character. Gatsby asks—no, demands—that we interrogate the ideas at the heart of our sociocultural world. Meta-Gatsby abides.
***
Contemporary society is propelled by the always-on demand of the Internet and its trappings, from headlines filled with celebrity intrigue and corporate greed to the human tragedy at the heart of the roller-coaster economy. An unsettling aspect of the developing cyber crutch is that the web is changing the way people think, analyze, and interpret their environments. The speed and supposed efficiency of finding information by searching Google, combined with the tiny packets of information delivered on web pages, Twitter feeds, and Facebook status updates, is turning people into self-selecting consumers of small snippets of data that can be quickly digested, especially versus the relentless churn of information constantly available via the Internet. Under the spell of technology, one might think that classic literature has little bearing, particularly in a world obsessed with the bells and whistles offered by the web.
What we lose in this trade-off over time, however, is the ability to think critically and contextually. The long-term consequence of ignoring critical-thinking skills is that people rely on “facts” and equate that with knowledge. Rather than carefully thinking through challenges, people then fall back on emotion or what most people deem their “gut reaction.” Sadly, this kind of thinking is rewarded in today’s society. The political parties, for example, play off people’s emotional response to hot-button issues, such as the continuing divisiveness of the pro-choice versus pro-life argument, jobs, and gun control.
When “facts,” represented by Google and search engine results, become the dominant structure of knowledge, then more important concepts, such as critical thinking and wisdom, fall by the wayside. This phenomenon is in direct contrast to what is considered higher-level learning. Instead, I advocate that wisdom or context be elevated for the betterment of society, particularly as personal technological gadgets enable people to access “facts” anywhere, almost instantly.
Yet, given the dominance of the web and its consequences, Gatsby has developed into part of the fiber of the American ethos and an important tool in helping readers to better comprehend their lives and the broader world around them. The novel and films, particularly with the release of the Luhrmann version in May 2013, help people explore a variety of topics essential to their emotional and intellectual well-being.
This chapter explores how and why Gatsby remains relevant, particularly given the extremes of the contemporary world, which one might imagine would create a progressive society that has moved beyond the novel. What we find, however, is that the ideas central to the intellectual core of the book still reverberate across today’s landscape.
Most intriguing, perhaps, is the way Gatsby addresses wealth and the consequences of living within a society that makes one’s economic status seem flexible, yet simultaneously erects barriers that allow few to make significant climbs through social class. Richard Brody, writing in the New Yorker, contemplates why Gatsby endures in this area. He determines that the novel’s current popularity is, in part, its arrival “in another glittering age of incommensurable inequality.” What Fitzgerald delivered, after all, is “a novel of conspicuous consumption—not even of appetite but of the ineluctable connection between wealth and spectacle.”[1] It is in this area, principally as it helps the reader comprehend the American Dream, that Fitzgerald’s book resonates with contemporary readers who struggle with similar uncertainties today.
Journalist Philip Hensher sees Fitzgerald’s novel as a barometer for other works that followed, particularly when addressing social class. This aspect of Gatsby serves as a bridge between the author’s time and ours. Hensher says, “There’s something permanent about it, but also something rather current, too.”[2] The book is valuable today, he explains, because “the novel, with its clear sense that money comes and goes, and that detachment from opulence is as empty a gesture as indulgence in it, seems to come to mind whenever we aren’t doing so well ourselves.”[3] Reading Gatsby forces us to think about our own place in the economic caste system and then bounce that notion off what we establish as our own dreams and aspirations.
The list of national and global crises in the first couple of decades of the twenty-first century could nearly drive a person mad. Undoubtedly, the chaos of these years might leave one questioning just exactly how far humanity has come in its life span. Perhaps an argument could be made that progress is no longer possible, especially in a world where mankind seems hell-bent on destroying itself via direct confrontation or through the gradual destruction of the planet and its ability to sustain life. From this perspective, one hopes that the themes and ideas at the core of meta-Gatsby might help people, particularly young, educated audiences, to find a coping mechanism for these kinds of global ills.
In the United States, the new millennium has witnessed years of explosions and upheavals that have both influenced and transformed American life, including the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the ensuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the nation’s governmental response to natural and human-made phenomena, such as the devastation of Hurricane Katrina; and Wall Street’s implosion resulting from the real estate mess driven by the arrogance and ineptitude of the nation’s banking industry. More recently, the ties to 9/11 and global terrorism were revisited when two terrorists planted homemade bombs at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon, causing death and mayhem at one of the nation’s most revered sporting events. The subsequent manhunt shut down most of the city and captivated the nation, both reopening and still tending to the wounds of the initial attacks some dozen years earlier.
The range of challenges and serious issues forced the public into a situation in which it is constantly facing action, reaction, and interpretation. The tools for such contemplation include aspects of popular culture, the federal government’s maneuvers, and personal contemplation. For example, technology, economics, and innovation combine to produce culture-shifting products, such as the iPod, Wi-Fi hubs, and smartphones. These goods then set in motion a shift in popular culture as these products influence people far beyond their intended functions. In turn, users come to define themselves by them—the kinds of music they download, the movies they watch, and television shows they record via TiVo.
A key aspect of Gatsby that links the 1925 novel with the early decades of the twenty-first century is that Fitzgerald’s masterwork provides readers with a peek behind the curtain into a world that most people will never actually experience. Yet in making this forthright statement, the corollary is that while people may never comprehend the wealth depicted in Gatsby or understand what it means to exist in that echelon, life in contemporary America is built on offering audiences pseudoevents and faux incidents that seem authentic.
In today’s cultural landscape, reality television is part of this cycle. The genre allows curious audiences privileged access to other people’s lives, essentially peeking inside their medicine cabinets and poking around their daily being. Yet reality television is not as frivolous as many critics like to argue. Scholar Leigh Edwards explains, “Rather than mere sensationalism, the genre is making substantive arguments at the heart of contemporary social issues, whether that is how media shapes people’s everyday lives or how the family unit is still central to American social life.”[4] These kinds of critical issues are at the core of television programming and have been across the medium’s history.
One may view the link between Gatsby and reality TV as a stretch, but consider another outcome of the latter—creating a new social class of pseudocelebrities. This was an important undercurrent in Fitzgerald’s work and is imperative in understanding how money and consumer culture merge. The outcome that Fitzgerald examined created an expanded gene pool of celebrities and faux fame, like Myrtle’s sister Catherine, a young woman who is not wealthy but is able to travel to Europe and find her way to Gatsby’s parties once a month.
As if Fitzgerald possessed a crystal ball, he nailed the look and feel of celebrity, particularly when a person could achieve it without actually doing anything expressly noteworthy. In the novel, Nick lists a number of “names” that came to Gatsby’s parties, all celebrated people by the fact that he is cataloging them, but many would certainly be regarded as infamous or notorious. There are also the numerous “young Englishmen” who attend in search of wealthy American heiresses, “all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans . . . agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.”[5] There are two important things taking place in this section: first, Fitzgerald is commenting on wealth and celebrity in his era; second, Nick, as author of the book about Gatsby, provides a portrait of the rich that is both informative and scattered, demonstrating the senselessness of how these people are emulated and placed on society’s pedestal.
From his experiences living in Great Neck, Long Island, and among many wealthy friends and acquaintances, Fitzgerald had all the background information he needed to absolutely skewer the rich. But he did so with such a deft stroke that generations of misinformed readers regard the author as a sycophant to that class. Like us, the glance into their lives intrigued him, but he did not hold them up on a pedestal. Literary critic Clive James notes Fitzgerald’s ability to get this picture right, saying that Gatsby “is a cautionary tale, but the tale is about us more than about him.”[6] His portrait of Tom Buchanan is an obvious example of his feelings about America’s moneyed aristocracy.
Writing in late 2002, New York Times columnist and Princeton professor Paul Krugman railed against the vast income gap that existed between the rich and everyone else in early twenty-first-century America. One might have expected that the dot-com meltdown that threw the nation’s coasts into a panic would have leveled this phenomenon a bit, but instead Krugman focuses directly on the disparity.
First, he took a jab at Jack Welch, the then-newly divorced former General Electric chief executive. Welch’s divorce proceedings bared to the world the golden parachute the corporation gave its old leader (in the 1980s nicknamed “Neutron Jack” for his propensity for mass firings). Welch’s perks included lifetime use of a Manhattan apartment, use of corporate jets, and other luxuries. As Krugman correctly pointed out, though, these benefits amounted to chump change for Welch, whose final year at the top resulted in a $123 million payday.[7]
More or less providing the intellectual rationale for the Occupy Wall Street movement that would erupt a decade later, Krugman cited Congressional Budget Office (CBO) studies that revealed that the after-tax incomes of the top 1 percent of the wealth ladder experienced a 157 percent gain between 1979 and 1997. These figures contrast to about a 10 percent increase in the average annual salary (adjusted for inflation) over approximately the same time frame. While Bill Gates and the few at the very top got more Bill Gates-y, the rest of the nation wallowed. According to Krugman, the nation returned to Gatsby days: “After 30 years in which the income shares of the top 10 percent of taxpayers, the top 1 percent and so on were far below their levels in the 1920s, all are very nearly back where they were.”[8]
The challenge in drawing comparisons between the characters in Fitzgerald’s novel and the exorbitant pay drawn by CEOs is that Jay Gatsby benefited from overt criminal activities and Tom’s wealth came from inheritance. Although it is implied that the latter carries on some business activities, the reader can only infer the depth of his knowledge (for example, he knows the bond business well enough to know that Nick’s firm is not one of the main players). A swindler or a megarich squire, however, could appreciate the scam modern-day corporate bosses orchestrated, which Krugman outlined as filling the board of trustees with toadies, friends, and lackeys who ultimately determined salary, perks, and how stock options were divvied.
Rather than the “invisible hand of the market,” Krugman explains, these CEOs gained their largesse via “the invisible handshake in the boardroom.” After decades of forcing the idea that executives somehow deserved these gargantuan salaries, the notion finally stuck in the public’s mind. The little guy—also buying into the sanctity of the market—needed to believe that a corporate demigod could push their investments through the roof.[9]
Even the global recession initiated by the seedy mixture of real estate loan arbitrage and big-bank malfeasance seems to have not slowed down the vicious capitalism that rocks the nation. In these times, Gatsby stands as a beacon for understanding what price we pay for ruthless power grabs and the economic devastation of a winner-takes-all mentality.
Ironically, I write this on a day in which one of the two biggest news stories is a devastating tornado 1.3 miles wide with two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds that ripped through Moore, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City. The rampage leveled the entire town, killing dozens and causing an estimated $2 billion in damages. At the same time, the media is having a field day covering Apple chief executive Tim Cook’s appearance before a U.S. Senate subcommittee to discuss the methods the company employed to divert funds offshore to avoid paying U.S. taxes. What the subcommittee revealed is that from 2009 to 2012, Apple used tax loopholes to circumvent taxes on $44 billion, including three subsidiaries in Ireland that have no official residency anywhere.[10]
While Gatsby can do nothing to explain away a natural disaster like the killer tornado in Oklahoma or the countless calamities that take place, Fitzgerald’s novel can provide a guiding light as we mull over the lengths corporations and individuals will go to bilk and deceive in their own interests. From this perspective, there is value in the generic ways that the term “Gatsby” has been deployed and transformed within a meta-Gatsby culture. One might hope that in an increasingly corrupt environment that using “Gatsby” terminology could serve as a rallying point. The ubiquity of these terms, then, might energize activists and other parties to rise up against this kind of corporate misconduct.
Globalization is not a new term. Over many decades, various economic powers have emerged at different times to rival the United States. However, the interconnectedness of twenty-first-century society shows a cohesion among global trading partners that is unprecedented. While one might assume that the interdependence would strengthen the entire structure, there is a competing notion that any small fissure could cause the whole thing to fall apart. The simple fact that frequent national and regional crises call the system into question demonstrates its strength and fragility simultaneously.
Scholars Krishnamurthy Sriramesh and Dejan Verič refer to this new era as a “multipolar world” in which “different countries and different cultures have begun to compete more or less peacefully on the global stage.” While the Cold War superpowers still have enormous power based on the existence of nuclear weaponry, others are exerting economic might. The entire world has marveled at China’s rise to dominance, which is well documented and seemingly unprecedented, yet other nations also seem poised to develop into economic powerhouses.[11]
America remains the center of world finance, but its dependence on foreign nations to finance its growing national debt, Middle Eastern oil reserves, and Chinese imports reveals the shaky nature of that position. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman coined the phrase “the world is flat” to describe the consequences of globalization on the United States in his 2005 best-seller The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.
After visiting India, Friedman astutely realized that globalization provided global nations a level playing field economically and removed many barriers to foreign trade that previously existed. For example, one of Friedman’s examples is the outsourcing trend occurring in corporate America. Companies sent jobs to overseas knowledge centers, which saved them money, instead of offering the same services using American employees. Companies like Dell, Microsoft, Citigroup, and many others outsourced IT and customer service functions to India, China, and other Far Eastern nations.
Despite the backlash against such practices, outsourcing provided a greater return on investment. The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals estimated that American companies spent $4.2 trillion on outsourcing in 2006, up from $3.1 trillion just three years earlier. Obviously, with trillions of dollars being put into outsourcing the trend is not going to stop. Rather, the question for U.S. corporations is how to best use it strategically. For example, some organizations are moving away from India, the traditional power base in the field, to places such as Russia, the Philippines, and Mexico. Any nation with a workforce strong in software and engineering and English-language skills is a potential hotbed for outsourcing.[12]
While the business world flattens the distance between nations economically, American culture virtually obliterates any gap. For instance, one of the interesting tangential side effects of the 2013 Gatsby film is that it serves as a kind of new introduction of the novel and its time to the rest of the world. The global intrigue regarding 1920s America, for example, found a home in fashion-crazed China, where the novel is known as The Amazing Gai-Ci-Bi. Writing for the New Yorker, Evan Osnos quotes a men’s dress shirt advertisement for the Chinese label Masa Maso that speaks to the power of the character’s shirts, reading, “It’s true: Put on a flower-print shirt, and it will show you the door to a whole new world.”[13]
Jing Daily, which bills itself as the outlet for “the business of luxury & culture in China,” reports on the Chinese version of Vogue magazine, which spotlights a Gatsby-like photo spread featuring Prada, Tiffany, and the Wangfujing luxury shopping district. The shoot stars Chinese supermodels Du Juan and Sui He “in Gatsby-inspired 1920s attire as they pose in decidedly modern locations of Beijing.” While the response to the American Jazz Age fashions was limited because the film had not yet opened in mainland China or made its way there via the black market, many Chinese fashion bloggers and commentators gushed over the style.[14]
The infusion of Gatsby-themed fashion and other cultural inroads expands the idea of meta-Gatsby globally. For example, Osnos claims that the novel/movie’s themes of “self-invention
and stupendous wealth, of hidden pasts and imagined futures—could hardly find a more
fitting audience than in China in the opening years of the twenty-first century.”
Moreover, he reports, many people in China have read Gatsby and are tracking its themes, basically comparing and contrasting the ideas Fitz-
gerald concentrates on and what these notions mean for them in modern China.[15] The mind boggles at what an inroad into China might portend for that nation, which
is the economic engine of the world. The idea that meta-Gatsby could become an analytical tool across the globe is a stunning acknowledgment of
the timelessness of the novel and a case study in cultural diplomacy.
The Great Gatsby is an important piece of Americana. Over the last six decades it has moved from forgotten time stamp to legendary status. Since teachers in high schools and colleges use the book so frequently, and it stands as one of the few works of literature that nearly everyone is at least acquainted with in text or film form, its influence is broad and important as a part of popular culture. The myriad of interpretations and ideas Gatsby represents shows its utility. For example, novelist Jennifer Egan explains that the novel “tells a story of a reinvention and a transformation. It captures a strong part of what I think of as American identity: You can be anyone that you want here, though it doesn’t always work out.”[16]
Ideas about identity and the myriad of topics related to it comprise much of American popular culture. The significance of culture on the nation is in the way it connects people. The ubiquity of the web and around-the-clock access via handheld devices makes this an era of hyperpopular culture in which people not only expect, but demand, continual entrée to mass communications. People also need tools to help them codify and comprehend all the streaming blips and beeps blasting through their lives.
Technological innovation and our enslavement to it transforms the way we think about culture, not as a kind of thing, as most definitions attempt to explain, like the antithesis of high art or culture, but as the link that exists in the impulses that draw members of the global community to a person, thing, topic, or issue that arises out of the juncture of mass communications, technology, political systems, and economic institutions. In other words, I am proposing that we view popular culture not as an object, say, Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s Soup can painting, but as the interface itself that draws viewers to or repels them from that artwork.
Examining Warhol’s piece, it is not that a person says, “Wow, that is popular culture.” Instead, it is the confluence of seeing the image; interacting with it based on one’s own life experiences; adding context, history, experience, and personality; and then creating a new meaning of it personally that defines popular culture. In other words, popular culture is more than what people like or enjoy in the large scheme of entertainment. Popular culture is our national dialogue via cultural engagement.
Scholar Ray B. Browne once defined popular culture, saying, “It is the everyday world around us: the mass media, entertainments, diversions, heroes, icons, rituals, psychology, religion—our total life picture.”[17] My redefinition asks that we acknowledge that it is more than just the world around us; it also includes the exchange between a popular culture object and a person’s assimilation of the thing—all the thoughts, emotions, and manners in which one consumes it. This meaning of popular culture exists in absorption and consumption rather than in attempting to define a tangible object as low-, high-, or middlebrow on a fabricated scale of hierarchies. In this respect, “popular culture” should be seen as a verb, not a noun, the total interaction with a topic and the new synthesis or creation that occurs as a result of that fusion.
Returning to the notion of popular culture as a connector between people, it is no wonder then that film and television play a central role. These mass communications channels define and encompass our national dialogue. Television and film are the great equalizers—essentially providing Americans with basic talking points across race, political ties, gender differences, or any other demographic features that usually separate them. The narratives, regardless of the reason they attract or repel us, give context and a way of interpreting society and culture. As millions of Americans interact with mass media, whether watching the same movies and television shows or listening to radio programs, a common language develops that opens new lines of communication.
The downside, however, is that the fascination with popular culture diverts attention from important challenges the nation confronts. In this light, popular culture serves as a kind of placebo. The obsessive, loving nature of cult objects, for example, intensifies this diversion critique of popular culture because the focus on a specific cult influence distracts people and, at the same time, enables them to feel good about the world without really forcing them to directly confront critical issues.
The beauty and value of popular culture is its ability to let people explore the ideas, topics, people, and influences that matter to them most. This exercise actually forces people to engage in higher-order critical-thinking skills involved in the formation of new ideas and impulses. As we wrestle with our own thoughts, dreams, and aspirations through popular culture exploration, we obtain, strengthen, and evolve our personal worldviews or core guiding ideologies.
I believe that popular culture scholars have a critical impact by helping the public better understand the necessity of humanities-based education and the broader education system, particularly K–12 battles over standardized testing, such as the ravages of No Child Left Behind. Scholar Brendan Riley addresses how academics might play a more critical role in helping the public engage in the education system. He explains:
The conversation about education has become very vocational in the last twenty years, with students and the public seeing college as job-training rather than person-training. But the modern economy requires flexible workers; people who can problem solve, work with others in complex ways, and engage difficult questions creatively. All of these things arise from the work we do in the Humanities, we just need to remind people of that—and public scholarship is just the way to do it. As the scholars most directly poised to bridge the town/gown divide (because we write about things people care about), we should be on the front lines of the battle over education in the twenty first century.[18]
Scholar Brian Cogan looks at the big picture, saying, “We study the ‘meaning making’ process, how people use popular culture artifacts to give themselves hopes, dreams, aspirations and ethical systems, but people don’t get this easily, or the importance of Elvis, as an example, in people’s lives.” Cogan, however, points to the power of popular culture studies, concluding, “I like to think of us as cultural barometers, we are trying a very difficult type of analysis, looking at mostly the current mediated ecosystem and asking questions about it, not as cheerleaders or naysayers, but asking objective questions about the ideas, stories, and artifacts that define not just individuals, but culture as well.”[19]
The many manifestations of Gatsby across popular culture demonstrate what Cogan emphasizes as the central narratives that audiences use to make sense of the world around them and that scholars employ in analyzing culture as a whole. An example of Gatsby’s influence is witnessed on the hit Showtime cable television series Californication, created by Tom Kapinos, which centers on Hank Moody (played by David Duchovny), a self-absorbed writer who attempts to drink and bed his way through contemporary Los Angeles while still hanging on to the love of his former wife and teen daughter.
When the then-new television series Californication debuted on August 13, 2007, Duchovny had just turned forty-seven years old. In comparison, novelist Fitzgerald never made it to that age. In 1940 he succumbed to heart failure at just forty-four years old in the Hollywood apartment of his girlfriend, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. By all accounts, after decades of alcohol abuse and stress brought on by family and financial problems, Fitzgerald’s body gave out.
In season two of Californication, the entire premise of the run is a loose adaptation of Gatsby. Hank plays the role of a debauched and drunken Nick Carraway, while famous record producer Lew Ashby is a modern-day Jay Gatsby (played by the wonderful character actor Callum Keith Rennie). Unlike Fitzgerald, the boozing, drug-taking, womanizing Moody does not worry about the consequences of his actions on his body. Fictional characters in viable series seem to never die or even fade away.
The protagonists initially meet in a stunning Laurel Canyon mansion with so many rooms that one could get lost inside, but Hank does not know who Ashby is. Hank, half-naked and completely loaded, bumps into him without knowing that it is Ashby’s party or mansion, just like Nick’s first meeting with Gatsby. Other aspects of the mansion and the circumstances are similar to Gatsby.
Ashby, a record mogul, later hires Hank to write his biography. Hank initially turns down the offer because he does not want to put out a hack job about Ashby’s wealth. Hank agrees only after the producer opens up to him about his first, lost love. After listing his many successes, Ashby quietly reflects, “All I want is her.” As a result, Hank claims that Ashby’s biography has “a theme” and accepts the job. I do not want to spoil the plot, but the rest of the season continued in its Gatsby-like mode, so its ending should not surprise anyone.
Importantly, the use of Gatsby had consequences for the executives in charge of the series. In only its second season, Californication needed to connect to an audience to secure its place in Showtime’s lineup. Therefore, employing the Gatsby trope served as a way to connect the show to the classic novel, more or less equating Hank to Fitzgerald and the show to an updated version of the Great American Novel. Its creators attempted to link the public’s general understanding of global celebrity across generations, as well as connect to the notion of lost love that Gatsby centered on.
While Californication’s detractors cannot move past the drinking, nudity, and general debauchery of the show, Hank’s role as a kind of fallen Nick Carraway was little more salacious than Fitzgerald’s novel was for its age. For example, in the TV series the two main characters have their first real conversation in a jail cell: Hank arrested for assaulting a police officer and Lew for accusations of domestic abuse. We often forget, though, that in Fitzgerald’s day, the mayhem and orgy-like festivities in the love nest Tom and Myrtle rent seemed just as lewd and sensational.
Californication creator/writer Tom Kapinos claims that he attempted to make Hank Moody “the perfect romantic antihero.”[20] Jay Gatsby, too, is one of popular culture’s most infamous antiheroes. In this sense, Hank falls in line with the current crop of television antiheroes, ranging from loveable serial killer Dexter Morgan on Showtime’s Dexter to Mad Men’s Don Draper. The small screen is filled with characters audiences love to hate, particularly when one adds in the infinite number of antiheroes on reality television programming. One might go so far as to call this the age of the antihero.
Hank fits the mold. His list of illegal, immoral, and decadent behaviors sends critics of Californication into a rage. One doubts if there is a sexual position or situation that has not been attempted or discussed over its run. Certainly, part of Hank’s charm is boosted by the intelligence, wit, and charisma of Duchovny. His wry smile keeps the audience on Hank’s side. Furthermore, in an odd twist, Duchovny himself went into treatment for sex addiction one month prior to the second-season debut, which caused him to split with his wife, actress Tea Leoni. Yet, despite the similarities between the on-screen Hank and the offscreen Duchovny, audiences did not turn on him or stop watching the show. Similarly, readers of Fitzgerald’s novel and the millions who have seen one of the several film adaptations forgive Jay Gatsby, despite his illegal and immoral actions.
Strangely, Hank revels in being principled in an odd, twenty-first-century definition of the word, despite his own often immoral or just plain stupid behavior. Hank speaks the truth as he sees it without the filter that most real people possess, a kind of go-for-broke mentality that audiences enjoy. One television critic explains, “He may be sexually loose, but Hank is not unprincipled, which helps keep the character from becoming reprehensible.”[21]
In this way, Moody has quite a bit in common with Jon Hamm’s character Don Draper on Mad Men. Audiences enjoy the voyeuristic peek into the life of a character that acts with little or no reproach, except the agony that they sometimes exude based on their own actions. In the second season, Californication is direct in equating Hank as a kind of mix between Nick as storyteller and Fitzgerald as artist—two lives audiences have a great deal of insider information about—with Ashby saying to Hank about the latter’s first, famous novel: “God Hates Us All, that was your Gatsby.”
While Hank Moody is patterned after Fitzgerald, he is not a stand-in for him. Some sources claim that the famed poet Charles Bukowski served as the model (Bukowski’s nickname was Hank), but one could speculate that Kapinos had a stylized version of Fitzgerald in mind, perhaps the young, iconic Fitzgerald who got drunk and was the life of the party who is transported to Los Angeles at the height of his fame, not at the end of a gin-soaked life.
Hank is definitely in line with the kind of lifestyle Fitzgerald once lived. Duchovny told a reporter, “A friend said this is the guy you don’t want in your house, but you’re going to invite [him] to the party and you know something is going to happen.” He explained, “That’s really the magic trick of the show. . . . Somehow he gets punished just enough in life, but we don’t want to punish him too much.”[22] Reading through Fitzgerald’s letters and reminisces by people who knew him at the height of his fame, both he and wife Zelda had that “life of the party” mentality—mercurial, spontaneous, and unpredictable.
The major difference is that Hank’s hard-core partying does not seem to take any real toll on his body, whereas the lifestyle of the 1920s and 1930s turned Fitzgerald old beyond his years. Fitzgerald’s poor health from 1935 to 1937 had dire consequences. He could not physically write, which compounded his writer’s block and put him further behind financially. Nearly destitute and living under the umbrella of constant pain, Fitzgerald snapped, declaring in early 1937 to his agent, Harold Ober, “My biggest loss is confidence.”[23] So far, after six seasons of decadence, Hank has yet to pay for his sins. I guess that’s the benefit of being a fictional character and not a fiction writer.
***
Literary critic Clive James represents many commentators when he calls Gatsby “one of the prophetic books of the twentieth century.”[24] Fitz-
gerald’s little gem fulfills many needs for today’s readers, from those who encounter
it as a part of the high school or college curriculum or others who want to understand
many of the thematic issues at the heart of American culture. The success of the 2013
film (eclipsing the magical $100 million mark in its second week in broad release)
adds to the overall notion that Gatsby is and will remain essential.
Fitzgerald hemmed and hawed over the title of the book. He never really settled on it, and then later blamed the title in part for the book’s mediocre sales. However, the title The Great Gatsby speaks to the book’s enduring importance, even in the twenty-first century. Frankly, labeling the title character “great,” then having him murdered at the end, obliges the reader to ponder Fitzgerald’s account of his greatness and its broader implication. The engagement between the author, reader, and the ideas in the text sets up a kind of forced critical thinking. The reader cannot answer questions about the legitimacy of the “great” label without taking into account many disparate themes at the novel’s core.
The title also contains a kind of hope that attracts readers and stimulates their curiosity, even in an era like ours of dark economic scenes and global uncertainty about the future. An aura of mystery exists in the gap between Jay Gatsby’s rise from nothing to vast wealth, the vision he hopes to fulfill, and his ultimate death that enables one to continue believing in the American Dream, even though Gatsby paid the price for his conviction.
In this sense, one can read the novel as support for the rags-to-riches story and the American Dream, particularly if the emphasis is on the title character’s rise to wealth and the lavish parties thrown as a lure to capture Daisy’s heart. One could argue that reading Gatsby as a support for these ideas misinterprets Fitzgerald’s intentions, thus making the novel similar to Hollywood’s attempts at commoditizing both the American Dream and optimism, despite the difficulties audiences face in any given era. Yet there is a “get mine” attitude at the heart of the American Dream that is essential in understanding its modern meaning. Many people would gladly trade health or long life for a shot at fame and riches. Writer Philip Norman explains, “Gatsby is also a very modern figment of the consumer society and its tawdry values, with his vast, yellow, open-topped limousine and the gorgeous shirts he pulls out of his wardrobe in his attempts to impress Daisy. He was into ‘bling,’ too, 80 years ahead of the pack.”[25] The old adage “He who dies with the most toys wins” is perfect in conceptualizing the consumerism that Fitzgerald critiqued and which is rampant today.
Fitzgerald’s ending sermon about continually working against the past, full of hope for a better future is a kind of call for a different vision of America, and more optimistic. One could read this as Fitzgerald championing morality, ethics, and hard work as traits that set people apart. These qualities then define our national dreams and lead to a more truly democratic vision. It is hope—in Fitzgerald’s 1920s and our own twenty-first century—that drives us to reach further and trek faster toward our dreams, the goal just tickling against our feverish fingers as we push on, believing that one day our goals will be achieved.
Richard Brody, “Why The Great Gatsby Endures,” New Yorker, April 30, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/04/the-great-gatsby-the-raw-material.html (accessed May 1, 2013).
Philip Hensher, “Great Gatsby: A Story for the Modern Age,” Telegraph (London), May 23, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/9284394/Great-Gatsby-a-story-for-the-modern-age.html (accessed March 30, 2013).
Hensher, “Great Gatsby.”
Leigh H. Edwards, The Triumph of Reality TV: The Revolution in American Television (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2013), 177.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 49.
Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (New York: Norton, 2007), 209.
Paul Krugman, “For Richer: How the Permissive Capitalism of the Boom Destroyed American Equality,” New York Times Magazine, October 20, 2002, E62.
Krugman, “For Richer,” E65.
Krugman, “For Richer,” E65.
“Apple’s Taxes Expose the Rotten U.S. Code,” Bloomberg, May 21, 2013, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-21/apple-s-taxes-expose-the-rotten-u-s-code.html (accessed May 21, 2013).
Krishnamurthy Sriramesh and Dejan Verčič, Culture and Public Relations: Links and Implications (New York: Routledge, 2012), 2.
“Outsourcing Trends to Watch in 2007,” Fortune, September 3, 2007, S2.
Evan Osnos, “Reading Gatsby in Beijing,” New Yorker, May 2, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/05/reading-gatsby-in-beijing.html (accessed May 20, 2013).
“Gatsby’s Influence Reaches Chinese Fashion,” Jing Daily, May 22, 2013, http://www.jingdaily.com/gatsbys-influence-reaches-chinese-fashion/26871/ (accessed May 23, 2013).
Osnos, “Reading Gatsby in Beijing.”
Quoted in Chloe McConnell, “How to Write about America,” New Yorker, October 1, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/festival/2011/10/how-to-write-about-america.html (accessed January 2, 2013).
Ray B. Browne, “Popular Culture as the New Humanities,” in Popular Culture Theory and Methodology: A Basic Introduction, ed. Harold E. Hinds Jr., Marilyn F. Motz, and Angela M. S. Nelson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 75.
Brendan Riley, e-mail to the author, March 29, 2012.
Brian A. Cogan, e-mail to the author, March 28, 2012.
Quoted in Whitney Pastorek, “David Duchovny,” Entertainment Weekly, 947 (2007): 21–22, Academic Search Complete (accessed December 24, 2011).
Robert Bianco, “Duchovny Delights in Californication,” USA Today, August 13, 2007, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/television/reviews/2007-08-12-californication_N.htm?csp=34 (accessed August 13, 2007).
Richard Huff, “Duchovny Says His Heel Has a Soul, Too,” New York Daily News, September 25, 2009, LexisNexis Academic Solutions (accessed December 24, 2011).
Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 320.
James, Cultural Amnesia, 210.
Philip Norman, “The New Great Gatsbys,” MailOnline (U.K.), June 15, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2160115/The-new-Great-Gatsbys-Why-F-Scott-Fitzgeralds-book-relevant-Twenties.html (accessed March 30, 2013).