The Great Gatsby
In praise of The Great Gatsby
'Gatsby': The Greatest Of Them All
By JONATHAN YARDLEY
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
An occasional series in which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable books from the past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway met for the first time in 1925 in Paris, just as Fitzgerald's third novel, "The Great Gatsby," was being published in the United States. As recounted in the previous Second Reading, Hemingway was not a kind man and was especially unkind to Fitzgerald in "A Moveable Feast," his memoir of Paris in the 1920s, but when Fitzgerald gave him a copy of "Gatsby," Hemingway had to draw in his horns. With characteristic self-importance, he said it was now his duty to "try to be a good friend" to Fitzgerald because, he acknowledged, "If he could write a book as fine as 'The Great Gatsby' I was sure that he could write an even better one."
He never did. He took a bold shot at it a decade later with "Tender Is the Night," a thinly veiled account of the wealthy expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy and their circle, and at his death in 1940 he had written a significant part of a novel about Hollywood, "The Love of the Last Tycoon," published the next year in its uncompleted form, but "Gatsby" was, and remains, the monumental achievement of Fitzgerald's career. Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that it is Fitzgerald's masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country's writers.
To say this is not to call "The Great Gatsby" the Great American Novel . . . It seems to me, though, that no American novel comes closer than "Gatsby" to surpassing literary artistry, and none tells us more about ourselves. In an extraordinarily compressed space -- the novel is barely 50,000 words long -- Fitzgerald gives us a meditation on some of this country's most central ideas, themes, yearnings and preoccupations: the quest for a new life, the preoccupation with class, the hunger for riches and "the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."
'Gatsby': The Greatest Of Them All
By JONATHAN YARDLEY
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
An occasional series in which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable books from the past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway met for the first time in 1925 in Paris, just as Fitzgerald's third novel, "The Great Gatsby," was being published in the United States. As recounted in the previous Second Reading, Hemingway was not a kind man and was especially unkind to Fitzgerald in "A Moveable Feast," his memoir of Paris in the 1920s, but when Fitzgerald gave him a copy of "Gatsby," Hemingway had to draw in his horns. With characteristic self-importance, he said it was now his duty to "try to be a good friend" to Fitzgerald because, he acknowledged, "If he could write a book as fine as 'The Great Gatsby' I was sure that he could write an even better one."
He never did. He took a bold shot at it a decade later with "Tender Is the Night," a thinly veiled account of the wealthy expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy and their circle, and at his death in 1940 he had written a significant part of a novel about Hollywood, "The Love of the Last Tycoon," published the next year in its uncompleted form, but "Gatsby" was, and remains, the monumental achievement of Fitzgerald's career. Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that it is Fitzgerald's masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country's writers.
To say this is not to call "The Great Gatsby" the Great American Novel . . . It seems to me, though, that no American novel comes closer than "Gatsby" to surpassing literary artistry, and none tells us more about ourselves. In an extraordinarily compressed space -- the novel is barely 50,000 words long -- Fitzgerald gives us a meditation on some of this country's most central ideas, themes, yearnings and preoccupations: the quest for a new life, the preoccupation with class, the hunger for riches and "the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."
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