The Beautiful and Damned This Side of Paradise The Great Gatsby Other F. Scott Fitzgerald books published by Warbler Press This edition includes a biographical timeline and the full text of Zelda Fitzgerald’s spoof review of The Beautiful and the Damned, which appeared in the New York Tribune. Includes a biographical timeline and the full text of the career-launching reviews that appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The New Republic, The Evening Post, and The Evening World. Includes an insightful new afterword, select first edition reviews, and a biographical timeline. Check out the companion podcast at Think About It. From Ulrich Baer's Afterword to the Annotated Warbler Press edition of The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby occupies so much real estate in the American imagination today that it is hard to imagine that the book was greeted by ambivalent, tepid, and even hostile reviews when published in 1925. Though not all critics were scathing, the New York World reviewer called it “a dud,” while the Saturday Review wrote, “Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking…The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.” Fitzgerald had enormous hopes for The Great Gatsby, his third, shortest, and—we know today—not only his finest writing but one of the best novels of all time. “The happiest thought I have is of my new novel,” Fitzgerald wrote, announcing his idea for The Great Gatbsy in a letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, from Paris in 1925.” [I]t is something really NEW in form, idea, structure—the model for the age that Joyce and Stien [sic] are searching for, that Conrad didn’t find.” Fitzgerald hoped to break free from chronicling the Jazz Age (a term he invented for the 1920s, along with “emotional bankruptcy”) in thinly disguised autobiographical books, and wrote a novel not only about and for his age, but also for the ages. He wanted to achieve something like James Joyce’s Ulysses, which he admired and also satirized as containing the “revelation…that there are a lot of neglected Anglo-Saxon words.” But even his stalwart editor and muse, Perkins, after the Modern Library series published by Random House dropped The Great Gatsby in 1938 for lack of sales, commented that Fitzgerald had regrettably not yet published “a major book (that seems to be the current phrase nowadays).” Today, thanks to the book’s dramatic rise in popularity after hundreds of thousands of free copies were given to U.S. soldiers during World War II, successive critical reassessments, cheap mass printings in the 1950s, and several Hollywood adaptations, we no longer ask, “who’s Gatsby?” like the mindless hangers-on at his parties. We no longer dismiss Fitzgerald for not having published a “major book,” like the indifferent reading public in 1925 and the company men at Random House. We “get” Gatsby, which tops countless lists of greatest novels, and in our understanding we differ from the philistines of Fitzgerald’s time who failed to see it as the “very extraordinary book” we know today. Still, our contemporary celebration of Gatsby does not make us necessarily more sophisticated, smarter, more discerning than the naysayers of Fitzgerald’s time. We credit ourselves with understanding Gatsby because we appreciate Fitzgerald’s ironic intent in describing Gatsby’s magical “blue gardens,” buckets of champagne, his aquaplane, and shirts woven of the finest yarns spilling from custom closets. We perceive these extravagances as merely poignant props in what is a tale of unrequited longing and a shattered dream. That knowledge endows Gatsby’s “purposeless splendor” with a significance far greater than its superficial and extravagant beauty. But once we recognize the “purpose” behind Gatsby’s mansion, which is to win back his lost love, we risk not appreciating all that it is. We are not dismissive of Gatsby like the brutish, racist, sexist, and adulterous Tom Buchanan, who calls out Gatsby for being a fake and an unworthy rival and opponent. We are not cruel in rejecting him like Daisy Buchanan, who ultimately chooses Tom’s offer of safe money and a respectable name, rather than Gatsby’s new money and true love. And we do not fool ourselves into thinking we are as indifferent to the allure of wealth as Nick Carraway, who rather too-stubbornly asserts that, unlike everyone around, he does not care for mansions ringed by manicured lawns, top-shelf liquor, grand hotels, fancy cars, and perhaps also not for beautiful women. But our sophistication is is not achieved freely. We understand Fitzgerald’s dissection of American values and his historical moment. What we gain in understanding Gatsby may also be our loss of belief in pure, purposeless beauty, in carefree happiness, and in the idea that the American Dream still beckons us today.
✔ Author(s): F. Scott Fitzgerald
✔ Title: The Beautiful and Damned: Annotated Warbler Classics Edition
✔ Rating : 4.4 out of 5 base on (44 reviews)
✔ ISBN-10: 1734029226
✔ Language: English
✔ Format ebook: PDF, EPUB, Kindle, Audio, HTML and MOBI
✔ Device compatibles: Android, iOS, PC and Amazon Kindle
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