The Great Gatsby As A Modernist Novel

[Shawana Messerli]

A stunning piece of work. If Fitzgerald could have wished for one reader of The Great Gatsby, it would have been Ronald Berman. Berman's criticism creates an ideal companion piece to the novel--as brilliantly illuminating about America as it is about fiction, and composed with as much thought and style."

-- Roger Rosenblatt

"An impressive study that brilliantly highlights the oneness of Fitzgerald's art with the overall context of modernism." -- Milton R. Stern, author of The Golden Moment: The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Citing films, dates, places, schedules, Broadway newsstands, and the spoils of manufacture, the author, never lapsing into critical jargon, locates the characters in 'the moving present.' Gatsby, the first of the great novels to emerge from B movies, uses the language of commodities, advertisements, photography, cinematography, and Horatio Alger to present models of identity for characters absorbed in and by what is communicated. . . . Berman concludes that Gatsby 'reassembled' rather than 'invented' himself."

-- A. Hirsh, Choice

In videos on her website, this enterprising author-illustrator explains how she adapted and illustrated the book. She developed many preliminary thumbnails and page layouts. Once her editor had approved them, the illustrator created the linework using Clip Studio Paint and a Wacom Cintiq drawing tablet equipped with a pressure-sensitive stylus.

The lettering itself is a font based on her handwriting, which she and a designer at Candlewick developed using a site called Calligraphr. Thus, the lettering looks like natural comic book calligraphy, yet without the pitfalls of mistakes while handwriting.

Hi Marti. I agree that excerpting is definitely time-consuming and since the original is a noteworthy literary work familiar to everyone, this adaptation requires great sensitivity. There is also another graphic novel version by Fred Fordham and Aya Morton, published in June by Simon & Schuster. So you have two to compare with the original!

The Great Gatsby may be the most popular classic in modern American fiction. Since its publication in 1925, Fitzgerald's masterpiece has become a touchstone for generations of readers and writers, many of whom reread it every few years as a ritual of imaginative renewal. The story of Jay Gatsby's desperate quest to win back his first love reverberates with themes at once characteristically American and universally human, among them the importance of honesty, the temptations of wealth, and the struggle to escape the past. Though The Great Gatsby runs to fewer than two hundred pages, there is no bigger read in American literature.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby is a tragic love story, a mystery, and a social commentary on American life. Although it was not a commercial success for Fitzgerald during his lifetime, this lyrical novel has become an acclaimed masterpiece read and taught throughout the world.

Having left the Midwest to work in the bond business in the summer of 1922, Nick settles in West Egg, Long Island, among the nouveau riche epitomized by his next-door neighbor Jay Gatsby. A mysterious man of thirty, Gatsby is the subject of endless fascination to the guests at his lavish all-night parties. He is rumored to be a hero of the Great War. Others say he served as a German spy. Gatsby claims to have attended Oxford University, but the evidence is suspect. As Nick learns more about Gatsby, every detail about him seems questionable, except his love for the charming Daisy Buchanan.

Jay Gatsby's decadent parties are thrown with one goal: to attract Daisy, who lives across the bay in the more fashionable East Egg. From the lawn of his sprawling mansion, Gatsby can see the green light glowing on her dock, which becomes a symbol in the novel of an unreachable treasure, the "future that year by year recedes before us."

Though Daisy is a married socialite and a mother, Gatsby still worships her as his "golden girl." They first met when she was a young lady from an affluent family and he was a working-class military officer. Daisy pledged to wait for his return from the war. Instead she married Tom Buchanan, a wealthy classmate of Nick's. Having obtained a great fortune, Gatsby sets out to win her back again.

A profound indictment of class privilege in the Jazz Age and beyond, The Great Gatsby explores the conflict between decency and self-indulgence. In the novel's conclusion, the characters collide, leaving human wreckage in their wake.

Nick Carraway

Nick, a young Midwesterner educated at Yale, is the novel's narrator. When he moves to the West Egg area of Long Island, he joins the lavish social world of Tom, Jordan, Gatsby, and his cousin Daisy.

Jay Gatsby

The handsome, mysterious Gatsby, who lives in a mansion next door to Nick's cottage, is known for his lavish parties. Nick, whom he trusts, gradually learns about Gatsby's past and his love for Daisy.

Tom Buchanan

From an enormously wealthy Chicago family, Tom is a former Yale football star who sees himself at the top of an exclusive social hierarchy. He is conceited, violent, racist, and unfaithful.

Jordan Baker

Daisy's friend Jordan epitomizes the modern woman of the 1920s. A liberated, competitive golfer, she is firmly established in high society. She both attracts and repels Nick as a romantic interest.

September 24, 1896: Into a family that traces its ancestry to the author of "The Star Spangled Banner," Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is born in his parents' house on Laurel Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Fitzgerald would not publish another novel for nine years. In 1932, Zelda suffered a breakdown from which she never fully recovered. She spent most of her remaining days in mental institutions. Fitzgerald sold stories to The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire to keep financially afloat. Implicitly acknowledging his wife's mental illness and his own alcoholism, he drew on their life abroad in the novel Tender Is the Night (1934). Fitzgerald relocated to Hollywood in 1937 to write screenplays. His sole screen credit from this period is for the film Three Comrades (1938). It joins his other script credit, Pusher-in-the-Face (1929), from an earlier California stint. Eventually Fitzgerald began sustained work on his novel The Last Tycoon (1941). Tragically, his end came before the book's did. Several chapters shy of finishing, Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in the apartment of his Hollywood companion, columnist Sheilah Graham, while eating a chocolate bar and listening to Beethoven's Eroica symphony.

The Rainbow is the epic story of three generations of the Brangwens, a Midlands family. A visionary novel, it explores the complex sexual and psychological relationships between men and women in an increasingly industrialized world. Originally published in England in 1915, The Rainbow was the subject of an obscenity trial, as a result of which over a thousand copies were burned. Although it was available in the United States, it would be banned in England for many years.

Binx Bolling is a young Korean War veteran, adrift in his own life. He goes to movies and has a series of meaningless flings with his secretaries. But in this laconic novel, this premise expands to become a meditation on emotion and self-examination. Walker Percy won the National Book Award for The Moviegoer, beating the following nominees, among others: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger, and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.

Winner of the 1958 National Book Award, The Wapshot Chronicle is the story of Moses and Coverly Wapshot, two brothers growing up in the fictional New England town of St. Botolphs, Massachusetts. Both brothers wrestle with the lessons and expectations of their father, and both struggle to create their own identity away from St. Botolphs. A story of eccentric, warm characters in an archetypal Massachusetts fishing community, The Wapshot Chronicle established John Cheever as a novelist (he had previously focused on short stories) and a humorist.

First published in 1979, A Bend in the River is a profound and richly observed novel of postcolonial Africa. Salim, a young Indian man, moves to a town on a bend in the river of a recently independent nation. As Salim strives to establish his business, he comes to be closely involved with the fluid and dangerous politics of the newly created state, the remnants of the old regime clashing inevitably with the new.

Francis Phelan is a former basketball player, now grave digger, living in Albany. An alcoholic who accidentally killed his son many years ago, Phelan now wanders around town, occasionally encountering the ghosts of his son and other people he killed. Ironweed won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984, despite being rejected by thirteen publishing houses.

Originally titled American Hunger, this book is an autobiographical account of life in the Jim Crow South. Renowned for its radical portrayal of the realities of African American life under the oppression of Jim Crow, Black Boy was an instant success, a landmark achievement that earned Wright an audience unlike any other African American writer of the time commanded. Wright's powerful, pressing work foretold his eventual ascendance to being one of the most important American authors of the twentieth century, and paved the way for authors like James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry after him

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