Due to copyright restrictions, this title is only available in Canada.

The Great Gatsby is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of American fiction. It tells of the mysterious Jay Gatsby's grand effort to win the love of Daisy Buchanan, the rich girl who embodies for him the promise of the American dream. Deeply romantic in its concern with self-making, ideal love, and the power of illusion, it draws on modernist techniques to capture the spirit of the materialistic, morally adrift, post-war era Fitzgerald dubbed "the jazz age." Gatsby’s aspirations remain inseparable from the rhythms and possibilities suggested by modern consumer culture, popular song, the movies; his obstacles inseparable from contemporary American anxieties about social mobility, racial mongrelization, and the fate of Western civilization.

This Broadview edition sets the novel in context by providing readers with a critical introduction and crucial background material about the consumer culture in which Fitzgerald was immersed; about the spirit of the jazz age; and about racial discourse in the 1920s.

Comments:

"Canadian readers are indeed fortunate to have Michael Nowlin's extremely useful edition of The Great Gatsby. Nowlin provides a wealth of ancillary materials that enhance our understanding and appreciation of Fitzgerald's masterpiece: a selection of Fitzgerald's correspondence about Gatsby; eight advertisements that graphically demonstrate the commodity culture underlying the novel; and, perhaps most worthwhile of all, a selection of contemporary essays that supply an invaluable contextual framework for Gatsby. Throughout, Nowlin's emphasis is on the quality, not quantity of these materials; the result is a book that will be indispensable to students, teachers, and the casual reader alike." - Jackson R. Bryer, University of Maryland

"This edition of The Great Gatsby confirms what Fitzgerald Society members have long believed: Michael Nowlin is a leader in the emerging generation of Fitzgerald scholars. His introduction here charts the intensely personal journey through love, loss, and ambition that Fitzgerald traveled in order to realize his masterpiece; Nowlin's appendices, meanwhile, provide secondary sources for appreciating the chaotic energies of youth, race, and cultural change compelling the novel's inexorable tragedy. Whether excerpting Fitzgerald's mid-1920s correspondence, contemporary reviews, or nonfiction gems of the day—including Zelda Fitzgerald's insightful 'What Became of the Flappers?' (1925)—Nowlin dramatizes how thoroughly Jay Gatsby's creator intuited the sadness and uncertainty beneath the glitz and gild of modernity's most golden of decades." - Kirk Curnutt, Troy University, Vice-President of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society

Michael Nowlin is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria. He is the author of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness (2007) and editor of the Broadview edition of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (2002).

Table of Contents: [Back to Top]

Acknowledgments

Introduction

F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Brief Chronology

A Note on the Text

The Great Gatsby

Appendix A: Fitzgerald's Correspondence about The Great Gatsby (1922-25)

Appendix B: Contemporary Reviews

1. H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun (2 May 1925)
2. William Rose Benet, Saturday Review of Literature (9 May 1925)
3. William Curtis, Town & Country (15 May 1925)
4. Carl Van Vechten, The Nation (20 May 1925)
5. Gilbert Seldes, The Dial (August 1925)

Appendix C: Consumption, Class, and Selfhood: Eight Contemporary Advertisements

Appendix D: The Irreverent Spirit of the Jazz Age

1. From F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Echoes of the Jazz Age" (1931)
2. Duncan M. Poole, "The Great Jazz Trial" (1922)
3. From H.L. Mencken, ["Five Years of Prohibition"] (1924)
4. Zelda Fitzgerald, "What Became of the Flappers?" (1925)
5. From Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (1929)

Appendix E: Race and the National Culture, 1920-25

1. From Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920)
2. From Henry Ford, Jewish Influences in American Life (1921)
3. From Frederick C. Howe, "The Alien" (1922)
4. Miguel Covurrubias, "The Sheik of Dahomey" (illustration, 1924)

Select Bibliography