“I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” You can hear the sigh of despair in Nick’s voice at the end of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. But, why the despair? The West, after all, is the Land of Promise. It is a rather important part of the American Story. Go West, Young Man! Trivia time: what is the origin of … [Read more...] about Gatsby, Huck, and the American Dream
F Scott Fitzgerald
A Cautionary Tale
“You know these new novels make me tired….Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I’ve read ‘This Side of Paradise.’ Are our girls really like that? If it’s true to life, which I don’t believe, the next generation is going to the dogs. I’m sick of all this shoddy realism. I think there’s a place for the romanticist in literature.” Thus says a character is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. (Gotta love Fitzgerald having a character complain about Fitzgerald’s previous … [Read more...] about A Cautionary Tale
The College Carnival
Whenever a school year winds down, nostalgia creeps in. There is a sameness to the rhythm of college. While the individuals change, the nature of the average student doesn’t change much. Indeed, it hasn’t changed much since at least 1920. That was the year F. Scott Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise. This novel is one of those inter-war expressions of the hopelessness of the modern age. And after a century of unbelievable change, I was shocked at how much Amory Blaine … [Read more...] about The College Carnival