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Introduction
- The University of Alabama Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction “The Great Gatsby is inexhaustible,”Matthew J.Bruccoli wrote in his introduction to New Essays on“The Great Gatsby” in 1985.A quarter of a century’s further work on the novel has not proved him wrong. Surprisingly, Bruccoli’s statement also holds for studies of the author’s sources and the actual process of the novel’s composition.Even as the times recede in which the manuscript was written and revised, and even as the materials the author made use of disappear from view, new facts about the genesis of the novel can be brought to light.And rather than merely adding to our knowledge, they actually correct previous assumptions and change our perspective on The Great Gatsby as much as they enhance our assessment and understanding of Fitzgerald ’s creative imagination. The four essays in this collection are all concerned with material that Fitzgerald either worked with or worked from.They are the result of journeys of discovery,in a literal sense of the term as much as in a metaphorical sense. While each essay was begun as a separate study and involved its separate journey , and while each was allowed to determine its own development and its own scope—altogether independent of any overarching thesis to prejudice both procedure and findings—they yet converge in their overall conclusions. They all go to confirm my view that the author’s flights of fancy,even at their most spectacular,are securely grounded in biographical experience as well as 2 introduction in the social and literary circumstances of his time.The essays thus become chapters in a study of Fitzgerald’s working habits at a point in his development as a writer when he was turning away from the largely autobiographical matter of his first two novels and began searching for new materials and a more objective approach in the writing of what became The Great Gatsby. Four such essays, even as they combine to become chapters in a book, do not make an exhaustive study of the writing of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, to be sure.Rather,like all scholarship,they invite and hope to promote further work along the same or similar lines.Still,the essays assembled here do claim to be representative, not merely through the convergence of their method and their findings, but because they deliberately focus on facets of the novel and its writing that before all others would seem to commend themselves to the attention of readers as well as critics and scholars.These facets, in the order of their subsequent arrangement, are the following: the material that provided Fitzgerald with the basic inspiration for his protagonist as much as for his theme and narrative technique, the laying out of the opening chapter of the novel, the inspiration for a pivotal scene in the very center of the work,and the ideological frame for the working out of the final scene in the final chapter of his book. Reconstructing the biography of Max von Gerlach (in the first essay) as that of a German immigrant with a past as shady as Jay Gatsby’s is made out to be in the novel took me on not a few journeys to various archives and libraries in the United States as well as in Germany.It involved lengthy correspondence with authorities high and low and sent me on seemingly endless Internet searches as ever-new material became available online.Along with an earlier version first published in The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, now superseded in its conclusions, the essay has taken me ever sinceArthur Mizener’s first mention of Max von Guerlach as a model for Jay Gatsby—as long ago as 1951—to come to a satisfactory conclusion. Another journey, again undertaken in various installments over a period of years, sent me to Long Island to explore its actual and moral geographies in relation to the Fitzgeralds and their circle of friends and neighbors,as well as its role in the infamous eugenics movement.Taking me to highways (such as the JerichoTurnpike) and byways (such as Hitchcock Lane) and involving interviews with scholars,librarians,and local people,the search (as pre- [3.230.1.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:40 GMT) introduction 3 sented in the second essay) helped me to gather insights into the complexity and allusiveness of Fitzgerald’s opening chapter. The journey of discovery that took me east rather than west (as recounted in the third essay) was not a...