Editors' Note

We broke before news of the new record did.

During that last week of June 2019, the 15th International F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference ran flawlessly. Much of the credit goes to the expert organization of our site director, Pascal Bardet, who invited us to the campus of the Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès in honor of the Fitzgeralds' brief but significant excursion through southwestern France in early 1926. Although Bardet's Department of Anglophone World Studies could not have been a more generous host, attendees at the many inspiring presentations, keynotes, and special events felt especially grateful for one particular detail entirely beyond the sponsors' purview: La Maison de la Recherche where the five days of sessions were held was blessedly air-conditioned.

Yet even while our agenda at La Maison ran from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. or so, there was no avoiding going outside. There temperatures remained locked firmly at 40°C. Even for those of us accustomed to steamier climes, the heat felt oppressive and downright ominous. It was not simply the crush of the Metro that carried many attendees to the campus from the beautiful squares of the city center, nor was it the densely populated cafés and brasseries like Les Américains or the Kraken Paradise where we congregated afterhours. It was the deeper awareness that the world around us was fundamentally changing in ways we could not possibly begin to control. All week we kept thinking of Kyle Keeler's essay from last year's F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, "The Great Global Warmer: Jay Gatsby as a Microcosm of Climate Change." For decades environmentalism has been an important issue in literary studies, and while the impending reality of global warming since the 1990s has made the topic increasingly central to the interpretation of twentieth-and twenty-first-century literature, in so many ways the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald has felt irrelevant to the urgency of the dire forecasts for the future now constant in our infosphere. Never mind classics such as Thoreau's Walden (1855) or Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), or the enduring efforts of thoughtful nature writers such as Wendell Berry and his Appalachian descendant Silas House who warn against the stripping of soil and landscape.

Ecocriticism thrives closer to home in modernist studies. Sustainability criticism galore assesses the way William Faulkner astutely protested the plundering of natural resources by Southern agriculture (sharecropping in particular), railroad expansion, or timbering; animal studies looks at depictions pro and con of nonhuman creatures in Hemingway's work to reflect upon the ethics of everything from sport to meat consumption (see Ryan Hediger's newly released Homesickness: Of Trauma and the Longing for Place in a Changing Environment [115–52]). Regardless of whatever alphabet association sponsors its annual conference in wherever locale—the MLA (Modern Language Association) in Chicago or Seattle, the ALA (American Literature Association) in San Diego, or the MSA (Modernist Studies Association) in Toronto—literary studies recognizes the necessity of elevating the role of poetry and fiction in documenting the inexorable altering of the ecosphere across the past two centuries. The arts, in general, likewise acknowledges its duty to dramatize the existential threat posed by this "inconvenient truth."

Yet the prevailing stereotype of Fitzgerald as a reveler—or perhaps an elegist of indulgence and excess—has prevented the field from pushing this pressing topic to the conversational forefront. Keeler's convincing thesis should change that. As he writes, "Gatsby's entire quest for Daisy, which began when he was inspired by Dan Cody's material wealth attained during California's Gold Rush, followed by his adherence to consumer throwaway culture, are … prime examples of values that cause and come to represent both the ash heaps in the novel and our current environmental emergency" (175). The possibility of reconceiving The Great Gatsby as a parable of the "human transformation of the Earth" (176) was certainly on our minds, at any rate, as we stewed in our own juices in Toulouse, eager to explore a place we had never before been but exhausted by the sheer solar intensity.

The breaking point came during the...