The Great Great Gatsby

The National Post takes a look back at the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald and discusses his literary legacy.

From the article...

The fact that a major publisher believes this slight and uneven work deserves reprinting is one more proof of Fitzgerald's enduring status.

The account of his drinking was probably amusing at the time but it makes uneasy reading for those who know, as millions do, that when he wrote it he was drinking himself to death. Eleven years after he set down that apparently jovial chronicle, his heart gave out and he was dead at 44.

Seven decades later, his career remains a source of wonder, admiration and retrospective anxiety. In almost every corner of life, from handling money to handling liquor, he lacked shrewdness and a sense of survival. Yet he had a strong sense of himself, and a feeling for the demands of literature. In this book we find him writing: "My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer, I think, writes for the youth of his own generation, the critic of the next and the schoolmasters of ever afterward."

He was critically dismissed during his last years and died believing himself a failure. But the sales records of today, the opinions of other writers and the current judgments of critics suggest that he was an author of spectacular resilience. When The Great Gatsby was published, T.S. Eliot wrote to Fitzgerald: "It seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James." Eliot had it right.

In 2002, a trade magazine asked a group of authors, editors and agents to name the most powerful character in literature since 1900. They chose Jay Gatsby and, in second place, Holden Caulfield, from J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. It was Holden who famously told us "I was crazy about The Great Gatsby. That killed me." So Fitzgerald came both first and second in the same poll. (Third and fourth were, respectively, Nabokov's Lolita and Joyce's Leopold Bloom.)