On The Great Gatsby

“The Great Gatsby is one of the three perfect books I go back to. I wasn’t able to fully comprehend the novel when I first read it in high school in Sacramento. To really understand the book, you have to know about the east, about what it means to buck up against the east.” —Joan Didion

“Fitzgerald saw our American world with clearer eyes than any of his contemporaries.” —Tobias Wolff

“In Fitzgerald’s work there is a thrilling sense of knowing exactly where one is—the city, the resort, the hotel, the decade, and the time of day.”
—John Cheever

“The Great Gatsby is incomparably the best piece of work you have done. Evidences of careful workmanship are on every page. The thing is well managed, and has a fine surface.”
—H.L. Mencken, in a letter to Fitzgerald

“The Great Gatsby has interested and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for a number of years…In fact, it seems to me the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James…” —T.S. Eliot

The above quotes were taken from New Essays on the Great Gatsby, Edited by Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (Cambridge University Press, 1985)

“[Nick Carraway] is both stage manager and chorus, recreating situations in all their actuality, and at the same time commenting upon them. Sometimes he even devises the action—contrives the circumstances by which the actors are brought together on the stage: it is he who arranges the reunion of Gatsby and Daisy.” —Brian Way, “The Great Gatsby,” Modern Critical Interpretations of The Great Gatsby

“Although there are fine-tuned differences and distinctions among all of the principals, there is one common bond. They are one and all outsiders.” —George Garrett, “Fire and Freshness: A Matter of Style in The Great Gatsby”

“Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country’s writers.” —Jonathan Yardley, “ ‘Gatsby’ the Greatest of Them All,” published on January 2, 2007 in The Washington Post

“Fitzgerald’s work captures the evaporating memory of the American Eden while connecting it to the advent of the New World of smartness and thuggery and corruption. It was his rite of passage; it is our bridge to the time before “dreams” were slogans. He wanted to call it Among the Ashheaps and Millionaires—thank heaven that his editor, Maxwell Perkins, talked him out of it. It was nearly entitled just plain Gatsby. It remains “the great” because it confronts the defeat of youth and beauty and idealism, and finds the defeat unbearable, and then turns to face the defeat unflinchingly. With The Great Gatsby, American letters grew up.” —Christopher Hitchens, “The Road to West Egg,” published in Vanity Fair, May 2000

“The core of Gatsby’s tragedy is not only that he lived by dreams, but that the woman and the class and the way of life of which he dreamed—that life of the rich which the novel so ruthlessly exposes—fell so far short of the scope of his imagination.” —Brian Way, “The Great Gatsby,” Modern Critical Interpretations of The Great Gatsby

Compiled by Jenna Clark Embrey, A.R.T. Literary Intern.