Summary
Summary
Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby has become one of the world's best-loved books, delighting readers across the world. Careless People tells the true story behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, exploring in newly rich detail the relation of Fitzgerald's classic to the chaotic world he in which he lived. Fitzgerald set his novel in 1922, and Careless People carefully reconstructs the crucial months during which Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald returned to New York in the autumn of 1922-the parties, the drunken weekends at Great Neck, Long Island, the drives back into the city to the jazz clubs and speakeasies, the casual intersection of high society and organized crime, and the growth of celebrity culture of which the Fitzgeralds themselves were the epitome. And for the first time it returns to the story of Gatsby the high-profile murder that provided a crucial inspiration for Fitzgerald's tale.With wit and insight, Sarah Churchwell traces the genesis of a masterpiece, discovering where fiction comes from and how it takes shape in the mind of a genius. Blending biography and history with lost and forgotten newspaper accounts, letters, and newly discovered archival material, Careless People is the biography of a book, telling the extraordinary tale of how F. Scott Fitzgerald created a classic and in the process discovered modern America.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
University of East Anglia literature professor Churchwell (The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe) evokes the Jazz Age in all its ephemeral glamour and recklessness in her latest book. Drawing on newspaper articles, correspondence, diary entries, scrapbooks, and newly discovered archival material, the author presents "a collage" of Scott and Zelda Fitzgeralds' world and a social history of the times. Churchwell focuses on 1922-the year the couple moved to Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island, and a gruesome, unsolved double murder (the Mills-Hall case, "the crime of the decade") took place in nearby New Jersey. She excels at providing rich period details-drugstores selling illegal liquor, ubiquitous car crashes-to show how the patchwork quality of the times affected Fitzgerald's thinking as he composed The Great Gatsby. Indeed, the book highlights how accurately Fitzgerald intuited what was to come: the damage being done to American society by focusing on wealth; the way mass media would give rise to a celebrity culture. Yet, in an effort to find a new angle on The Great Gatsby, Churchwell strains to establish a close connection between the Mills-Hall murders and Fitzgerald's work on the book, with little evidence to support the tie, other than the fact that they occurred around the same time. Illus. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency.(Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Choice Review
A journalist, broadcaster, author, and academic, Churchwell (University of East Anglia, UK) combines gossipy entertainment with serious scholarship in this appealing account of the milieu that surrounded F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing of The Great Gatsby. Using as a fulcrum the Halls-Mill murders in New Jersey, which she suggestively ties to the atmosphere of Roaring Twenties sensationalism as well as to the development of Gatsby, the author depicts the zeitgeist of that era. She manages the complex swirl of social, political, cultural, artistic, and literary phenomena in a way that delivers an incisive close reading and penetrating analysis of Fitzgerald's classic. In other words, while regaling the reader with details about Scott's and Zelda's incessant partying (and eventual decline)--and their associations with celebrities, writers, journalists, musicians, old-money aristocrats, and newly rich entrepreneurs (legitimate and otherwise)--Churchwell provides rich commentary about the possible influences on Fitzgerald's work as it developed in the early years of a flapper culture that Zelda and Scott helped to create. The discussions of Scott's relationship with writers like John Dos Passos, Ring Lardner, and Edmund Wilson that punctuate Careless People are unobtrusive but relevant, even brilliant. --Lawton Andrew Brewer, Georgia Northwestern Technical College
Library Journal Review
A carefully researched blend of biography, literary criticism, and history, this chronicle of the Jazz Age captures the drunken mayhem of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's marriage as it analyzes Scott's novel The Great Gatsby and its sources. The Fitzgeralds' lives typified those of the rich in New York during the wild days of prohibition, although Scott ended up dying penniless. Churchwell (The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe) convincingly places Gatsby among the great American novels whose underlying themes are still valid today. Unfortunately, she spends more time than necessary discussing the Hall-Mills case, a New Jersey double murder that was a possible inspiration for the Tom Buchanan and Myrtle relationship in the novel. Kate Reading's narration is clear and appropriate. VERDICT For Gatsby fans and those literature and history buffs seeking a thorough look at the world it inhabits. ["This well-written and entertaining study is highly recommended for anyone who wants to know how a great work of art evolved out of disparate materials, as well as those who are interested in the history of the United States in the 1920s," read the review of the Penguin Pr. hc, LJ 1/14.]-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.