Under the Red White and Blue
Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An "astute, challenging, and far-reaching” look (Kirkus Reviews, starred) at how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s vision of the American Dream has been understood, portrayed, distorted, misused, and kept alive
“Now more than ever, we need to think long and hard about our collective national fantasies. There's no one better suited to this task than Greil Marcus.”—David Treuer, author of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee
Renowned critic Greil Marcus takes on the fascinating legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. An enthralling parable (or a cheap metaphor) of the American Dream as a beckoning finger toward a con game, a kind of virus infecting artists of all sorts over nearly a century, Fitzgerald’s story has become a key to American culture and American life itself.
Marcus follows the arc of The Great Gatsby from 1925 into the ways it has insinuated itself into works by writers such as Philip Roth and Raymond Chandler; found echoes in the work of performers from Jelly Roll Morton to Lana Del Rey; and continued to rewrite both its own story and that of the country at large in the hands of dramatists and filmmakers from the 1920s to John Collins’s 2006 Gatz and Baz Luhrmann’s critically reviled (here celebrated) 2013 movie version—the fourth, so far.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In an idiosyncratic book that occasionally soars, critic Marcus (Real Life Rock) traces The Great Gatsby's impact on America's popular imagination. Marcus spends much of his time on various works based on or inspired by the novel: stage plays, Hollywood films, live readings, Saturday Night Live skits, and even a billboard in F. Scott Fitzgerald's birthplace of St. Paul, Minn. He also discusses responses to Fitzgerald's work from other writers, such as Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald; Fitzgerald's mostly ill-starred Hollywood writing career; and parallels between Gatsby and Moby-Dick. In one of the strongest sections, Marcus discusses The 7 Lively Arts by Fitzgerald's friend Gilbert Seldes, a 1924 analysis of the popular culture of the Roaring Twenties era, which the novel now epitomizes. In another strong entry, Marcus incisively critiques the botched 1949 Gatsby film starring Alan Ladd, "one of the most enervating movies ever made." However, the amount of space he grants to summaries of performances or movies, though invariably well-written, sometimes overwhelm the book's critical component. If the many facts and ideas gathered by Marcus sometimes feel like too daunting a pile of glittering cultural detritus, taken in small amounts they do result in an entertaining meander for Fitzgerald fans.