Recommendations from our site
“My book, Careless People, is really the biography of a book. It’s the true story behind Gatsby, a mix of biography, social history and literary essay. So it tells the story of the parties and speakeasies and high life in New York and Long Island, what Scott and Zelda were doing, and weaves that in with a broader social history about what’s happening in the world at the time – fascism is on the rise, for example – and then ties that back to Gatsby, explaining how this helps us understand the novel better. My book takes place over four months in 1922, which is when The Great Gatsby is set. The Great Gatsby takes place from June to September 1922, and my book takes place from September to December 1922: September is when the Fitzgeralds returned to New York from the Midwest. They moved to Great Neck, Long Island, which Fitzgerald would transform into West Egg in Gatsby, in October 1922, and the parties that would inspire the novel kicked off.” Read more...
Sarah Churchwell, Literary Scholar
Our most recommended books
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Walter Sickert: A Conversation
by Virginia Woolf -
How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
by Jenny Odell -
The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde -
Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea
ed. Rosalind Morris, original essay by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak -
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
by Ernst Robert Curtius -
Studies in the History of the Renaissance
by Walter Pater
