F Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (Icon Reader's Guides to Essential Criticism) Paperback - 1997

First line

THE GREAT Gatsby was not hailed as a masterpiece on its first appearance in April 1925.

From the rear cover

F. Scott Fitzgerald has become something of a defining figure of the twenties - the decade he so famously described as 'The Jazz Age'. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's writing is at its finest, exposing a society's tendency towards decadence and moral collapse through a decade of hedonism. Regarded as the most searching and tightly written of his novels, The Great Gatsby was the work that assured Fitzgerald's place amongst the major writers of the twentieth century.

In this Readers' Guide, Nicolas Tredell introduces and sets in context the key critical debates surrounding a novel about which more critical material exists than any other work of American fiction. The extracts and essays included here reflect on The Great Gatsby's place as one of the first American novels to make significant use of modernist techniques, and explore the influence of the work on later American writings. Considering secondary sources from the Twenties to the present, the Guide offers readers an invaluable resource for the study of this complex rendering of a moment in American history.