CHS Nonfiction Books on The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby: the limits of wonder (Richard Daniel Lehan)
1. Historical Context
2. The Importance of the Work
3. Critical Reception
4. The Road to West Egg
5. A Son of God
6. His Father’s Business: Dan Cody and Meyer Wolfsheim
7. Inventing Gatsby
8. Careless People: Daisy Fay
9. “Civilization’s Going to Pieces”: Tom Buchanan
10. Sugar Lumps and Ash Heaps: George and Myrtle Wilson
11. Careless Driving: Nick Carraway
12. Seeing and Misseeing: Narrative Unfolding
13. A Blanket of Prose: Style and Meaning
Understanding The Great Gatsby (Michael Wyly)
1. The Humanity of The Great Gatsby
2. The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. The Jazz Age, Gangsters, and the American Dream
4. Wealth, Love, and Tragedy
5. The Characters of The Great Gatsby
6. Themes in The Great Gatsby
Readings on The Great Gatsby (Ed. Katie de Koster, Greenhaven Press)
Chapter 1: Who Is Jay Gatsby?
1. Gatsby Is a Classic Romantic
2. Gatsby Is a Sinister Gangster
3. Gatsby Is a Profoundly Comic Character
4. Gatsby Is a Pathological Narcissist
5. Gatsby Is a Fairy-Tale Hero for the Middle Class
Chapter 2: Reflections of America in The Great Gatsby
1. The Cynical Views of an American Literary Generation
2. The American Dream: All Gush and Twinkle
3. Delusions of American Idealism
4. The True Heir of the American Dream
5. The Grotesque End Product of the American Dream
6. Ethics in Gatsby: An Examination of American Values
7. Corruption and Anti-Immigrant Sentiments Skew a Traditional American Tale
8. A Farewell to Flappers
Chapter 3: The Art of The Great Gatsby
1. An Introduction to Gatsby
2. The High Cost of Immersion
3.
4.
5.
6.
Using a Dramatic Narrator to Present
Creating a Creator
Fitzgerald’s Remarkable Narrative Art
Transforming Old Values into New Art
Public Library Nonfiction Books on The Great Gatsby
20th
Century Interpretations of The Great Gatsby (Ed. Maynard Mack)
Part One- Interpretations
 Boats Against the Current
 Scott Fitzgerald’s Criticism of America
 Scott Fitzgerald’s Fable of East and West
 The Theme and Narrator of The Great Gatsby
 Against The Great Gatsby
 Dream, Design, and Interpretation in The Great Gatsby
Part Two- View Points
 Maxwell Perkins: Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
 Conrad Aiken: F. Scott Fitzgerald
 Peter Quennell: The Great Gatsby
 F. Scott Fitzgerald: Letter to Edmund Wilson
 Edith Wharton: Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
 Richard Chase: From “Three Novels of Manners”
 F. Scott Fitzgerald: Introduction to The Great Gatsby
 Lionel Trilling: F. Scott Fitzgerald
 F. Scott Fitzgerald: Letter to his Daughter
Gatsby: Major Literary Characters (Ed. Harold Bloom)
 Gatsby and the Hole in Time
 The Great Gatsby as Pastoral
 The Promised Land
 Entropy vs. Ecology in The Great Gatsby
 The Great Gatsby: Apogee of Fitzgerald’s mythopoeia
 The Great Gatsby: Fitzgerald’s Droit de Seigneur
 Pecuniary Emulation of the Mediator in The Great Gatsby
 Glamor on the Turn
 Fiction as Greatness: The Case of Gatsby
 The Mystery of Ungodliness
 Gatsby and Emerson
 Within and Without: Nick Carraway
 Inventing Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: A Critical Commentary (Monarch Notes, Stanley
Cooperman)
1. The Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Book: The Great Gatsby
3. The Characters
Bloom’s Major Novelists: F. Scott Fitzgerald (Ed. Harold Bloom)
 Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald
 Plot Summary of The Great Gatsby
 Different Forms of Wealth
 Symbolism of the East and the West
 The Two Levels of Daisy Buchanan
 The Odor of Mortality
 The Pattern of Pastoralism
 Two Versions of the Hero
 The Narrator of Gatsby
 A “Man’s Book”
 The Car and Car Culture
 The Search for Order
 The Oxymoron
 Allusions to The Waste Land
 Gatsby as a Statement of America
 Gatsby’s Failure
 Gatsby and Conrad’s Kurtz
 The New Agenda of the Twenties
 Race and Racism
 List of Themes (p.87)