Great Gatsby and Modern Times

"A stunning piece of

        work. If Fitzgerald could have wished for one reader of The Great Gatsby,

        it would have been Ronald Berman. Berman's criticism creates an ideal

        companion piece to the novel--as brilliantly illuminating about America

        as it is about fiction, and composed with as much thought and style."

       

        -- Roger Rosenblatt

      "An impressive study

        that brilliantly highlights the oneness of Fitzgerald's art with the overall

        context of modernism." -- Milton R. Stern, author of The Golden

        Moment: The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald

      "Citing films, dates,

        places, schedules, Broadway newsstands, and the spoils of manufacture,

        the author, never lapsing into critical jargon, locates the characters

        in 'the moving present.' Gatsby, the first of the great novels

        to emerge from B movies, uses the language of commodities, advertisements,

        photography, cinematography, and Horatio Alger to present models of identity

        for characters absorbed in and by what is communicated. . . . Berman concludes

        that Gatsby 'reassembled' rather than 'invented' himself."

        -- A. Hirsh, Choice