"A stunning piece ofwork. If Fitzgerald could have wished for one reader of The Great Gatsby,it would have been Ronald Berman. Berman's criticism creates an idealcompanion piece to the novel--as brilliantly illuminating about Americaas it is about fiction, and composed with as much thought and style." -- Roger Rosenblatt"An impressive studythat brilliantly highlights the oneness of Fitzgerald's art with the overallcontext 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 charactersin 'the moving present.' Gatsby, the first of the great novelsto emerge from B movies, uses the language of commodities, advertisements,photography, cinematography, and Horatio Alger to present models of identityfor characters absorbed in and by what is communicated. . . . Berman concludesthat Gatsby 'reassembled' rather than 'invented' himself."-- A. Hirsh, Choice
