The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald's World of Ideas [antikvár]

IhTRODUCTIO F i or most of his professional life, F. Scott Fitzgerald was deeply aware of the conflict between modern times and what he called, in 1937, "the old America."^ Sometimes that older nation appears in his work, as in "The Diamond As Big as the Ritz," self-evidently ready for renewal or for destruction. It is a world of excess and pretense, with a special morality of wealth. Like many other Americans, Fitzgerald called the prewar past Victorian, and like them, he no longer felt bound by its imperatives. But that world will also be viewed, as Charlie Wales recalls it in "Babylon Revisited," as at least a point of certainty—if it were only possible morally and intellectually to "jump back a whole generation."^ The major figures of The Great Gatshy are located between those two American worlds. Like "The Diamond As Big as the Ritz," The Great