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A review by brighteyes1178
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell
5.0
I've read The Great Gatsby probably fifty times in the course of teaching it for the last twelve years, and looked up background info on Fitzgerald at least once a year, and I was shocked at how much I didn't know about what was behind its genesis. And what is behind it is pretty fascinating. Fitzgerald plagiarized his entire life and the lives of everyone around him, yet created something wholly new and his own. I think I'm even more impressed with Gatsby as a work of art after reading this even than I am in trying to discuss the scope of it with teenagers every year.
This is a biography of the both the book and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and to a lesser extent, the Jazz Age. And it's almost as if writing about beautiful, well-constructed prose makes the author, Sarah Churchwell, construct her own narrative beautifully and with choice diction. She never lost my attention once, even in her fancier flights of vocabulary.
I will say that if this book interests you and you haven't read Gatsby in a long time, you should reread it first. Having involuntarily memorized much of the book through reading aloud and reading hundreds of essays and assignments that quote long passages, I didn't have trouble. But there were even a few passages that I struggled to place, so if you aren't an American lit teacher but this sounds good, I'd say read both.
This is a biography of the both the book and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and to a lesser extent, the Jazz Age. And it's almost as if writing about beautiful, well-constructed prose makes the author, Sarah Churchwell, construct her own narrative beautifully and with choice diction. She never lost my attention once, even in her fancier flights of vocabulary.
I will say that if this book interests you and you haven't read Gatsby in a long time, you should reread it first. Having involuntarily memorized much of the book through reading aloud and reading hundreds of essays and assignments that quote long passages, I didn't have trouble. But there were even a few passages that I struggled to place, so if you aren't an American lit teacher but this sounds good, I'd say read both.