![]() If only to set the stage for the story of Gatsby’s dramatic return as The Great American Novel, Corrigan reconstructs Fitzgerald’s personal failures-his years of alcoholism and writer’s blocks-and keys them to the crucial dates and dead ends in the book’s publication history. He worried that when his daughter “Scottie assures her friends I was an author” she’ll learn “no book is procurable” (214). In May 1940, six months before his death, Fitzgerald had pleaded with his editor Max Perkins to consider bringing back Gatsby as a “25 cent” pocketbook. Writers of Fitzgerald’s obituaries who bothered to mention Gatsby generally dismissed it as a frivolous relic of the Jazz Age. When Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940, the novel was out of print and sales and royalties had dwindled to nothing. Gatsby was published to critical applause in 1925, but sales were disappointing and Scribners wound up warehousing the second printing. Along the way, Corrigan reconstructs in detail the moments when The Great Gatsby almost ceased to be. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby rose from a near death to become “our Great American Novel,” and how, in her view, it endures as one of the “modernist masterworks,” a work to be set alongside Ulysses and The Wasteland (23, 176). Corrigan is, after all, telling the story of how Minnesotan F. ![]() Maureen Corrigan’s So We Read On moves forward with the spirit and energy of a triumphal march. ![]()
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