The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald's World of Ideas

Berman examines the intellectual and cultural milieu in which The

Great Gatsby was created--and challenges accepted interpretations of

Fitzgerald's greatest novel. "The Great Gatsby" and Fitzgerald's World of Ideas

focuses on F. Scott Fitzgerald and the prevailing ideas and values

that permeated American society in the late teens and early twenties, providing

a vivid portrait of the intellectual and cultural milieu in which The

Great Gatsby was produced.

This new and original reading of Gatsby discloses

Fitzgerald's remarkable awareness of the issues of his time and his debt

to such philosophers and critics as William James, Josiah Royce, George

Santayana, John Dewey, Walter Lippman, H. L. Mencken, and Edmund Wilson.

Ronald Berman's fresh approach considers the meaning of various ideas important

to the novel: for example, those moral qualities governing both social

and individual life. Berman's reading of the text reveals extraordinary

emphases on matters that could productively be described as philosophical

-- the nature of friendship, love, and the good life. But the text of the

novel has many echoes, and the same concern with moral issues -- especially

those issues affecting democratic life - can be found in a number of other

texts of the first quarter of the century. Vigorously debated throughout

Fitzgerald's own lifetime, these texts shed a completely new light on the

idealism of The Great Gatsby and on the penetrating view it has

of life in a new form of American democracy.

A noted Fitzgerald scholar, Berman makes it clear that

accepted interpretations of The Great Gatsby and of Fitzgerald's

work in general must be changed. Berman demonstrates that Fitzgerald wrote

within a vast dialectic, relating the ideas of the twenties to those of

the "old America" described in so many of his works. Gatsby, Nick Carraway,

and the other characters of Fitzgerald's greatest novel all have to consider

not only their relationship to the present but also their distance from

what was once a highly meaningful past.