A stunning piece of
work. If Fitzgerald could have wished for one reader of The Great Gatsby,
it would have been Ronald Berman. Berman's criticism creates an ideal
companion piece to the novel--as brilliantly illuminating about America
as it is about fiction, and composed with as much thought and style.

-- Roger Rosenblatt
An impressive study
that brilliantly highlights the oneness of Fitzgerald's art with the overall
context 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 characters
in 'the moving present.' Gatsby, the first of the great novels
to emerge from B movies, uses the language of commodities, advertisements,
photography, cinematography, and Horatio Alger to present models of identity
for characters absorbed in and by what is communicated. . . . Berman concludes
that Gatsby 'reassembled' rather than 'invented' himself.
-- A. Hirsh, Choice