Gatsby's second life

It seems the novel would have died the same death as its namesake had it not been for its inclusion in the Armed Services Editions in 1945. Maureen Corrigan notes in her new book on The Great Gatsby that the novel had floundered for decades, unable to sell, due it seems to its lack of strong female characters. Even Fitzgerald lamented that this was the case in a market driven by women readers at the time. Not even a film version in 1926 could boost sales.

So We Read On appears to be an engaging new look at the novel. Corrigan herself said she was nonplussed by the novel upon first reading, but after 50 readings has come to regard it as America's greatest novel. Of course, she's not alone in this opinion. The Great Gatsby frequently tops lists and is number two (behind Ulysses) in the Modern Library Top 100.

The novel has been reprinted many times in many different languages, resulting in more than 25 million copies sold worldwide. When Fitzgerald died in 1940, the book had only sold 25,000 copies. The Armed Services Edition distributed 123,000 copies in 1945. Surprisingly, you can still get a first printing of the original edition for a reasonable price.

The book seems fitting today. Jordan Belfort looked like a modern-day Gatsby in The Wolf of Wall Street, helped by Leonardo DiCaprio having played Gatsby in Luhrmann's misguided film earlier the same year. Corrigan says the takeaway from this novel is: "you can't escape the past, but isn't it noble to try?" I guess that depends on how many embittered persons you leave in your wake.

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Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

The People Debate the Constitution

As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified. After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution. Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through. But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 . The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others. Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified. A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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