Gatsby’s Daughters: A Romance of the Last Century

Just out of college in 1945, Constance Dunbarton learns not only that she is F. Scott Fitzgerald's daughter but that her mother was the model for Gatsby's Daisy. Her life then becomes a tale that might have been told by Fitzgerald himself. Meanwhile, the tale of an ideal Jazz Age beauty he would call Jamie Gattison was one Fitgerald had planned but did not live long enough to start. Drawing on her father's brief notes, Constance writes Jamie's story herself while also narrating the saga of her own life. Each of these women, in her own way, proves herself a daughter of Jay Gatsby in GATSBY'S DAUGHTERS, a novel that carries on Fitzgerald's legacy.

Allen Frederick Stein teaches American Literature at North Carolina State University. He is the author of three books on American literature, including After the Vows were Spoken: Marriage in American Literary Realism (Ohio State University Press), and of over thirty essays on such figures as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, Kate Chopin, and Edith Wharton. He has also had a dozen short stories and poems appear in literary magazines.