Inside the Great Gatsby: The Hidden Subtext

Inside The Great Gatsby: The Hidden Subtext is a revolutionary analysis of the famed novel that reveals its important previously unknown literary foundations drawn from classical and modern literature, including the works of Dante, Milton, Conrad, Spengler, Frazer, Weston, Joyce, Eliot, and the King James Bible. Other studies of the novel have focused primarily on its biographical, cultural, or social issues, but none prior to Elmore’s have systematically examined the unrecognized debts Gatsby owes to previous literary works. The ultimate irony is that Gatsby, lauded as one of the greatest novels in the English language, earned its stature based solely on recognition of only a part of its whole--the literal narrative, or surface story--without realization or acknowledgment of its foundational subtext, the hidden layer that links it to the universal library of human experience, most of which remained undetected until the centennial year of the novel’s original publication.

A.E. Elmore (1938-2016) taught English at Athens State University from 1987 to 2013.