Gatsby: Death of an Irishman

Gatsby: Death of an Irishman delivers a compelling and new insight into the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the genesis of The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald once told a friend that ’Gatsby started as one man I knew and then changed into myself.’ Jay Gatsby’s story is one of aspiration and reinvention, so was Fitzgerald’s. The book shows how Fitzgerald dramatized the most powerful emotional experiences of his own life in the novel; from his childhood in the Midwest, Ivy League education at Princeton, literary success in New York, partying on Long Island, and marital struggles on the French Riviera.

Underpinning Scott’s brilliant, but turbulent, life was his complex, evolving and surprising relationship with his Irish heritage. Scott’s journey went from childhood shame in St. Paul at being ’common’ Irish to a patriotic immersion in Irish literature and revolutionary politics at Princeton. But the shame never went away, reinforced when the poor boy found he could not marry the rich girl. He tried to escape it; first through his imagination as a boy, and then through self-invention as a young man, then in his writing, and throughout his adult life in alcohol.