[In the following essay, Monteiro discusses possible sources for the last passage in Gatsby, in which Nick muses on how Long Island might have looked to the early explorers.]

In one of the most familiar passages in twentieth—century literature, Nick Carraway thinks back on the late Jay Gatsby, who had suffered so grievously from the hard malice of the Buchanans and their like in the inhospitable East. It begins as an elegy but turns into a lament for humankind's capacity for wonder and awe in the face of the hard truths of history. Disillusioned, sad, sentimental, this child of the Midwest looks out, through the mind's eye, across Long Island Sound and re-imagines the “old island” as it must have looked four centuries earlier to the Western sailors who were but the advance guard of the adventurers, immigrants, and settlers to come. Like the psalmist who sits by the rivers of Babylon, lamenting the lost Zion, he, too, weeps for what is past and will not return. It bears repeating.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes-a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. … Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. … And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.¹

These final sentences of The Great Gatsby take on a strange and surprising significance when they are read against Fitzgerald's immediate sources for them in the literature about Columbus and the New World. Behind Nick's words and sentiments lies a vast body of Western literature on notions of a terrestrial paradise. Since Fitzgerald ties this “fresh, green breast of the new world” to a New York island that “flowered once,” as Carraway imagined, for “Dutch sailors' eyes,” it is possible to pin down his principal if not sole source for Nick's last rueful vision.

Washington Irving's A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, first published in 1809 and attributed to the fictional persona of “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” is a problem for the genre purist. While the book often mocks history and historical writing, it otherwise suits perfectly Fitzgerald's fictional imagination. For among other matters, it demonstrates how one fabulating writer confronts the stuff of history, drawing on his considerable folkloristic ability to turn historic materials into the romanticized stuff of national legend and Western myth. Irving's history describes the first look which those “honest Dutch tars” had of the New World when their ships “entered that majestic bay which at this day expands its ample bosom before the city of New York, and which had never before been visited by any European.”

The island of Manna-hatta spread wide before them, like some sweet vision of fancy or some fair creation of industrious magic. Its hills of smiling green swelled gently one above another, crowned with lofty trees of luxuriant growth, some pointing their tapering foliage towards the clouds, which were gloriously transparent, and others loaded with a verdant burden of clambering vines, bowing their branches to the earth, that was covered with flowers.²

Irving's description echoes earlier accounts of what the so-called “terrestrial paradise” might look like. In Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus (1828), Irving places Columbus' considerations of this theme within a greater tradition of such speculation, beginning with the “Grand Oasis of Arabia,” where, he writes, “exhausted travellers, after traversing the parched and sultry desert, hailed this verdant spot with rapture; they refreshed themselves under its shady bowers, and beside its cooling streams, as the crew of a tempest tost vessel repose on the shores of some green island in the deep.”³ He also summarizes St. Basilius' discourse on “Paradise”:

There the earth is always green, the flowers are ever blooming, the waters limpid and delicate; not rushing in rude and turbid torrents, but welling up in crystal fountains and winding in peaceful and silver streams. There no harsh and boisterous winds are permitted to shake and disturb the air and ravage the beauty of the groves; there prevails no melancholy nor darksome weather, no drowning rain nor pelting hail, no forked lightning nor rending and resounding thunder; no wintry pinching cold nor withering and panting summer heat, nor any thing else that can give pain or sorrow or annoyance; but all is bland and gentle and serene; a perpetual youth and joy reigns throughout all nature and nothing decays and dies.⁴

Later, in A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), Irving summarizes Columbus' own thinking about the shape of the earth and the nature of the vast new world before him. “Philosophers had described it [the earth] as spherical,” he wrote,

but they knew nothing of the part of the world which he had discovered. The ancient part, known to them, he had no doubt was spherical; but he now supposed that the real form of the earth was that of a pear, one part much more elevated than the rest, and tapering upwards toward the skies. This part he supposed to be in the interior of this newly found continent, and immediately under the equator. … He beheld a vast world, rising, as it were, into existence before him; its nature and extent unknown and undefined, as yet a mere region for conjecture. Every day displayed some new feature of beauty and sublimity. Island after island, whose rocks he was told were veined with gold, whose groves teemed with spices, or whose shores abounded with pearls. Interminable ranges of coast; promontory beyond promontory, stretching as far as the eye could reach; luxuriant valleys, sweeping away into a vast interior, whose distant mountains, he was told, concealed still happier lands, and realms of still greater opulence. When he looked upon all this region of golden promise, it was with the glorious conviction, that his genius had, in a manner, called it into existence; he regarded it with the triumphant eye of a discoverer.⁵

Irving's major source for Columbus' speculations, theories, and convictions were Columbus' letters reporting on his four voyages to the New World. It was in his third-voyage letter that Columbus explained that the earth was in “the form of a pear … or like a round ball, upon one part of which is a prominence like a woman's nipple, this protrusion being the highest and nearest the sky, situated under the equinoctial line, and at the eastern extremity of this sea.”⁶ So important did he think his discovery to be that he repeated it in the same letter, in pretty much the same terms, only a few sentences further on. Therefore, when he reached the island of Trinidad, he was not surprised to find “the temperature exceedingly mild; the fields and the foliage likewise were remarkably fresh and green,” adding:

all this must proceed from the extreme blandness of the temperature, which arises, as I have said, from this country being the most elevated in the world, and the nearest to the sky. On these grounds, therefore, I affirm, that the globe is not spherical, but that there is the difference in its form which I have described; the which is to be found in this hemisphere, at the point where the Indies meet the ocean, the extremity of the hemisphere being below the equinoctial line. And a great confirmation of this is, that when our Lord made the sun, the first light appeared in the first point of the east, where the most elevated point of the globe is. …⁷

That Fitzgerald was acquainted with Columbus' letters may be confirmed further by his account of hardships suffered on his fourth voyage. As echoed later in Fitzgerald, he writes of “currents [that] were still contrary,” “currents still oppos[ing]” the progress of ships “in the worst possible condition” but “always beating against contrary winds.”⁸

If the finale of The Great Gatsby owes a good deal to Washington Irving, it is curious to note that Fitzgerald's novel might have had its own small share in a later historian's rendering of Columbus' Spanish in his letter on the third voyage. Samuel Eliot Morison, finding the existing translations of Columbus' letters into English to be unsatisfactory, informs readers of his Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (1942) that he has made his own translations of the original Spanish. Morison renders “de la forma de una pera … ó como quien tiene una pelota muy redonda, ye en un lugar della fuese como una teta de muger alli puesta”⁹ as “the earth was not round after all, but ‘in the shape of a pear,’ or, like a round ball ‘on one part of which is placed something like a woman's breast.”¹⁰ “This breast,” continues Morison, “reached nearer Heaven than the rest of the world, and on the nipple the Terrestrial Paradise was located.”¹¹ Interestingly, the English scholar Stephen Reckert, who quotes Morison's explanation for Columbus' miscalculations, also provides his own translation of the passage from Columbus' third voyage letter, which reads in part: “I began to think this about the world: I find it is not round …, but the shape of a quite round pear, and in one place like a woman's breast …, and this nipple part is the highest and nearest to Heaven. …”¹²

Foreshadowing Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway, Columbus sets down his impressions on first looking at what would come to be called the New World:

All these islands are very beautiful, and distinguished by a diversity of scenery; they are filled with a great variety of trees of immense height, and which I believe to retain their foliage in all seasons; for when I saw them they were as verdant and luxuriant as they usually are in Spain in the month of May,—some of them were blossoming, some bearing fruit, and all flourishing in the greatest perfection, according to their respective stages of growth, and the nature and quality of each. … The nightingale and various birds were singing in countless numbers. …¹³

For the dreamer, as Dick Diver learns in Tender Is the Night, the nightingale of the imagination knows no spatial limitations. It has no natural habitat. But it does for Nick Carraway, of course, whose plaintive anthem evokes Columbus' vision as it is replayed for Dutch sailors, first in Irving, then in Fitzgerald. Gatsby embodies a twentieth-century version of their dream—it was William Butler Yeats's notion, it will be recalled, that man embodies truth but cannot know it—but he cannot get past the green light at the end of Daisy's dock, which has signaled from the start the absolute barrier to the realization of his dream of Daisy and the recoverable past.¹⁴

Of course what is problematic about Gatsby's dream is that it not only has roots in the past but that it is intended to remake the past. In short, it is temporally disoriented, for the dreams of Columbus and the others, including the Dutch sailors, are keyed to the possibilities of the future. Henry David Thoreau quotes Humboldt's words on Columbus as he first faces the New World:

The grateful coolness of the evening air, the ethereal purity of the starry firmament, the balmy fragrance of flowers, wafted to him by the land breeze, all led him to suppose (as we are told by Herrara, in the Decades) that he was approaching the garden of Eden, the sacred abode of our first parents. The Orinoco seemed to him one of the four rivers which, according to the venerable tradition of the ancient world, flowed from Paradise, to water and divide the surface of the earth, newly adorned with plants.¹⁵

Thoreau reveals his own wonderment, as he looks out over the beach at Cape Cod, that “men do not sail the sea with more expectation. Nothing remarkable was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood. The heroes and discoverers have found true more than was previously believed, only when they were expecting and dreaming of something more than their contemporaries dreamed of, or even themselves discovered,” he continues, “that is, when they were in a frame of mind fitted to behold the truth.” Thus, even the quixotic “expeditions for the discovery of El Dorado, and of the Fountain of Youth, led to real, if not compensatory discoveries.”¹⁶ Such quests differ from Jay Gatsby's, though, for there can be nothing compensatory when, as in his case, the risk is absolute.

Washington Irving's History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus also anticipates Carraway's simile connecting the egg to Columbus in the first chapter of The Great Gatsby:

Next to the countenance shown him by the king and queen, may be mentioned that of Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, the grand cardinal of Spain, and first subject of the realm; a man whose elevated character for piety, learning, and high prince-like qualities, gave signal value to his favours. He invited Columbus to a banquet, where he assigned him the most honourable place at table, and had him served with the ceremonials which in those punctilious times were observed towards sovereigns. At this repast is said to have occurred the well known anecdote of the egg. A shallow courtier present, impatient of the honours paid to Columbus, and meanly jealous of him as a foreigner, abruptly asked him whether he thought that, in case he had not discovered the Indias, there were not other men in Spain, who would have been capable of the enterprize? To this Columbus made no immediate reply, but, taking an egg, invited the company to make it stand upon one end. Every one attempted it, but in vain; whereupon he struck it upon the table so as to break the end, and left it standing on the broken part; illustrating in this simple manner, that when he had once shown the way to the new world, nothing was easier than to follow it.¹⁷

Irving then adds a footnote: “This anecdote rests on the authority of the Italian historian Benzoni. … It has been condemned as trivial, but the simplicity of the reproof constitutes its severity, and was characteristic of the practical sagacity of Columbus. The universal popularity of the anecdote is a proof of its merit.”¹⁸ Interestingly enough, Mary Shelley borrowed the anecdote of Columbus and the egg from the 1828 edition of Irving's Columbus. In her 1831 preface to Frankenstein, she writes:

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.¹⁹

This is not a bad explanation for what encourages Jay Gatsby to think that he can re-fashion the factual past, bringing it into line with his clear dreams and hazy ideals, much like the Dutch sailors with all time and place seemingly opening out before them. So too, Jay Gatsby, that young student of “needed inventions,” succeeds in becoming both his own Dr. Frankenstein and his own creation. He is, after all, to Nick's amazement, his own best invention: the product of his Platonic conception of himself. Like Mary Shelley's monster, he is not accepted by the villagers, from whose ranks will come his murderer.

Behind Fitzgerald's story of New York and the East, however, lies still another major source, this time not for the anecdote about Columbus' triumph over his carping critics, but for the fable of failure that is the story of the two Eggs, West and East. Into the mix out of which emerged The Great Gatsby had gone Sherwood Anderson's “The Triumph of the Egg.” Published in The Dial in March 1920 and collected in 1921 in a volume bearing the same title as the story, Anderson's story, from one point of view at least, offers a major criticism of that version of the American Dream promising success to those who work honestly, hard, and long, especially to those independent souls who strike out on their own into the adventurous but dangerous realm of small business.

Like The Great Gatsby, “The Egg” (its final title) is a first-person retrospective narrative. A son recalls his boyhood, his mother and father, his father's attempts to succeed. He meditates on the dark metaphysics of raising chickens and the darksome effects on a child of living among the daily dying of chicks and chickens. Not so mysterious diseases decimate the population, and the stupid chicken has a predilection, like a character in Gatsby, for running out into the road and being struck dead by passing vehicles. The chicken farm fails (compare the Uncle Sol of E. E. Cummings' poem “Nobody Loses All the Time,” who, after committing suicide, finally starts a successful business, a “worm farm”), and the father starts a restaurant. But chickens and eggs are in his blood. He has a collection of monster chicks, with two heads, multiple legs, and the like, preserved in jars, and he has learned to perform tricks with eggs. Anxious to satisfy his ambition for himself and his family (when single he had his own horse), his desperation takes a singularly American turn toward Barnumism. He will attract customers to his restaurant by exhibiting his chicken wonders and doing magic tricks that he will not hesitate to explain to his customers. The showing of his exhibits is doomed from the start. It would take a rare bird, indeed, to order a fried egg sandwich or a Western omelet as a bizarrie of chicken freaks before him suspended in preservative alcohol stare out at him.

The father on this day, to amuse and bemuse his only customer, moves anxiously and excitedly to his magic tricks. He promises to do the real trick that Columbus said he would do but did not.

“Well,” he began hesitatingly, “well, you have heard of Christopher Columbus, eh?” He seemed to be angry. “That Christopher Columbus was a cheat,” he declared emphatically. “He talked of making an egg stand on its end. He talked, he did, and then he went and broke the end of the egg.” My father seemed to his visitor to be beside himself at the duplicity of Christopher Columbus. He muttered and swore. He declared it was wrong to teach children that Christopher Columbus was a great man when, after all, he cheated at the critical moment. He had declared he would make an egg stand on end and then when his bluff had been called he had done a trick.²⁰

The father proceeds to his trick. He will make the egg stand alone by rolling the egg between the palms of his hands, claiming that he was coaxing the electricity from the human body into the egg. When he does bring off the trick, however, his customer is not looking, and by the time the latter looks back, the egg has fallen over.

It does not seem to be far-fetched to think here of Gatsby's grand entertainments designed to attract Daisy, weekend parties that have no other meaning for Gatsby beyond that one purpose. Of course, they too fail ultimately. Nick Carraway early on foreshadows the notion of the Columbian sham that so angers the father in Anderson's story “The Egg” when he describes West Egg and East Egg, “a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals,” he continues, “—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end.” With Columbus on his mind, it is no wonder that Nick describes himself as “a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.”²¹ For all of his Barnum-like tricks and Columbus-like antics, Gatsby will fall before the “hard malice” of others. Fitzgerald was, of course, not rewriting Anderson's story. But it might have been one of its starting points, not the least of which was the ironic, elegiac, rueful tone of its retrospective narration.²²

Nick is carried away with his narration, his mythologizing, his defense of Gatsby the criminal with an impossibly sentimental ideal that fails to recognize both the incarnation in Daisy of the grail which he is in the quest of and the realities of the human condition, among the contingencies of which is inevitable mutability and the passage of time. The battle of East Egg and West Egg is over, and there is no winner.

The Columbus and egg story surfaces also in the William Faulkner story “The Bear.” “Cass” McCaslin Edmonds presents his cousin Isaac McCaslin with a global overview of an exhausted Old World just before the New World is discovered. For a “thousand years … men fought over the fragments of that collapse until at last even the fragments were exhausted and men snarled over the gnawed bones of the old world's worthless evening until an accidental egg discovered to them a new hemisphere.”²³ That new hemisphere provided him with opportunity, but at a cost, as Faulkner reported to the Delta Council, a Mississippi group honoring him in 1952:

By remaining in the old world, we could have been not only secure, but even free of the need to be responsible. Instead, we chose the freedom, the liberty, the independence and the inalienable right to responsibility; almost without charts, in frail wooden ships with nothing but sails and our desire and will to be free to move them, we crossed an ocean which did not even match the charts we did have; we conquered a wilderness in order to establish a place, not to be secure in because we did not want that, we had just repudiated that, just crossed three thousand miles of dark and unknown sea to get away from that; but a place to be free in, to be independent in, to be responsible in.²⁴

Yet, as “The Bear” indicates, this continent was already owned by men “while He—this Arbiter, this Architect, this Umpire—condoned—or did He? looked down and saw—or did He? Or at least did nothing: saw, and could not, or did not see; saw, and would not, or perhaps He would not see—perverse, impotent, or blind: which?”²⁵ Faulkner's indifferent or uncaring deity is an avatar of Fitzgerald's Dr. T. J. Eckleberg, whose vacant eyes overlook the valley of ashes on the way to Mana-hatta. So Faulkner joins the story of Columbus' egg with arguably Fitzgerald's most famous Modernist image, dropping the entire matter, in all its aspects, into heady ruminations about history and divinity in Yoknapatawpha.

Just as his use of the Columbus anecdote emerges in Faulkner's great hunting story, so Fitzgerald's sorrowful look into the past for the green light and the paradisal hopes the Dutch sailors saw in the promised land of New York shores has lived on, one imagines, in the breasts of many, each manifestation taking its own form and seeking out its own expression. One of the more striking versions of Nick Carraway's vision is wonderfully emblematic—the words of a professor of literature later turned university president and, still later, baseball commissioner:

[Baseball] is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. … It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised. Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.²⁶

In this piece, published in the Yale Alumni Magazine in 1977 when he was president of the university, Bart Giamatti gives a new emphasis and a re-focused meaning to Gatsby's dreaming, and he does so in a voice that sounds a bit like Nick Carraway's. It was not inappropriate that the young Angelo Bartlett Giamatti, the author of a doctoral dissertation later published as The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic, had served an apprenticeship at Princeton, teaching Dante, Petrarch, and Spenser, before journeying home to New Haven. “Columbus thought he had found the blessed land across the wide waters,” Giamatti had written in the Earthly Paradise, “and he was certainly not the last man to search.”²⁷

In notes toward his last novel, now known as The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western (note, a “Western”), Fitzgerald has his female narrator, a young woman named Cecilia, tell of her first sight of sheep in the flesh:

I thought of the first sheep I ever remember seeing—hundreds of them, and how our car drove suddenly into them on the back lot of the old Laemmle studio. They were unhappy about being in pictures but the men in the car with us kept saying:

“Swell?”

“Is that what you wanted, Dick?”

“Isn't that swell?” And the man named Dick kept standing up in the car as if he were Cortez or Balboa, looking over that grey fleecy undulation. If I ever knew what picture they were in I have long forgotten.²⁸

It is the narrator who refers to “Balboa or Cortez” as the one who first looks out over the Pacific Ocean. One of them is commonly accepted as the first European to do so. The narrator confesses to confusing the two Spaniards. Her confusion recalls John Keats, of course, whose poem mistakenly credits this primary experience to Cortez. The confusion in The Love of the Last Tycoon is not, of course, Fitzgerald's. That he introduces it into his fiction, however, suggests that he found the confusion meaningful or at least suggestive of meaning.

There are, for example, the parallels between the Spaniards (represented by Balboa and Cortez) and the Dutch sailors who first saw in wonderment the greenness of Mana-hatta. It is the wonder that each experiences at new discovery which each feels brings them together. Just as the whole of the Pacific Ocean lies before the Spanish Europeans, the whole of the North American continent lies before the Dutch Europeans. Just as Keats can imagine how Balboa (or Cortez) felt, along with his men, so too can Nick Carraway imagine how the Dutch sailors felt. But what is more important is the parallel between Keats and Carraway. Each has had to resort to a simile to define his amazement. Keats's “discovery” of Chapman's translation of Homer is like Carraway's discovery of Gatsby and his intransigent dream. Only the discovery of a new planet or the sight of a new ocean can reveal the depth and magnitude of discovering Chapman's Homer. Only the one-time awe of the Dutch sailors can reveal the depth and magnitude of Gatsby's American dream. So Carraway has to reach for a new loop in the coda to his narrative to put that narrative in its proper historical-mythic perspective.

Interestingly, the effect that Fitzgerald achieves is, in a funny way, something like that of the Dutch girl pictured on the cleanser container. Fitzgerald as author stands to Carraway as Carraway as author stands to Gatsby, while Gatsby stands to the East Egg world as, in history, the first Dutch sailors stand to the green islands before them. Keats saw in Balboa silence and in his men “wild surmise.” History has told us what such “wild surmise” led to with the brutal violence and bloody conquests of Cortez. Yet the Gatsbys stay the course. They will not learn the lessons of history. If they are doomed to repeat the mistakes, they will keep the dreams (though they be violent and destructive) both alive and verdant. They shall persist if not prevail, like the boats beating against the current, doomed to fail at the last.

Of course, in Keats's time, Europe's “discovery” of the Western hemisphere was not much deplored, nor was Britain's still-expanding empire much questioned except by her rivals in empire building. For Fitzgerald, however, who would soon discover Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, the discoverer's egg turned out to be the great humpty-dumpty. It could never be put back together again any more than Gatsby could fix the past or Sherwood Anderson could abandon the hopeful mystery he cast over his “almost beautiful,” single-truth grotesques.²⁹

Notes

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Scribners, 1925), pp. 217-18.

2. Washington Irving, A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (Author's rev. ed.) (David McKay, 1891), pp. 80, 81.

3. Washington Irving, Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus, ed. James W. Tuttleton (Twayne, 1986), p. 333.

4. Irving, Voyages and Discoveries, p. 337.

5. Washington Irving, History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (G. and C. Carvill, 1828), II, 184, 187-88.

6. I quote from Christopher Columbus: Four Voyages to the New World, Letters and Selected Documents, ed., and trans. R. H. Major, intro. John E. Fagg (Citadel, 1992), p. 130. This is a bilingual edition of Select Letters of Christopher Columbus, with Other Original Documents, Relating to his Four Voyages to the New World (Hakluyt Society, 1847).

7. Fagg, Four Voyages, pp. 132-33.

8. Fagg, Four Voyages, pp. 180, 188.

9. Fagg, Four Voyages, p. 130.

10. Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Little, Brown, 1942), p. 557.

11. Morison, Admiral, p. 557. In a later translation of the same passage, Morison substitutes “teat” for “breast” (Journals and Other Documents of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, trans., ed. Samuel Eliot Morison [Heritage Press, 1963], p. 286).

12. Stephen Reckert, Beyond Chrysanthemums: Perspectives on Poetry East and West (Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 179, n. 40.

13. Fagg, Four Voyages, p. 5.

14. In the same year that saw the publication of The Great Gatsby, William Carlos Williams rendered Columbus' vision: “[W]e saw the trees very green, and much water and fruits of divers kinds. … Bright green trees, the whole land so green that it is a pleasure to look on it. Gardens of the most beautiful trees I ever saw. … I walked among the trees which was the most beautiful thing which I had ever seen” (In the American Grain, intro. Horace Gregory [New Directions, n.d.], pp. 25-26).

15. Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod, intro. Paul Theroux (Penguin, 1987), pp. 139-40.

16. Thoreau, Cape Cod, pp. 139-40.

17. Irving, Life and Voyages, I, p. 275.

18. Irving, Life and Voyages, I, p. 275. See William A. Fahey, “Fitzgerald's Eggs of Columbus,” ANQ, VIII (1995), pp. 26-27. Girolamo Benzoni's anecdote appears as an epigraph to Columbus' Egg: New Latin American Stories on the Conquest, ed. Nick Caistor (Faber and Faber, 1992).

19. Mary Shelley, Introduction (1831), in Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, Volume I of The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, ed. Nora Crook, intro. Betty T. Bennett (William Pickering, 1996), pp. 178-79.

20. Sherwood Anderson, “The Egg,” in The Portable Sherwood Anderson, ed., and intro. Horace Gregory (Viking, 1949, p. 459).

21. Fitgerald, Great Gatsby, pp. 5-6, 4.

22. Until Anderson's “collapse” with the publication of the novel Dark Laughter Fitzgerald's attitude toward his work had always been laudatory. In 1923, he had reviewed the novel Many Marriages favorably, and even as late as 1925 he still considered Anderson, as he wrote to Maxwell Perkins, “one of the very best and finest writers in the English language today” (The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull [Scribners, 1963], p. 187). By 1927, however, he had changed his mind. It was Hemingway who, since “Anderson's collapse,” was “the best we have, I think,” as he informed Mencken (Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan [Random House, 1980], p. 210).

23. William Faulkner, “The Bear,” in Go Down Moses (Random House 1963), pp. 257-58.

24. William Faulkner, “Address to the Delta Council” (Cleveland, Mississippi, May 15, 1952), in Essays, Speeches & Public Letters, ed. James B. Meriwether (Random House, 1965), p. 128.

25. Faulkner, “The Bear,” p. 258.

26. A. Barlett Giamatti, “The Green Fields of the Mind,” in A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti, ed. Kenneth S. Robson, foreword by David Halberstam (Algonquin Books, 1998) pp. 7, 12-13.

27. A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (W. W. Norton, 1989), p. 4.

28. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 9-10.

29. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, intro. Glen A. Love (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 8.