Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. With a Genealogical Afterword by Scottie Fitzgerald Smith. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. While believing that Fitzgerald's life was a quest for heroism and that the writer himself was heroic, Bruccoli does much in his biography to revise the popular mythology surrounding Fitzgerald's life and to correct the factual errors of previous biographers. This study is the most carefully researched of the many books on Fitzgerald's life.

Cowley, Malcolm, and Robert Cowley, eds. Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age. New York: Scribner's, 1966. Sets the context of the times in which Fitzgerald grew to maturity.

Eble, Kenneth. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1963. The best of the short life-and-works books on Fitzgerald. Contains a good overview and balanced assessment of his writing.

Goldhurst, William. F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries. Cleveland and New York: World, 1963. Information on the relationship of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, John O'Hara, and others.

Le Vot, Andre. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Translated by William Byron. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983. This work combines traditional biography with critical and psychological analysis. Includes a few excellent chapters on The Great Gatsby.

Long, Robert E. The Achieving of "The Great Gatsby." Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1979. Concentrated, probing examination of the composition and meaning of The Great Gatsby.

Miller, James E. F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique. New York: New York University Press, 1967. Still probably the best single work on Fitzgerald's art of fiction.

Phillips, Gene D. Fiction, Film and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1986. An informative account of the filming of Fitzgerald's works, plus information on Fitzgerald's involvement with screenwriting.

There have been three films made from The Great Gatsby.

The silent version of 1926, starring Warner Baxter as Gatsby and Lois Wilson as Daisy, has been lost, but critics generally agree that the direction by Herbert Brenon was competent but uninspired. In addition, the film's subtitles were often wordy and inappropriate.

The 1949 production featured an interesting cast, including Alan Ladd as Gatsby, Barry Sullivan as Tom, Betty Field as Daisy, MacDonald Carey as Nick, and Shelley Winters as Myrtle Wilson. The film presents many powerful visual correlatives for Fitzgerald's prose but lacks the authority of a profound directoral vision.

The 1974 production of The Great Gatsby was an ambitious and expensive effort. Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay and Jack Clayton directed, and the cast included Robert Redford as Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy, Bruce Dem as Tom, Sam Waterston as Nick, and Karen Black as Myrtle. Despite some excellent moments, the film is too slow paced and too long, and much of the production looks overwrought.

• The Great Gatsby was first adapted as a film by Richard Maibaum as producer and Elliott Nugent as director. It stars Alan Ladd, Betty Field, Macdonald Carey, Barry Sullivan, and Shelley Winters, Paramount, 1949.
• The second film was produced by David Merrick, directed by Jack Clayton, and written for the screen by Francis Ford Coppola. The cast features Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, Bruce Dern, Sam Waterston, and Karen Black, Paramount, 1974; available from Paramount Home Video.
• The novel has been recorded twice, once by The Audio Partners, Listening Library. Three sound cassettes, unabridged, read by Alexander Scourby, 1985.
• The other sound recording is by Recorded books, Audiobooks. Three sound cassettes, unabridged, read by Frank Muller, 1984.

Sources

Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen Twenties. New York: Harper & Row, 1957.

Benét, William Rose. “An Admirable Novel,” in Saturday Review of Literature, May 9, 1925.

Commager, Henry Steele. The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950.

Donaldson, Scott. “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 9: American Novelists, 1910—1945, edited by James J. Martine. Gale, 1981, pp. 3-18.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Preface and notes by Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1992.

Holman, C. Hugh, and William Harmon. Handbook to Literature. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1992.

Le Vot, Andre. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography, translation by William Byron. Doubleday, 1983.

Mizener, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise (biography; includes several letters to Fitzgerald). Avon, 1965.

Turnbull, Andrew. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962.

Turnbull, Andrew, ed. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963.

Wilson, Edmund. In a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald on April 11, 1925, in his Letters on Literature and Politics: 1912-1972, edited by Elena Wilson. Farrar, Straus, 1977, pp. 121-22.

For Further Study

Bloom, Harold, ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby': Modern Critical Interpretations. Chelsea House, 1986. This book contains eight articles, with an introduction, on the novel's structure, Gatsby as an “American” novel, and the wasteland, and includes the article by David Parker, "Two Versions of the Hero.”

Bloom, Harold, ed. Gatsby, Major Literary Characters Series. Chelsea House, 1991. This comprehensive collection of articles focusing on the novel's “hero,” Gatsby, begins with 25 critical extracts on the character and the author from letters, reviews, and articles. Of particular interest is the article by Arnold Weinstein, “Fiction as Greatness: The Case of Gatsby” (1985), which reads the novel as being about making meaning, or creating belief. This includes both Gatsby's fiction of himself and Nick's story of this. The collection also includes an important early article on the time theme by R. W. Stallman, “Gatsby and the Hole in Time” (1955).

Bruce, M. J., ed. New Essays on 'The Great Gatsby'. Cambridge University Press, 1985. This shorter work (five articles with an introduction) also includes an interesting overview of the novel's impact on fiction and criticism over the decades, “Gatsby's Long Shadow: Influence and Endurance," by Richard Anderson.

Cass, Colin S. “‘Pandered in Whispers’: Narrative Reliability in The Great Gatsby,” in College Literature, Vol. 7, 1980, pp. 113-24. Investigates the role of narrator Nick Carraway in the novel and his reliability as the narrator of events.

Crosland, A.T. A Concordance to F. Scott Fitzgerald's ‘The Great Gatsby’. Gale, 1975. The concordance provides cross-referenced lists of every word in the novel, assisting in consideration of the use and frequency of certain words or word-groups (such as “eye,” “blind,” “see,” “blink,” “wink,” and the famous accidental use of “irises,” for example).

Donaldson, Scott, ed. Critical Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald's ‘The Great Gatsby’. G. K. Hall, 1984. This balanced survey of critical issues (21 essays with an introduction, and excerpts from letters to and from Fitzgerald about the novel) contains some of the now-classic articles or chapters from other books. It features treatments of sources for the novel, the novel's complicated revisions in its composition, and the historical aspect of the work.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. Cambridge University Press, 1991. Bruccoli's critical edition of the novel contains the useful “apparatus” (notes keyed to page numbers in the novel) which had been published separately in 1974, when the novel was still under copyright protection. This edition now explains many of the novel's more obscure references, and points to some of its infamous inconsistencies (the age of Daisy Fay's daughter, for instance). Bruccoli himself is perhaps the most prolific of Fitzgerald's biographers and critics, and has also edited numerous editions of Fitzgerald's correspondence, manuscript facsimiles, notebooks, and even accounts ledgers.

Fitzgerald-Hemingway Annual, various years. This yearly periodical devotes itself to the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

Kazin, Alfred. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work. Twayne, 1951. This collection of essays on the author's literature is considered to be one of the best single volumes of criticism on Fitzgerald. Arranged chronologically, the material ranges from early reviews of the first novel through other critical reactions to Fitzgerald.

Lockridge, Ernest, ed. Twentieth-Century Interpretations of ‘The Great Gatsby’: A Collection of Critical Essays. Prentice Hall, 1968. An earlier collection of seven articles and nine brief “View Points” on the novel, briefly encapsulating a range of different approaches to the novel.

Malin, Irving. “‘Absolution’: Absolving Lies,” in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Approaches in Criticism, edited by Jackson Bryer. University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. This article links the ideas of the short story with The Great Gatsby. The author demonstrates how Fitzgerald is, to some extent, a religious writer.

Mellow, James R. Invented Lives. Houghton Mifflin, 1984. This is a full portrait of Fitzgerald, his hunger for fame, his destructive marriage, and a backward look to an era that continues to dazzle us with its variety and intrigue.

Tuttleton, James. The Novel of Manners. Norton, 1972. The book offers a revealing perspective on Fitzgerald's ability to identify social and cultural manners in the 1920s American society. Reference is made to Henry James and other writers' works.