"A stunning piece of
        work. If Fitzgerald could have wished for one reader of The Great Gatsby,
        it would have been Ronald Berman. Berman's criticism creates an ideal
        companion piece to the novel—as brilliantly illuminating about America
        as it is about fiction, and composed with as much thought and style."
       
        — Roger Rosenblatt
      "An impressive study
        that brilliantly highlights the oneness of Fitzgerald's art with the overall
        context of modernism." — Milton R. Stern, author of The Golden
        Moment: The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald
      "Citing films, dates,
        places, schedules, Broadway newsstands, and the spoils of manufacture,
        the author, never lapsing into critical jargon, locates the characters
        in 'the moving present.' Gatsby, the first of the great novels
        to emerge from B movies, uses the language of commodities, advertisements,
        photography, cinematography, and Horatio Alger to present models of identity
        for characters absorbed in and by what is communicated. . . . Berman concludes
        that Gatsby 'reassembled' rather than 'invented' himself."
        — A. Hirsh, Choice