Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby

by Greil Marcus

Overview

An "astute, challenging, and far-reaching” look (Kirkus Reviews, starred) at how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s vision of the American Dream has been understood, portrayed, distorted, misused, and kept alive
 
“I found great pleasure in . . . Under the Red White and Blue . . . about the idea of the American dream, its allure, the exploitation of it.” —Percival Everett, New York Times Book Review, “By The Book” section
 
Renowned critic Greil Marcus takes on the fascinating legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. An enthralling parable (or a cheap metaphor) of the American Dream as a beckoning finger toward a con game, a kind of virus infecting artists of all sorts over nearly a century, Fitzgerald’s story has become a key to American culture and American life itself.
 
Marcus follows the arc of The Great Gatsby from 1925 into the ways it has insinuated itself into works by writers such as Philip Roth and Raymond Chandler; found echoes in the work of performers from Jelly Roll Morton to Lana Del Rey; and continued to rewrite both its own story and that of the country at large in the hands of dramatists and filmmakers from the 1920s to John Collins’s 2006 Gatz and Baz Luhrmann’s critically reviled (here celebrated) 2013 movie version—the fourth, so far.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300261394
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	09/21/2021
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	4.70(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Greil Marcus has written many books including Mystery Train,Lipstick Traces, and The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs. With Werner Sollors he is the editor of A New Literary History of America. He lives in Oakland, CA.

Table of Contents

Subway 1

A Patriotic Swerve 11

A Book Everyone Has Heard Of 35

Reading the Book 51

The Ferment 95

At the Movies 117

"He too was a Great Gatsby" 125

Fable 147

Acknowledgments 155

Index 157

Editorial Reviews

I found great pleasure in Greil Marcus’s Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby, about the idea of the American dream, its allure, the exploitation of it.”—Percival Everett, New York Times Book Review, “By the Book” section

“Astute, challenging, and far-reaching.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[Marcus’] smart, singular book gives us invigorating new ways to think about Fitzgerald’s iconic novel.”—Kevin Canfield, San Francisco Chronicle

“Deep learning and distinctive prose. . . . A welcome addition to the study of modern US culture by one of our most incisive and original critics.”—David Alworth, American Literary History

“Greil Marcus is one of our greatest living cultural critics. Not only is this a wildly original essay on one of America’s most revered novels—it’s also a fitting capstone to his oeuvre.”—James Miller

“Now more than ever, we need to think long and hard about our collective national fantasies. There’s no one better suited to this task than Greil Marcus.”—David Treuer, author of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

“With history, with narrative flourish, and with thoughtfully woven connective tissue, Greil Marcus takes The Great Gatsby and gives it a newer, richer life well beyond the one it has already lived.”—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of Go Ahead in The Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest

“Greil Marcus’s prose has an electric wondering urgency; the artworks under description crackle and glow, illuminating whole landscapes of history and culture. This method has never found a better home than Gatsby. The result kept me up all night.”—Jonathan Lethem, author of The Ecstasy of Influence

“Under the Red White and Blue is a soaring, roaring song of a book. The pretext is The Great Gatsby, but the value comes in riding along as Marcus beats back into the past and the fate of America.”—David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

From the Publisher

★ 2020-02-16
The legendary rock critic digs into one of American literature’s cornerstones.

This ambitious, extended essay on America as seen through the “gravitational pull” of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is about how The Great Gatsby “exists on its own terms—as a commercial product, meant to make money and elevate a reputation, and as a story, an exposé and an illumination of the moral life of its characters, the country they inhabit, and the legacy the country’s discoverers and founders left for them to reckon with or ignore.” Less than a month before the publication date, Fitzgerald wanted to change the title to “Under the Red White and Blue.” Marcus asks: “What is it that Americans share?” The author, a master of juxtaposition, draws provocative, unexpected connections among literature, music, and movies. He uses quotes from W.E.B. Du Bois, Edmund Wilson, Lady Gaga, Barbara Jordan, and Bruce Springsteen to assess patriotism in America. He then discusses Moby-Dick, a novel “that, in America, defines the contours of a common imagination as much as anything America has ever produced.” Indeed, “in the American story, Ahab is always out there.” Marcus traces the Gatsby effect as it later weaved its way into the “American fabric” in books by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and Walter Mosley as well as, perhaps most significantly, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain. Instead of an ordinary plot summary, Marcus draws on Andy Kauffman’s quirky Gatsby reading on Saturday Night Live in 1978 and an extended discussion of Gatz, the six-hour public theatrical reading. After an insightful examination of the historical “ferment that fed the energies of the decade into Fitzgerald’s book,” Marcus goes to the movies. He dismisses the “enervating” Robert Redford version in favor of Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 edition. The author is much taken with Leonardo DiCaprio’s acting and Tobey McGuire’s sensitive narration.

Astute, challenging, and far-reaching: There’s much to chew on in Marcus’ disquisition on Gatsby’s legacy.

Kirkus Reviews