It’s third period English, junior year. You’ve just finished reading The Great Gatsby, and your teacher is prodding the class to consider Fitzgerald’s use of color. Daisy’s white dress, Gatsby’s gold tie, the green light across the blue lawn—what could it all mean?
And then, from the back row, you see Matt—or maybe it’s Mike—cock his head and raise his hand.
"Uh," he says with a snort. "Maybe the light was just… green."
In Taking Things Hard: The Trials of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Garnett doesn’t take the side of the fledgling philistine in the back row of your AP Lit class. But Garnett, professor emeritus of English at Gettysburg College, is hardly sympathetic to Fitzgerald scholars whose Talmudic readings of Gatsby often veer into the absurd. Instead, he offers a refreshingly intuitive explanation for Gatsby’s greatness and its author’s precipitous decline.
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