首页
登录
职称英语
I was in high school when I first fell for Gatsby, who turns 90 today—an "old
I was in high school when I first fell for Gatsby, who turns 90 today—an "old
游客
2025-01-11
22
管理
问题
I was in high school when I first fell for Gatsby, who turns 90 today—an "old sport" by any measure. He was 50 even then, but he appeared to me as Robert Redford in a pink Ralph Lauren suit and those "shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel" that set Daisy sobbing. How could a Catholic-raised virgin resist that kind of bad boy: rich and handsome, with the best party house in town, even if he never did mingle? Gatsby seems the kind of guy who would always have been popular. But the truth is more complicated.
The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925. Max Perkins, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s editor, thought it a masterpiece. The then-29-year-oId Fitzgerald wrote of the novel before it was published, "It represents about a year’s work and I think it’s about ten years better than anything I’ve done. " And it did receive some praise in its early days, for sure. The New York Times called it "a curious book, a mystical)glamorous story of today. " But others weren’t enamored. The New York World ran a review under the headline "F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Latest a Dud"(ouch!), and Perkins wrote at the time that so many people attacked him over the book that he felt "bruised. "
Sales were lackluster too. The first printing of Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise, had sold out in days, and Scribner’s Sons went back to press 11 more times in two years to sell 50, 000 copies. His follow-up The Beautiful and the Damned also sold well enough to put 50,000 copies into print. But the 20,000-copy first run of The Great Gatsby was followed by a mere 3,000 second print run, and no third. Gatsby was never out of print in the years before he died—at age 44, 15 years after its publication—only because Scribner’s still had unsold copies from the first two printings.
In fall 1940, Fitzgerald, writing to his wife, Zelda, of a new novel he was working on, lamented, "I don’t suppose anyone will be much interested in what I have to say this time and it may be the last novel I’ll ever write. " The last Scribner’s royalty check before he died that December was for $ 13. 13. Fitzgerald’s friend, the literary and social critic Edmund Wilson—who said of Fitzgerald’s death that he "felt robbed of some part of my own personality"—helped with the posthumous publication of Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last Tycoon. He and Perkins, together with other Fitzgerald friends and fans, worked to keep critical attention on Fitzgerald’s work. Without them, Gatsby might have disappeared altogether from the American literary canon.
It was World War II, though, that gave The Great Gatsby a real boost in readership. As the war came to a close, 150,000 pocket-sized Armed Service Edition paperbacks were sent to soldiers, men who were perhaps left dreaming of swapping their uniforms for all those monogrammed shirts, and almost certainly of Daisy. How the almost-forgotten novel ended up being chosen for this distribution isn’t clear. Maureen Corrigan, in her book about Gatsby, So We Read On, speculates that Nicholas Wreden, a member of the Council on Books in Wartime and also the manager of Scribner’s bookstore, may have had a hand in it, a hand perhaps guided by Perkins.
The cover of the soldiers’ edition, in selling Gatsby as "the greatest of the ’racketeers’ in American fiction," may have led some to open it expecting Dashiell Hammett. That idea was perpetuated by the movie tie-in edition released by Bantam a few years later: on its cover, Howard Da Silva, as the character George Wilson, points a gun at a bare-chested and very buff Alan Ladd as Gatsby—a paperback that was reprinted five times by 1954. The Bantam success influenced Scribner’s reissue of the novel, first in collected-work volumes, then in a 1957 student paperback. Sales of the latter—designed for baby boomers needing something beyond textbook excerpts to test their literary mettle—rose from 12,000 in its first year to 36,000 in 1958, 100,000 each year by 1960, and three times that before Robert Redford donned that pink Lauren suit.
Were students reading Gatsby because of its literary heft or because it was teachable? Likely both, but in any event the result was an explosion of scholarly analysis paralleling the growth in sales and the dawning recognition of an American classic. This week, 90 years after its publication, The Great Gatsby is a phenomenon, having spent 476 weeks on one national bestseller list, and "timed out" of most of the others. Internationally it has sold more than 25 million copies. It’s impossible to say how many scholarly articles it has given rise to, but a Google search of "Gatsby" returns 34 million hits. So Perkins’ prescience has been confirmed. He wrote to Fitzgerald two weeks after the book’s publication: "One thing I think we can be sure of: that when the tumult and shouting of the rabble of reviewers and gossipers dies, The Great Gatsby will stand out as a very extraordinary book. " Happy 90th, Old Sport. And many more. [br] Which of the following best expresses the tone and attitude of the author?
选项
A、Critical, retrospective and argumentative.
B、Neutral, nonchalant and matter-of-fact.
C、Descriptive, affirmative and commending.
D、Sarcastic, joking and partial.
答案
C
解析
转载请注明原文地址:https://tihaiku.com/zcyy/3908206.html
相关试题推荐
IwasinhighschoolwhenIfirstfellforGatsby,whoturns90today—an"old
IwasinhighschoolwhenIfirstfellforGatsby,whoturns90today—an"old
IwasinhighschoolwhenIfirstfellforGatsby,whoturns90today—an"old
Mychildrenwenttoprivateschool,andgiventhewaythingsareinoureduc
Mychildrenwenttoprivateschool,andgiventhewaythingsareinoureduc
Mychildrenwenttoprivateschool,andgiventhewaythingsareinoureduc
Iffamiliesaretoworkwithschoolsaspartnersineducation
EtonCollegeisafamous______.A、publicschoolB、universityC、primaryschoolD、
EducationoutofschoolⅠ.Theoriginof
1 Whilethemissionofpublicschoolshasexpandedbeyondeducationtoinclude
随机试题
Robert______whathewanted,buthegaveupatthelastminute.A、mightgetB、ma
ProfessorBhattandRobMeakinhavedevelopedamethodto______.[br]Howdoes
Everyboyandeverygirl______.(有权获得九年义务教育)isentitledto(或hastherighttor
甲公司许可乙公司使用其注册商标“阿凡”,乙公司必须()A.在使用“阿凡”商标
女,4岁,烧伤总面积70%,1小时后送入当地卫生院并准备转送上级医院治疗,当地卫
下列关于马可维茨投资组合分析模型的说法,不正确的是()。A、投资组合具有一个特
既能利尿通淋,又能清解暑热,收湿敛疮的药物是A.茯苓 B.猪苓 C.滑石
运用泊松分布设计的控制图是()。 A.单值X图B.p控制图 C.s控制图
利用概率样本数据推断全国居民人均消费支出,适用的统计学方法是()A.参数估计
下列关于从业人员安全培训的表述中,不符合《生产经营单位安全培训规定》规定的是(
最新回复
(
0
)