Jazz Age In The Great Gatsby Quotes

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Fitzgerald could sense that America was poised on the edge of a vast transformation, and wrote a novel bridging his moment and ours. The Great Gatsby made manifest precisely what Fitzgerald’s contemporaries couldn’t bear to see, and thus it is not only the Jazz Age novel par excellence, but also the harbinger of its decline and fall.

This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.

Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (Scribner) has 'arrived' . . . . There is more maturity here and none of the 'smartness' which he himself came to deplore; the author has grown up . . . . In a letter from Rome he tells me that he is ‘$99,000.000 short of the $ 100,000,00’ which he went into exile in order to save. The Great Gatsby looks as if it might do something towards bringing about that consummation." Ernest Boyd, “Books and Other Hors d'Oeuvres” literary column, July 1925