The Jazz Age Mirror

Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda lived the lifestyle the novel critiques — extravagant parties, heavy drinking, celebrity status. Their marriage became a public spectacle of glamour and destruction that mirrored Gatsby and Daisy's doomed relationship.

Fitzgerald wrote from inside the disease he was diagnosing. He knew the parties were hollow because he attended them. He understood the seduction of wealth because he craved it. This double vision — participating in excess while seeing through it — gives the prose its distinctive quality of enchantment laced with mourning. Every glittering sentence contains its own funeral.