One wishes they hadn’t interpolated themselves and messed up the title. Why not The Great Gatsby: 100th Anniversary Deluxe Annotated Edition, putting the editor and his helpers in their subtitled place, in service to the greatness? This great novel is flawed, but its title is unimpeachable. Fitzgerald was never quite happy with it, having started with Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires and considered also Trimalchio in West Egg, which would have needed an explanation on the dust jacket, The High-Bouncing Lover, Gold-Hatted Gatsby, and desperately, three weeks before publication, Under the Red White and Blue. Fitzgerald’s editor at Scribner, Maxwell Perkins, is to be commended for seeing The Great Gatsby through to print with that title, let alone with his other suggested changes. All of this we learn in the preface by the editor, James L. W. West III of Pennsylvania State University, before learning some of it again in the margins, and confirming it in the reproduced letters between Fitzgerald and Perkins. This edition takes Fitzgerald primarily and seriously as a writer, with annotations that deal more with its composition, critical reception, and cultural references than with the biography, which it mostly leaves to be covered by a chronology following the letters.
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