Acentury ago, a slender novel captivated casual readers and literary giants alike with its insightful skewering of Jazz Age consumerism and the American lust for class, wealth, sex, social acceptance, and, above all, a piece of the American Dream.
Edith Wharton praised the book to Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield as “the great American novel (at last)”; James Joyce told a friend he couldn’t put it down; Aldous Huxley wrote to its author that he was “enraptured” by it; William Faulkner offered his “envious congratulations.” In The New York Times, Herman Mankiewicz, the future movie mogul who would later write the screenplay for Citizen Kane with Orson Welles, held that the novel was “a gorgeously smart and intelligent piece of work … civilized, human, [and] ironic.”
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