"A stunning piece of         work. If Fitzgerald could have wished for one reader of The Great Gatsby,         it would have been Ronald Berman. Berman's criticism creates an ideal         companion piece to the novel--as brilliantly illuminating about America         as it is about fiction, and composed with as much thought and style."                 -- Roger Rosenblatt       "An impressive study         that brilliantly highlights the oneness of Fitzgerald's art with the overall         context of modernism." -- Milton R. Stern, author of The Golden         Moment: The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald       "Citing films, dates,         places, schedules, Broadway newsstands, and the spoils of manufacture,         the author, never lapsing into critical jargon, locates the characters         in 'the moving present.' Gatsby, the first of the great novels         to emerge from B movies, uses the language of commodities, advertisements,         photography, cinematography, and Horatio Alger to present models of identity         for characters absorbed in and by what is communicated. . . . Berman concludes         that Gatsby 'reassembled' rather than 'invented' himself."         -- A. Hirsh, Choice