‘Gatsby’: The Greatest Of Them All

Posted January 31st, 2010 by admin

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway met for the first time in 1925 in Paris, just as Fitzgerald’s third novel, “The Great Gatsby,” was being published in the United States. As recounted in the previous Second Reading, Hemingway was not a kind man and was especially unkind to Fitzgerald in “A Moveable Feast,” his memoir of Paris in the 1920s, but when Fitzgerald gave him a copy of “Gatsby,” Hemingway had to draw in his horns. With characteristic self-importance, he said it was now his duty to “try to be a good friend” to Fitzgerald because, he acknowledged, “If he could write a book as fine as ‘The Great Gatsby’ I was sure that he could write an even better one.” Read more…