Editor's note: The Great Gatsby

I just finished rereading Gatsby and was struck once again by the publisher's 1992 Afterword. Excerpted is a letter by Maxwell Perkins to F. Scott Fitzgerald with the slimmest of suggestions for improving what Perkins knew right away was a masterpiece. Though the book did not gain critical acclaim in Fitzgerald's lifetime, Perkins offered the following comfort: "One thing I think we can be sure of: that when the tumult and shouting of the rabble of reviewers and gossipers dies, The Great Gatsby will stand out as a very extraordinary book" (204).

But there is more to share. Here is Perkins upon reading the manuscript -- and this is what I have been trying to impart to my students for most of February:

"The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimensions and intensity of the impression you make a paragraph carry, are most extraordinary. The manuscript is full of phrases which make a scene blaze with life. If one enjoyed a rapid railroad journey I would compare the number and vividness of pictures your living words suggest, to the living scenes disclosed in that way. It seems in reading a much shorter book than it is, but it carries the mind through a series of experiences that one would think would require a book of three times its length" (201).

Today in class we read aloud gorgeous passages from chapter 8 and discussed their significance. I can think of many novels that would crumble under this exercise, but Gatsby was made for it. Here you go:

"For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the "Beale Street Blues" while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor" (158).