The Girls and the Money: Reflections on 'The Great Gatsby'

Abstract

My Grey Walls Press edition of The Great Gatsby, published in 1948 and bought about the same time, came in a dust jacket I never liked. But it's more dust than jacket now, and all I can remember of its design is that it had crude skyscrapers, not the least sharp-edged, on it somewhere, and something red and something green. Or at least I think it did. Yesterday what I picked up was green cloth bound, slim, subdued, plain, not the least bit awkward and garish, hurried and home-made. Those last are qualities I've always associated not only with Gatsby but also with Gatsby, and if being reduced to that plain green is one of the signs that some of the life you held in your hand when you held it new-and it still felt new, in 1948 (to a young man, anyway) -has now been rubbed off, has crumbled away and left bare, the permanent rock, then it's a change I suppose we can do nothing but try to get used to. In its plain monotone, perhaps we can think of the book as more like the jewel Edmund Wilson compared it with and less like the local newspaper. Plain cloth is in any case an improvement over ruffled Robert Redford on glossy paper cover.