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Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, And The Invention Of The Great Gatsby (2014)

by Sarah Churchwell(Favorite Author)

3.67 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1594204748 (ISBN13: 9781594204746)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Penguin Press HC, The

review 1: As syncopated as the jazz we Normally connect with Fitzgerald himself, this insightful examination of "Fitz" and Zelda is poignant and powerful. Churchwell pulls no punches in her insights into the Fitzgeralds or the decade which bore and nursed them. A truly amazing book for anyone interested in Fitzgerald or The Jazz Age. Neither traditional history, nor literary analysis, Churchwell combines the best of both into a truly intriguing study.
review 2: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925, has been read or has been heard of in many households. Either you were introduced to it by family, read it at school or just picked it up on your own accord just because it is famous. The movie, starring Leonard De Caprio premiered in 2013 and raised furt... moreher awareness of a generation that is losing touch with the great classics of the English Language. Regardless of its age and setting, The Great Gatsby is still a story of great significance.Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell takes both an imaginative and a realistic look at the time during which Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby with special attention to the Jazz era and other important events.The story opens in the autumn of 1922, with the return of Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda to New York from the Midwest at the height of his fame. Just days after turning 26, Zelda had given birth to a little girl, whom they left behind for a full twelve months. He has returned for the publication of his fourth book, Tales of the Jazz Age, and as a spokesperson for America’s happy-go-lucky younger generation, he made New York his home. He hasn’t begun his work on The Great Gatsby yet, and finds himself in the middle of alcohol abuse, extravagant parties, financial scandals, car crashes and fights with his wife.This celebratory return overlapped with another major event that happened in New York at the time; a double murder in New Jersey involving a priest and a member of his choir with whom he was having an affair. This was a huge scandal that took over the newspapers nationwide until the Lindbergh kidnapping trial in the 1930s. Even Churchwell speculates that some parts of the ending in The Great Gatsby were based on the Hall-Mills murder case. The case never got solved by the police who were suspecting the priest’s wife and her two brothers. They were tried in a court of law but there was insufficient evidence to convict.Careless People is a mix of reality and imagination; what Churchwell believed took place based on facts and other information. It is a journey in search of piecing together an unsolved murder and finding the roots of The Great Gatsby. Churchwell writes flawlessly about the life and loves of Fitzgerald and his relationship with his wife. She writes about their adventures in New York in such detail as if she was actually there in the 1920s. The factual side is backed by newspaper accounts, letters and other archived material. With all the evidence she had before her, Churchwell rebuilt the 1920s of F. Scott Fitzgerald giving an insight into the inner workings of one of the great American novels.There are many intriguing facts that I won’t give away here, but there is some interesting coining of words, Fitzgerald’s own thoughts on his success and his work and of course details regarding his death. Churchwell has dived headfirst into research to make the characters as realistic as possible and given us jaw dropping images of the 1920s. Even his wife, who did not get much attention before has now been given a personality and a life.The book takes us from the arrival in New York to the death of both Fitzgerald and his wife. Perhaps the book would have worked just as well without the attention given to the murder. Maybe she included it to link it to The Great Gatsby. However, it does not diminish the literary strength of Careless People. I would recommend this book whole heartedly to anyone who was in love with The Great Gatsby, and would now like to have a look ‘behind the scenes’ of the author who penned it. less

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