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Summary
Summary
Kirkus (STARRED review)
"Churchwell... has written an excellent book... she's earned the right to play on [Fitzgerald's] court. Prodigious research and fierce affection illumine every remarkable page."
The autumn of 1922 found F. Scott Fitzgerald at the height of his fame, days from turning twenty-six years old, and returning to New York for the publication of his fourth book, Tales of the Jazz Age . A spokesman for America's carefree younger generation, Fitzgerald found a home in the glamorous and reckless streets of New York. Here, in the final incredible months of 1922, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald drank and quarreled and partied amid financial scandals, literary milestones, car crashes, and celebrity disgraces.
Yet the Fitzgeralds' triumphant return to New York coincided with another event: the discovery of a brutal double murder in nearby New Jersey, a crime made all the more horrible by the farce of a police investigation--which failed to accomplish anything beyond generating enormous publicity for the newfound celebrity participants. Proclaimed the "crime of the decade" even as its proceedings dragged on for years, the Mills-Hall murder has been wholly forgotten today. But the enormous impact of this bizarre crime can still be felt in The Great Gatsby , a novel Fitzgerald began planning that autumn of 1922 and whose plot he ultimately set within that fateful year.
Careless People is a unique literary investigation: a gripping double narrative that combines a forensic search for clues to an unsolved crime and a quest for the roots of America's best loved novel. Overturning much of the received wisdom of the period, Careless People blends biography and history with lost newspaper accounts, letters, and newly discovered archival materials. With great wit and insight, acclaimed scholar of American literature Sarah Churchwell reconstructs the events of that pivotal autumn, revealing in the process new ways of thinking about Fitzgerald's masterpiece.
Interweaving the biographical story of the Fitzgeralds with the unfolding investigation into the murder of Hall and Mills, Careless People is a thrilling combination of literary history and murder mystery, a mesmerizing journey into the dark heart of Jazz Age America.
Author Notes
Sarah Churchwell is the Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe and coeditor of Must Read: Rediscovering the Bestselle r, and her literary journalism has been published widely. An American currently living in London, she is a regular broadcaster and contributor to the BBC.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
University of East Anglia literature professor Churchwell (The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe) evokes the Jazz Age in all its ephemeral glamour and recklessness in her latest book. Drawing on newspaper articles, correspondence, diary entries, scrapbooks, and newly discovered archival material, the author presents "a collage" of Scott and Zelda Fitzgeralds' world and a social history of the times. Churchwell focuses on 1922-the year the couple moved to Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island, and a gruesome, unsolved double murder (the Mills-Hall case, "the crime of the decade") took place in nearby New Jersey. She excels at providing rich period details-drugstores selling illegal liquor, ubiquitous car crashes-to show how the patchwork quality of the times affected Fitzgerald's thinking as he composed The Great Gatsby. Indeed, the book highlights how accurately Fitzgerald intuited what was to come: the damage being done to American society by focusing on wealth; the way mass media would give rise to a celebrity culture. Yet, in an effort to find a new angle on The Great Gatsby, Churchwell strains to establish a close connection between the Mills-Hall murders and Fitzgerald's work on the book, with little evidence to support the tie, other than the fact that they occurred around the same time. Illus. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency.(Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
"I FIND LIFE QUITE IMPOSSIBLE," wrote Nancy Cunard, the English heiress famous in the 1920s for her fashionable excess, "as I cannot enjoy a thing without carrying it to all the extremes and then nearly dying of the reaction." She wasn't the only one blowing past her limits during that risky era, but as Judith Mackrell puts it in "Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation," she was an audacious female forerunner preceding a "collective surge in expectation." Women on the verge demanded more from life than marriage and motherhood. Joining Cunard in her restless experimentation were the outrageous actress Tallulah Bankhead, the brazen aristocrat Diana Cooper, the electrifying jazz dancer Josephine Baker, the Polish-Russian painter Tamara de Lempicka and America's über-flapper, Zelda Fitzgerald. They shared an edgy ambition and a taste for immoderation that led them crashing through the public psyche, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes not, but always on toward emancipation - or at least on to the next great party. As Mackrell demonstrates so elegantly, their collective defiance redefined the feminine possible. It took nerve. Though Cunard might have wanted to be remembered for her poetry, she was infamous for her sexual adventures. She flaunted a relentless promiscuity and "inspired half the poets and novelists" of the era, as one contemporary reported, tumbling into bed with Aldous Huxley and, probably, T.S. Eliot. For her part, de Lempicka claimed she launched an art career by sheer will, while Baker's high-voltage sensuality captivated Paris. Bankhead, as a teenage ingénue, haunted the lobby of New York's Algonquin Hotel, telling anyone who would listen, "My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine." Cooper, from one of Britain's oldest families, instigated debauchery and calmed her nerves with morphine, learning all too well the allure of being "dangerous, dissipated, desperate." During World War I, an admirer threw grand, hard-drinking parties, riots that went on until Cooper stood to leave, at which point he stopped the band and told everyone else to go. Mackrell, a dance critic, loves a romp, and tales of her high-flying subjects lose none of their adrenaline in the retelling. Her writing is bright and nimble, but she's also astute enough to delve beyond the flash and dazzle, the public illusions cast to hide private insecurity, pain and frustration. Despite the "hard, fast and luxe" glaze of de Lempicka's self-portrait, Mackrell shows tenderness toward the painter's disappointing marriage and awkward descent into obscurity. She writes not only of Baker's bespangled banana skirt and her affair with Le Corbusier, but of the bleak reality of her impoverished childhood and first marriage at age 13. She's sensitive to the ache of what one writer at the time called Bankhead's "scorching eagerness to be somebody." Some of her flappers break the rules just for the sake of it. Others are hellbent on ruination. But for Mackrell, wise to the self-promotion and self-destruction, their efforts are "never less than valiant." "In their various attempts to live and die in their own way," she writes, "the flappers represented a genuinely subversive force." They were "willing to run the risks of their independence as well as enjoy its pleasures." Of course, no one was more devoted to this experiment in modish living than Zelda Fitzgerald, the precocious Montgomery, Ala., flirt who moved to Manhattan and became an ultramodern muse for her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald. She proved herself provocative to the point of exhaustion, whether receiving guests while in her bath, dancing in fountains, or stripping down in the middle of Grand Central Terminal, buoyed along on a cascade of cocktails. As Mackrell writes of Zelda and her peers, "what made them emblematic of their time was the spirit of audacity with which they reinvented themselves." The process of reinvention - and the lives of the fabulous Fitzgeralds, or "the Fitz" as they were known - fuses together Sarah Churchwell's "Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of 'The Great Gatsby,"' interweaving stories of the couple's hard-partying exploits in New York City and in Great Neck in 1922 with details of a sensationalized homicide investigation that helped inspire Fitzgerald's masterwork, a book he thought he'd call "Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires." Churchwell, the author of "The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe," devotes much effort to the double murder of Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills in New Brunswick, N.J., but the tawdry stuff of their end is never as interesting as anecdotes that burned a hot halo around the jazz era's golden couple. How could it be? The Fitzgeralds lead the way to the real-life polo players, socialites, bootleggers and chorus girls who fed his fiction, as they spill out of speakeasies, dance the shimmy and shoot craps in their evening clothes. Churchwell's research fills the city's streets with "moonlight-blue" taxis and floats rumrunning boats offshore. It's easy to imagine the young novelist in his element. Riding in a cab under a "mauve and rosy sky," he "began to bawl," he wrote, "because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again." E. E. Cummings first used "partied" as a verb in 1922, Churchwell notes, and for the Fitz, the rolling revels never stopped. They were most often seen "publicly and spectacularly drunk," as one friend cautioned. Their household budget that year allocated $80 a month to "house liquor" and $100 to "wild parties," and Churchwell's book includes Scott's recipe for bathtub gin. It's no wonder he was writing only about 100 words a day. As Churchwell writes of Gatsby, "anyone who is self-made can be unmade too." Ever sensitive to the shifting tides, when Scott and Zelda felt their fashionability wane, they packed and left for France. "We were no longer important," he wrote. "The flapper, upon whose activities the popularity of my first books was based, had become passé by 1923." AT TIMES, CHURCHWELL chips away at the magnificent arc of the Fitzgeralds' fall, and Zelda's plunge into madness, rather like one of the macabre souvenir seekers who pulled apart a crab-apple tree under which the Halls-Mills corpses were found. In comparison, Mackrell carefully appraises the pair's "Faustian pact with celebrity," preserving their dignity by affording each a depth of intellect and telling the story of their post-fab years with insight. The fame that "united them had, inexorably, imprisoned them," she concludes. "There simply wasn't enough space in the legend they had created for them both to flourish as individuals." By 1956, Bankhead had become a camp icon, Mackrell notes, still playing it risqué well past her prime. Cunard reported on the Spanish Civil War from its front lines, but she eventually succumbed to psychiatric breakdowns. Cooper became a celebrated hostess and lost her taste for revolution. During World War II, Baker secreted Free French documents in her luggage, landing the Médaille de la Résistance. Zelda, embarrassed by her "dependent idleness," as Mackrell writes, fitfully danced, wrote and painted. Then, just shy of 30, after a decade of nonstop rebellion, she cracked. "I wish I had been what I thought I was," she later wrote to Scott while hospitalized, "and so debonair; and so debonair." Yet beyond their personal traumas and triumphs, with frenetic zeal Zelda and her fellow flappers unfettered themselves, and just as at some of the era's epic soirees, a rowdy new crowd picked up where they left off. "Nobody knew whose party it was," Zelda once wrote. "It had been going on for weeks. When you felt you couldn't survive another night, you went home and slept and when you got back, a new set of people had consecrated themselves to keeping it alive." JESSICA KERWIN JENKINS is the author of "All the Time in the World: A Book of Hours" and "Encyclopedia of the Exquisite : An Anecdotal History of Elegant Delights."
Choice Review
A journalist, broadcaster, author, and academic, Churchwell (University of East Anglia, UK) combines gossipy entertainment with serious scholarship in this appealing account of the milieu that surrounded F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing of The Great Gatsby. Using as a fulcrum the Halls-Mill murders in New Jersey, which she suggestively ties to the atmosphere of Roaring Twenties sensationalism as well as to the development of Gatsby, the author depicts the zeitgeist of that era. She manages the complex swirl of social, political, cultural, artistic, and literary phenomena in a way that delivers an incisive close reading and penetrating analysis of Fitzgerald's classic. In other words, while regaling the reader with details about Scott's and Zelda's incessant partying (and eventual decline)--and their associations with celebrities, writers, journalists, musicians, old-money aristocrats, and newly rich entrepreneurs (legitimate and otherwise)--Churchwell provides rich commentary about the possible influences on Fitzgerald's work as it developed in the early years of a flapper culture that Zelda and Scott helped to create. The discussions of Scott's relationship with writers like John Dos Passos, Ring Lardner, and Edmund Wilson that punctuate Careless People are unobtrusive but relevant, even brilliant. --Lawton Andrew Brewer, Georgia Northwestern Technical College
Kirkus Review
The Great Gatsby floats on a limpid river fed by myriads of autobiographical, cultural and historical tributaries. Churchwell (American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities/Univ. of East Anglia; The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, 2004, etc.) has written an excellent book on a novel that remains a favorite in English courses in American high schools and colleges. Surprisingly, she even manages to find fresh facts that escaped previous scholars, including one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's own published comments about his novel, a book that, as Churchwell notes, neither sold well nor received uniformly favorable reviews. Churchwell weaves together a variety of strands: a summary of the novel (including its earlier drafts), a biographical account of the years Fitzgerald was working on the novel (including the time he and Zelda were living and partying in Great Neck, near the novel's setting), and an account of a sensational New Jersey murder case in 1922 (the year that Gatsby takes place), an investigation that resulted in arrests and a trial but no convictions. Churchwell also digs deeply into the architecture of the novel--looking, for example, for the relevance of specific details Fitzgerald mentions. She also examined Simon Called Peter, a novel that Nick Carraway picks up early in Gatsby; she read countless New York newspaper and magazine files looking for items in 1922 that may have found their way into the novel (car wrecks, wild parties and the like). She haunted the rich Fitzgerald archives at Princeton and elsewhere and, employing the clarity of hindsight, chides most of the early critics who missed what Fitzgerald was up to. At times, Churchwell attempts Fitzgerald's lyrical style--one chapter-ending sentence alludes to "the vagrant dead as they scatter across our tattered Eden"--she's earned the right to play on his court. Prodigious research and fierce affection illumine every remarkable page.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A carefully researched blend of biography, literary criticism, and history, this chronicle of the Jazz Age captures the drunken mayhem of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's marriage as it analyzes Scott's novel The Great Gatsby and its sources. The Fitzgeralds' lives typified those of the rich in New York during the wild days of prohibition, although Scott ended up dying penniless. Churchwell (The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe) convincingly places Gatsby among the great American novels whose underlying themes are still valid today. Unfortunately, she spends more time than necessary discussing the Hall-Mills case, a New Jersey double murder that was a possible inspiration for the Tom Buchanan and Myrtle relationship in the novel. Kate Reading's narration is clear and appropriate. VERDICT For Gatsby fans and those literature and history buffs seeking a thorough look at the world it inhabits. ["This well-written and entertaining study is highly recommended for anyone who wants to know how a great work of art evolved out of disparate materials, as well as those who are interested in the history of the United States in the 1920s," read the review of the Penguin Pr. hc, LJ 1/14.]-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Guest List | p. xiii |
Preface | p. xv |
Prologue: 1924 | p. 1 |
September 1922 | |
Chapter 1 Glamor of Rumseys and Hitchcocks | p. 7 |
Chapter 2 Ash Heaps. Memory of 125th. Gt Neck | p. 43 |
October 1922 | |
Chapter 3 Goddards. Dwans Swopes | p. 71 |
Chapter 4 A. Vegetable Days in New York B. Memory of Ginevra's Wedding | p. 107 |
November 1922 | |
Chapter 5 The Meeting All an Invention. Mary | p. 149 |
Chapter 6 Bob Kerr's Story. The 2nd Party | p. 185 |
December 1922 | |
Chapter 7 The Day in New York | p. 223 |
January 1923 - December 1924 | |
Chapter 8 The Murder (Inv.) | p. 261 |
1924-1940 | |
Chapter 9 Funeral an Invention | p. 295 |
Envoi: The Orgastic Future | p. 342 |
Acknowledgments | p. 347 |
Note on Sources | p. 351 |
Notes | p. 353 |
Bibliography | p. 375 |
Illustration Credits | p. 387 |
Index | p. 389 |