"Ashes to Ashes will appeal to a wide variety of readers. Those unfamiliar with psychoanalysis will especially appreciate the author's avoidance of jargon, while psychoanalytic experts will be interested in his use of both traditional and contemporary psychoanalytic literature."--BOOK JACKET.
Examines the stories behind the dedications in fifty literary classics, discussing each author, as well as the social and historical context in which each book was first published, and covering such works as Shelley's Frankenstein, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.
A collection of autobiographical essays offers the author's impressions of privileged American life during the 1920s, his rise to fame and subsequent decline, and the attitudes that both shaped him and reflected his literary contributions
F. Scott Fitzgerald's early short stories, even more than his first two novels - This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned - reveal both a growing mastery of his craft and an evolution of the themes and techniques that distinguish The Great Gatsby and his major later works. Indeed, features of Gatsby that Fitzgerald supposedly absorbed from Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather, William Makepeace Thackeray, Oswald Spengler, and T. S. Eliot sometimes appear in stories Fitzgerald wrote before reading such putative sources. Scholars Robert and Helen H. Roulston examine Fitzgerald's fiction up to the completion of The Great Gatsby and briefly survey his later career in The Winding Road to West Egg.
Ronald Berman, noted Fitzgerald scholar, makes it clear that accepted interpretations of The Great Gatsby and of Fitzgerald's work in general must be changed. Berman demonstrates that Fitzgerald wrote within a vast dialectic, relating the ideas of the twenties to those of the "old America" described in so many of his works.
