Publisher's Synopsis
“… he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gatsby: Death of an Irishman is a fresh and compelling insight into the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the genesis of his most iconic character.
Underpinning Fitzgerald’s brilliant but turbulent life was his complex, evolving and surprising relationship with his Irish identity. From childhood shame at being ‘common’ to a patriotic immersion in Irish literature and revolutionary politics at Princeton. But the shame never went away, reinforced when the poor boy found he could not marry the rich girl. Fitzgerald tried to escape it, first through his imagination as a boy and self-invention as a young man, and then in his writing and self-destructive lifestyle.
This is a dramatic, evocative and vivid narrative of the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the creation of The Great Gatsby, the story of American identity rather than the American Dream.
