Careless People by Sarah Churchwell (2014)
The autumn of 1922, a double murder in New Jersey, and the novel that came out of that year.
The novel is set in 1922 for a reason. Go back to that autumn, and to the news the Fitzgeralds were reading.
You like true crime and literary history, and you want the autumn the novel came out of.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: the year the novel is set, and Scott and Zelda in New York that autumn.
Changes: the form: biography, history and a murder investigation at once, linking an unsolved double murder to the novel’s origins.
Whose story is it?
the Fitzgeralds’, and the victims of a crime the country followed.
How much time does it ask?
432 pages in the Penguin Books paperback.
Penguin Books: Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby.
Where to find it
Buy the paperback — Bookshop.org
Other ways to get it: Paperback — Amazon · Ebook — Kobo · Kindle — Amazon
Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby · Find at your library — WorldCat
More ways into West Egg: The Scribner paperback (“The Only Authorized Edition”) · The Penguin Classics edition, introduction by Min Jin Lee · The Norton Critical Edition, ed. David Alworth