How and why Fitzgerald's novel, initially called a failure, has come to be considered a masterwork of American literature and part of the fabric of the culture. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is widely seen as the quintessential "great American novel," and the extensive body of criticism on the work bears out its significance in American letters. American Icon traces its reception and its canonical status in American literature, popular culture, and educational experience. It begins by outlining the novel's critical reception from its publication in 1925, to very mixed reviews, through Fitzgerald's death, when it had been virtually forgotten. Next, it examines the posthumous revival of Fitzgerald studies in the 1940s and its intensification by the New Critics in the 1950s, focusing on how and why the novel began to be considered a masterpiece of American literature. It then traces the growth of the "industry" of Gatsby criticism in the ensuing decades, stressing how critics of recent decades have opened up study of the economic, sexual, racial,and historical aspects of the text. The final section discusses the larger-than-life status Gatsby has attained in American education and popular culture, suggesting that it has not only risen from the critical ash heaps into which it was initially discarded, but also that it has become part of the fabric of American culture in a way that few other works have. Robert Beuka is Professor of English at Bronx Community College, City University of New York.

The Romance of Regionalism in the Work of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald: The South Side of Paradise explores resonances of "Southernness" in works by American culture's leading literary couple. At the height of their fame, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald dramatized their relationship as a romance of regionalism, as the charming tale of a Northern man wooing a Southern belle. Their writing exposes deeper sectional conflicts, however: from the seemingly unexorcisable fixation with the Civil War and the historical revisionism of the Lost Cause to popular culture's depiction of the South as an artistically deprived, economically broken backwater, the couple challenged early twentieth-century stereotypes of life below the Mason-Dixon line. From their most famous efforts (The Great Gatsby and Save Me the Waltz) to their more overlooked and obscure (Scott's 1932 story "Family in the Wind," Zelda's "The Iceberg," published in 1918 before she even met her husband), Scott and Zelda returned obsessively to the challenges of defining Southern identity in a country in which "going south" meant decay and dissolution. Contributors to this volume tackle a range of Southern topics, including belle culture, the picturesque and the Gothic, Confederate commemoration and race relations, and regional reconciliation. As the collection demonstrates, the Fitzgeralds' fortuitous meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1918 sparked a Southern renascence in miniature.