Matthew Bruccoli News Today

First published in 1925, The Great Gatsby still sells half a million copies a year. Both a brilliant evocation of the Jazz Age in all its exhausting glory and a satire of a country obsessed with money and power, F Scott Fitzgerald's novel is lauded as one of the greatest ever written in English. His editor Max Perkins described it as "a story that ranges from pure lyrical beauty to sheer brutal realism".

From the NS archive: The wound and the bow 27 October 1978: On the precariousness of friendship between writers. In this 1978 piece, the author and academic Malcolm Bradbury considered two recent publications – “Scott and Ernest” by Matthew J Bruccoli (Bodley Head) and “Ernest Hemingway and His World” by Anthony Burgess (Thames & Hudson) – and the topic of literary friendships. How can a writer friend be trusted, when one knows how easy it would be for them to trivialise their life...