Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby
Sarah Churchwell, 2014
Penguin Group USA
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594204746
Summary
The autumn of 1922 found F. Scott Fitzgerald at the height of his fame, days from turning twenty-six years old, and returning to New York for the publication of his fourth book, Tales of the Jazz Age.
A spokesman for America’s carefree younger generation, Fitzgerald found a home in the glamorous and reckless streets of New York. Here, in the final incredible months of 1922, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald drank and quarreled and partied amid financial scandals, literary milestones, car crashes, and celebrity disgraces.
Yet the Fitzgeralds’ triumphant return to New York coincided with another event: the discovery of a brutal double murder in nearby New Jersey, a crime made all the more horrible by the farce of a police investigation—which failed to accomplish anything beyond generating enormous publicity for the newfound celebrity participants.
Proclaimed the “crime of the decade” even as its proceedings dragged on for years, the Mills-Hall murder has been wholly forgotten today. But the enormous impact of this bizarre crime can still be felt in The Great Gatsby, a novel Fitzgerald began planning that autumn of 1922 and whose plot he ultimately set within that fateful year.
Careless People is a unique literary investigation: a gripping double narrative that combines a forensic search for clues to an unsolved crime and a quest for the roots of America’s best loved novel. Overturning much of the received wisdom of the period, Careless People blends biography and history with lost newspaper accounts, letters, and newly discovered archival materials. With great wit and insight, acclaimed scholar of American literature Sarah Churchwell reconstructs the events of that pivotal autumn, revealing in the process new ways of thinking about Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.
Interweaving the biographical story of the Fitzgeralds with the unfolding investigation into the murder of Hall and Mills, Careless People is a thrilling combination of literary history and murder mystery, a mesmerizing journey into the dark heart of Jazz Age America. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Raised—Winnetka, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Vassar College; M.A., Ph.D.,
Princeton University
• Currently—lives near London, England, UK
Sarah Bartlett Churchwell is an American-born academic who is the Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia, UK. She is a writer and literary critic and regularly appears on British television and radio in addition to writing reviews and other articles for many publications in the United Kingdom and United States.
She grew up in Winnetka, near Chicago, Illinois, and was awarded a BA in English Literature from Vassar College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English and American Literarure from Princeton University.
She then moved to England where she has lectured at the University of East Anglia since 1999. She has written for many publications including; The Times Literary Supplement, New York Times Book Review, Spectator, New Statesman, Guardian and The Observer.
Her publications include a book about Marilyn Monroe entitled The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2004) and one on Scott Fiztgerald, Careless People: Murder, Mayem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby (2014). Her television appearances include Newsnight, The Review Show, and The Sharp End with Clive Anderson.
Churchwell was appointed a member of the judging panel for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/14/2014.)
Book Reviews
Churchwell brings… a lively curiosity, a gift for making connections, and an infectious passion for Fitzgerald and his greatest novel…. A suggestive, almost musical evocation of the spirit of the time.
London Review of Books
The first readers of The Great Gatsby thought it was all about themselves, a book of the moment. Today, we tend to admire its enduring mythology of aspiration and undoing. Churchwell brilliantly brings these two perspectives together as she holds in counterpoint the sprawling stuff of Fitzgerald’s daily life and the gleamingly taut prose poem that emerged from it… Fitzgerald offered the year 1922 as the chief exhibit when he tried to explain the meaning of the jazz age. It is an exhibit worth looking at very carefully. Careless People does so with a mixture of patience and panache and it would take a long time to get bored of that particular cocktail.
New Statesman (UK)
The wonder of Careless People ... is that it rewinds the years and allows the reader to appreciate again just how well Fitzgerald reflected his times.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)
A literary spree, bursting with recherché detail, high spirits and the desperate frisson of the jazz age.
Observer (UK)
A treasury of new material. Churchwell adds considerably to our understanding of the early 1920s, and how life for Fitzgerald played into the development of his art.
Literary Review (UK)
Churchwell evokes the Jazz Age in all its ephemeral glamour and recklessness in her latest book.... "a collage" of Scott and Zelda Fitzgeralds' world and a social history of the times.... Churchwell strains to establish a close connection between the [New Jersey] Mills-Hall murders and Fitzgerald’s work on [Gatsby].
Publishers Weekly
Churchwell [The Great Gatsy] genesis to the Hall-Mills murder case, a notorious 1920s double homicide that occurred in New Jersey. Since the novel is set in 1922, also the year Fitzgerald began plotting the story, Churchwell examines the events...that took place in that important year.... [W]ell-written and entertaining. —Morris Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology, CUNY, Brooklyn
Library Journal
Churchwell... has written an excellent book.... [S]he even manages to find fresh facts that escaped previous scholars, including one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's own published comments about [The Great Gatsby], a book that, as Churchwell notes, neither sold well nor received uniformly favorable reviews.... Prodigious research and fierce affection illumine every remarkable page.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)