Sisters Under the Skin: "The Great Gatsby" as Jazz and Racial History

 -- By Tom Phillips                        

This is an edited version of my essay published in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Vol 19, 2021, pp. 189-202.

Amid the cacophony of Jay Gatsby’s garden party in chapter three of The Great Gatsby, a bass drum booms and the orchestra conductor announces a request from the host, for “Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World.”  The title is all we learn of the piece.  It disappears, “tossed off” into the evening, a passing joke. However, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s intricately patterned novel, as in jazz, things take on meaning even as they disappear.