This text focuses on F. Scott Fitzgerald and the prevailing ideas and values that permeated American society in the late teens and early twenties. It provides a vivid portrait of the intellectual and cultural milieu in which "The Great Gatsby" was produced.

Vigorously debated throughout Fitzgerald's own lifetime, these texts shed a completely new light on the idealism of "The Great Gatsby" and on the penetrating view it has of life in a new form of American democracy. Berman makes it clear that accepted interpretations of "The Great Gatsby" and of Fitzgerald's work in general must be changed. He demonstrates that Fitzgerald wrote within a vast dialectic, relating the ideas of the 1920s to those of the "old America" described in so many of his works. Gatsby, Nick Carraway and the other characters of Fitzgerald's greatest novel all have to consider not only their relationship to the present but also their distance from what was once a highly meaningful past.