When we deconstruct the essential elements of our culture today,  celebrity culture, the privilege of wealth, the importance of popular culture in shaping the broad national conversation, even our obsession with the automobile, we find it all had its roots in the 1920’s.  

Perhaps the endurance of Gatsby, is that it represents a time that was a kind of line of demarcation for the country.  One world before the early 1920's and another after.

This is the world that Sarah Churchwell takes us into in her book Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby. A story about a story,  it captures the ethos of the 20’s, the origin of the times and the great American novel that still defines it.

My conversation with Sarah Churchwell: