To glow with bright colours: Jimmy Gatz's trip to Oz

L. Frank Baum's The wonderful wizard of Oz (1900) could have furnished F. Scott Fitzgerald with a matrix of imagery and thematic for his The Great Gatsby (1925). The children's classic had sold widely and even been dramatized during Fitzgerald's childhood. Its emphasis on the greenness of the Emerald City foretells the role played by the colour green in Fitzgerald's novel. Baum's relentless optimism offers a foil to the profoundly tragic vision of the novelist; his title figure (also from the American Midwest) resembles Gatsby in his fraudulence. The shallowness of material fulfilment had preoccupied Fitzgerald since "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" (1921). Gatsby enriched that vision. Could Wizard have furnished him with a network of imagery?

Abstract licence: CC BY

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