Hello and welcome to the Anthropocene Reviewed, a podcast where we review different facets

of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale.

I'm John Green, and today I'll be reviewing sunsets and humanity's capacity for wonder.

Toward the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby, the narrator is sprawled out

on a beach at night when he begins thinking about the moment Dutch sailors first saw what is now

called New York. Fitzgerald writes, for a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath

in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood

nor desired face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity

for wonder. It's a hell of a sentence. A lot changed in Gatsby between the first manuscript and the

finished book in 1924 Fitzgerald's publisher actually had Galleys printed of the novel then called

Tremonchio before Fitzgerald extensively revised the Galleys and changed the title to The Great Gatsby,

but in all of the editing and cutting and rearranging, that particular sentence never moved and never

changed. Well, except in one draft Fitzgerald misspelled the word aesthetic, but who hasn't?

Gatsby took a circuitous route on its way to becoming one of the Great American novels.

The initial reviews weren't great, and the book was widely considered to be inferior to Fitzgerald's

first novel, This Side of Paradise. In the New York Herald, Isabelle Patterson wrote that Gatsby

was, quote, a book for the season only. HL Mankan called it, obviously, unimportant. The

downless morning news was especially brutal, writing, one finishes the Great Gatsby with a feeling of

regret, not for the fate of the people in the book, but for Mr. Fitzgerald. When This Side of

Paradise was published, Mr. Fitzgerald was hailed as a young man of promise, but the promise,

like so many, seems likely to go unfulfilled. Yikes! The novel sold modestly, not nearly as well as

his previous ones, and by the time Fitzgerald died in 1940 at the age of 44, Gatsby was mostly forgotten.

...