One Half-Tipsy Yank with a Typewriter

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby was published 100 years ago this month .

The novel is not so much a story as it is a collection of memorable phrases.

Nothing Fitzgerald wrote was really complete, or in some cases even finished.

Evelyn Waugh found it remarkable that “ one half-tipsy Yank with a typewriter” could write scenes more memorable than anything he had ever seen on television.

Now it’s a sprawling, extraordinarily messy suburb of Washington , D.C. : My wife and I sometimes joke that it is “the attic of the city.” The place is unfinished, never to be finished, full of all sorts of half -forgotten, wonderful things that don’t quite fit anywhere else—among them, the author of The Great Gatsby ..