J. P. Morgan and Gatsby's Name

Abstract

J. P. Morgan and Gatsby's Name Karen Bellenir Karen Bellenir Oakland University Notes . I would like to thank Bruce J. Mann, Associate Professor of English at Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, for issuing the challenge to consider the name "Gatsby" and for his encouragement and assistance. 1. Lottie R. Crim and Neal B. Houston, "The Catalogue of Names in The Great Gatsby," Research Studies, 36, no. 2 (1968), 114. 2. Alexander R. Tamke, "The 'Gat' in Gatsby: Neglected Aspect of a Novel," MFS, 14 (1968-1969), 443; and also Crim and Houston, p. 115. 3. Warren Bennett, "Prefigurations of Gatsby, Eckleburg, Owl Eyes and Klipspringer," Fitzgerald /Hemingway Annual, 1979 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1980), pp. 222-23. 4. Tamke, p. 445. 5. Horst H. Kruse, "'Gatsby' and 'Gadsby,'" MFS, 15 (1969-70), 539-40. 6. Paul A. Makurath, Jr., "Another Source for 'Gatsby,'" Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 1975 (Englewood, Colo.: Information Handling Services, 1975), p. 115. 7. The switch from a "p" sound to a "b" sound involves replacing a voiceless consonant with a voiced consonant of otherwise identical qualities. Fitzgerald uses the same phonetic variation to turn a "business connection" into Wolfsheim's "business gonnegtion" (p. 71). 8. John Blum et al., The National Experience: A History of the United States Since 1865, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1968), p. 444. 9. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; repr. New York: Collier Books-Macmillan, 1986), p. 4. Subsequent references to this edition are in parentheses in the text. 10. Carl Hovey, The Life Story of J. Pierpont Morgan; a biography (New York: Sturgis and Walton, 1911). 11. Hovey, p. 34. 12. Hovey, p. 339. 13. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan, eds., Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1980), p. 66. I wish to thank Dr. Bruccoli for bringing this to my attention. 14. Hovey, p. 319. 15. Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., "Morgan, John Pierpont," Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribner's, 1934), p. 178. See also George Wheeler, Pierpont Morgan and Friends: The Anatomy of a Myth (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 61-62. 16. Andrew Turnbull, ed., The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1963), p. 173. 17. Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1978), p. vii. 18. Hovey, p. 196. 19. Bruce Michelson, "The Myth of Gatsby," MFS, 26 (1980-81), 563-77, notes the parallels between Gatsby and Ovid's dubious fire-bringer, Phaeton. 20. F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Echoes of the Jazz Age (1931)," The Fitzgerald Reader, ed. Arthur Mizener (New York: Scribner's, 1963), p. 275. 21. Bruccoli, Notebooks, p. vii. 22. Crim and Houston, pp. 114-5. Copyright © 1993 Northeastern University