Because it was the book available to me. I had lousy access to books until I escaped my nutso mum. We always seemed to live in dingy small towns or out in the wilds where bookstores and libraries aren't all that common. Even when a town was big enough for one or both, the selection was always bloody awful. The school libraries were invariably abysmal. I knew every book in every small town bookstore and library I encountered. Never saw anything by this person.
So I read what was there, and had to be glad of what I could get. Gatsby was one of those books. I first read it when I was 12.
I'll look into this Parrott author now, so thanks for the rec.
PS: I also don't think Edmund Wilson had all that much to do with Gatsby becoming the Great American Novel (which it is). Everyone in my family who were around when it came out loved it. My grandparents--both sides, my stepfather's mum, my other stepfather's mum, their siblings and friends--All of them had loved it. It was *that* book for their generation, and it's not difficult to understand why. Unlike what Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner or other "serious" writers were up to at the time, Gatsby was fun and exciting and daring and much more representative of the lives of young adults in the 20s than those other books were. It spoke to that generation's experiences and culture in a way that other literary books of the period didn't.
And I stand by calling it the ultimate Great American Novel, because it nails everything American about America--its greed and lust and excesses and selfishness and shadiness and shallowness and dinginess and chutzpah and smallness and opportunism and hopes and dreams and, yes, even its startling naivete despite it all.
It's America, wrapped up in more or less 110 neat little pages.
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