Name: Apparatus for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Author: Matthew J. Bruccoli

Ex Carta

Scholarly volume with endpaper maps. Part of series of South Carolina Apparatus for Definitive 

The maps in this volume appear to be the earliest cartographic renderings of Gatsby’s world. The front endpaper offers a map titled ‘Long Island: East Egg to Manhattan’, extending from Westchester to Manhattan and across Long Island Sound. The rear endpaper presents a larger-scale depiction of ‘The Valley of Ashes,’ locating Wilson’s garage in relation to Flushing, Roosevelt Avenue, and the Long Island Rail Road. By giving form to Fitzgerald’s symbolic geography, these maps underscore the novel’s preoccupation with class boundaries, social mobility, and moral disintegration, as well as the connective networks of dependency and exploitation it reveals.

This scholarly volume on F. Scott Fitzgerald includes endpaper maps depicting the geography of The Great Gatsby. By translating Fitzgerald’s symbolic landscape – East Egg, West Egg, Manhattan, and the Valley of Ashes – into explicit cartographic form, the maps highlight the novel’s underlying structure of class division and moral geography.

The endpapers contain two maps of the geography of ‘The Great Gatsby’. Despite the central role of geographical space as a metaphor for class in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous Jazz Age novel, the endpapers here appear to be the earliest printed maps of Gatsby’s world.

Issued as part of the South Carolina Apparatus for Definitive Editions (SCADE), this scholarly volume provides textual and bibliographical notes for Fitzgerald’s modernist masterpiece. It includes facsimiles of the original dust jacket and correspondence, alongside a critical apparatus designed for students and researchers.

Edited by Fitzgerald’s foremost bibliographer, Matthew J. Bruccoli, the volume foregrounds geography as a structuring element in the novel. Fitzgerald’s narrative is set in 1922 Long Island, where East Egg (old money) and West Egg (new money) stand as proxies for Great Neck and Cow Neck. Between them lies the ‘Valley of Ashes,’ a bleak industrial wasteland ‘created by the very industries that maintain the wealthy residents of East Egg and New York City’, that functions as both literal setting and moral allegory. The spaces of the novel – East, West, Manhattan, and the Midwest – map directly onto the novel’s ethical and social dichotomies.

Map of the Valley of the Ashes and Flushing Bay, from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby