Reviews for In Gatsby's shadow

The average rating for In Gatsby's shadow based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-08-10 00:00:00 Lynda Lansford I have some hesitations about evaluating Larry Haeg's biography of Charles Macomb Flandrau. First, I've not read any of Flandrau's books or essays, which I'm sure impacts whether I'd agree with Haeg's picture of Flandrau's potential for literary greatness. Second, I don't know the careers of Fitzgerald and Lewis all that well, and their lives and careers are a sort of background metric for examining Flandrau. (I have a sense that Haeg might not have done enough with that metric, but I can't yet be sure.) Third, I picked up the biography primarily because I'm a genealogist and researcher of the history of the Flandreau family in America. Charles M. Flandrau, his father Judge Flandrau, and his grandfather Thomas Hunt Flandrau are all notable figures in that family -- my interest in the biography's source material probably colored my view of the work itself. Certain small errors about his family history certainly got more attention from me that they would otherwise. All those considerations aside, I enjoyed the biography and the opportunity to get a better picture of Charles and his family than I've gotten from vital records, encyclopedic entries, and obituaries. A side note, for more information on Flandrau's sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts, read Kristie Miller's A Volume of Friendship: The Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Isabella Greenway. Isabella was his niece.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-07-21 00:00:00 Scott Lawrence In his preface, Haeg explains that this book is "not a literary biography but a biography of one man's character--how it was formed by his world, the choices he made, the price he paid for those choices." According to the author, Flandrau had the talent but not the purpose, passion, and resolve required for greatness. Flandrau disliked the self-promotion that Fitzgerald and Lewis, his Minnesota contemporaries, practiced; he believed that great literature would find its own audience. Flandrau despised writing for slick magazines that dumbed down a writer's style--though writing for those very periodicals had honed the clarity and concision that marked Fitzgerald and Lewis at their best. If these two writers shadow Flandrau here, it is because they help explain why Flandrau never fulfilled his early promise as a writer.