Excerpt from F.Scott Fitzgerald - a biography by Jeffrey Meyers:

- In late October 1924, just before he left St.-Raphaël for Rome, Fitzgerald had sent Perkins (Maxwell Perkins - Editor at the publisher, Scribners) the typescript of The Great Gatsby, which he continued to revise throughout his stay in Italy. Three weeks later Perkins, recognising its greatness, enthusiastically praised its themes, narrative technique , symbolism, character, drama, style and art:

I think you have every kind of right to be proud of this book. it is an extraordinary book, suggestive of all sorts of thoughts and moods. You adopted exactly the right method of telling it, that of employing a narrator who is more of a spectator than an actor: that puts the reader upon a point of observation on a higher level than gives perspective. In no other way could your irony have been so immensely effective, nor the reader have been enabled so strongly to feel at times the strangeness of human circumstances in a vast heedless universe. In th eyes of Dr. Eckleburg various readers will see different significances; but their presence gives a superb touch to the whole thing; great unblinking eyes, expressionless, looking down upon the human scene. It's magnificent!...

The presentation of Tom, his place, Daisy and Jordan, and the unfolding of their characters is unequalled so far as I know. The description of the valley of ashes adjacent to the lovely country, the conversation and the action in Myrtle's apartment, the marvellous catalogues of those who came to Gatsby's house, - these are such things as make a man famous. And all these things the whole pathetic episode, you have given a place in time and space, for with the help of Dr. Eckleburg and by an occasional glance at the sky, or the sea, or the city, you have imparted a sort of eternity. You once told me you were not a natural writer - my God! You have plainly mastered the craft, of course; but you needed far more than craftsmanship for this.

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