Gatsby: The Greatest?

Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post:

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway met for the first time in 1925 in Paris, just as Fitzgerald's third novel, "The Great Gatsby," was being published in the United States. As recounted in the previous Second Reading, Hemingway was not a kind man and was especially unkind to Fitzgerald in "A Moveable Feast," his memoir of Paris in the 1920s, but when Fitzgerald gave him a copy of "Gatsby," Hemingway had to draw in his horns. With characteristic self-importance, he said it was now his duty to "try to be a good friend" to Fitzgerald because, he acknowledged, "If he could write a book as fine as 'The Great Gatsby' I was sure that he could write an even better one."
He never did. He took a bold shot at it a decade later with "Tender Is the Night," a thinly veiled account of the wealthy expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy and their circle, and at his death in 1940 he had written a significant part of a novel about Hollywood, "The Love of the Last Tycoon," published the next year in its uncompleted form, but "Gatsby" was, and remains, the monumental achievement of Fitzgerald's career. Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that it is Fitzgerald's masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country's writers.

Read the rest of the article here.