In Under the Red White and Blue, Greil Marcus documents the afterlife of The Great Gatsby as a narrative “continually taken up by other artists” and available for “anyone’s consideration of the American subject” (96). Gatsby has become, Marcus argues, “a book that has exerted a gravitational pull so insistent that it can be seen to have colonized the imagination of both its own country and of people imagining the country from anywhere else” (6). Reclaiming America’s founding legacy—or at least one legacy—the book sets out to decolonize and in effect refight the War of Independence by reading America’s perennial culture war as a constant battle between Patriots and Tories, or between “those … on the side of social and economic justice, defined in a manner conventionally rendered as progressive” and “all those perceived … to have resisted such values” (12). In 1975 Marcus, who inaugurated his storied career...

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