The Great Gatsby is a summer novel that begins with the exciting promise of a glamorous season for Nick yet ends with disillusion and tragedy, a thirtieth birthday, and leaves from "yellowing trees" about to turn and start dropping downward into Gatsby's fateful swimming pool. There's the longest day of the year that Daisy always forgets to remember, Gatsby's lavish weekend parties on endless warm nights, gin rickeys and mint juleps, and lilac trees in the July rain. But in the middle of another sticky August heatwave, even summer-loving people might start to agree with Jordan Baker's comment that "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall." Or we can just take Tom's bullying advice to just forget about the heat: "You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it."
Pictured: Beach Scene with Lavender Sky -- William Glackens, 1914 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
