Under the Red White and Blue

“I found great pleasure in Greil Marcus’s Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby, about the idea of the American dream, its allure, the exploitation of it.”—Percival Everett, New York Times Book Review, “By the Book” section

“Excerpts are well-chosen. Anything that drives readers back to a transcendent work, fully ‘commensurate to [our] capacity for wonder,’ is to be commended.”—Stephen Phillips, Irish Times

“Greil Marcus is one of our greatest living cultural critics. Not only is this a wildly original essay on one of America’s most revered novels—it’s also a fitting capstone to his oeuvre.”—James Miller

“Now more than ever, we need to think long and hard about our collective national fantasies. There’s no one better suited to this task than Greil Marcus.”—David Treuer, author of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

“With history, with narrative flourish, and with thoughtfully woven connective tissue, Greil Marcus takes The Great Gatsby and gives it a newer, richer life well beyond the one it has already lived.”—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of Go Ahead in The Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest

“Greil Marcus’s prose has an electric wondering urgency; the artworks under description crackle and glow, illuminating whole landscapes of history and culture. This method has never found a better home than Gatsby. The result kept me up all night.”—Jonathan Lethem, author of The Ecstasy of Influence

“Under the Red White and Blue is a soaring, roaring song of a book. The pretext is The Great Gatsby, but the value comes in riding along as Marcus beats back into the past and the fate of America.”—David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film