A Rotten Crowd

America, Wealth, and One-Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby

John Marsh

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2024
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781685900847
• Subtopic: Political Literary Criticism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A look at how much, and how little, has changed about class in America

One century ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald invited us into the lives of the "rotten crowd," Jazz Age Americans with far more money than morals. In "A Rotten Crowd": America, Wealth, and One Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby, John Marsh welcomes us back to Fitzgerald's world to examine the rich and their reckless approach to human relationships, their poor taste in friends, and the harm they cause. Marsh leads us to wonder: What kinds of waste—economic, environmental, emotional—accompany a culture of wealth? What kinds of relationships do the wealthy form with those they rely upon to maintain their power—and how does capitalism and the need for the accumulation of wealth influence the bonds the rest of us form? On a surface level, how do the clothes people wear signal their status—and how do those fashions trickle down to the rest of us? And on a deeper level, how does racism drive a wedge between those who might otherwise stand up to the rich? As we move between 2025 and 1925 to consider how much—or little—has changed in the interim, A Rotten Crowd helps us discover what we can do about the obscene concentration of wealth in America today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: The Great Gatsby in 1,000 Words
• Introduction: The Distressing Proximity of Millionaires
• Chapter One: What to Wear in The Great Gatsby
• Chapter Two: Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires
• Chapter Three: “You’re Selling Bonds, Aren’t You, Old Sport?”
• Chapter Four: “We’re All White Here”
• Conclusion: Our Orgastic Futures
• Notes