F. Scott Fitzgerald - Winter Dreams & The Great Gatsby

“I’m posting this LitSalon Short as a ‘taster’ for anyone considering joining Toby Brothers and me for our co-facilitated four meeting study of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, starting on 29 July, 5.00–7.00 pm UK. Participants in this single meeting will also get a feel for my facilitation style.”

Nancy Goldstein

In this ‘LitSalon Short’ we’ll discuss Winter Dreams (1922), one of Fitzgerald’s most admired short stories — and, as he himself acknowledged, a first sketch for the novel that would become The Great Gatsby. Dexter Green, a caddie at a Minnesota golf club, falls for Judy Jones, a rich, careless, luminously beautiful girl who will occupy his imagination for the next decade. What follows is a story about desire so precisely observed it is almost clinical: the way a certain kind of longing attaches not to a person but to everything that person appears to represent.

Or rather, everything she once represented. Winter Dreams turns on a moment of loss so quiet you could miss it — and then can’t stop thinking about. Fitzgerald understood, a full three years before Gatsby, that the green light at the end of the dock is not really about the girl.

As for The Great Gatsby. When it was first published in April 1925 it was a commercial and critical failure. Its resurrection came from an unlikely source: during the Second World War, the Council on Books in Wartime distributed over 150,000 Armed Services Editions (no frills, easy to carry paperbacks) to soldiers, and Gatsby found its audience in the trenches. Jay Gatsby is one of literature’s great early architects of the curated public image: a man who reinvented himself from scratch, surrounded that invention with spectacle, and bet everything on a single, doomed idea of who he needed to be. In our current era of personal branding and the relentless pressure to project a life rather than to live one, this predicament is instantly recognisable. Fitzgerald knew, a century before the term existed, that ‘hustle culture’ is a trap.

Our four-meeting study of The Great Gatsby begins on Wednesday 29 July 2026.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single session LitSalon Short on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Winter Dreams, led by Dr Nancy Goldstein. The story can be downloaded free-of-charge here.
• Wednesday 15 July, 5.00–7.00 pm (UK time), live on Zoom
• ‘LitSalon Shorts’ are single-session studies (usually slightly shorter than a typical Salon study meeting) in which a facilitator shares with the wider Salon community their enthusiasm for an aspect of literature or culture.
• Shorts are offered free of charge, but numbers are limited so please use the booking form below to reserve a place. Although there is no fee for this Short, Nancy asks you to consider making a donation — perhaps the price of your last G&T or flat white? — to José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, which feeds hungry people in war and emergency zones all over the world, from Gaza and Ukraine to Pakistan and areas struggling with natural disasters.