SOURCE: Bender, Bert. “‘His Mind Aglow’: The Biological Undercurrent in Fitzgerald's Gatsby and Other Works.” Journal of American Studies 32, no. 3 (December 1998): 399-420.

In the following essay, Bender discusses the influence of theories of evolutionary biology—including eugenics, ideas of accident and heredity, and Darwin's notions of sexual selection—on Gatsby and other Fitzgerald works.

They talked until three, from biology to organized religion, and when Amory crept shivering into bed it was with his mind aglow …

(Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise)

Readers familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald's early work might recall that in those years just before the Scopes trial he wrote of Victorians who “shuddered when they found what Mr. Darwin was about”; or that he joined in the fashionable comic attacks on people who could not accept their “most animal existence,” describing one such character as “a hairless ape with two dozen tricks.”¹ But few would...