第二篇阅读 —— Los Angeles Times

      标题：Gatsby, literature’s party animal, turns 90 (文学)

　　I was in high school when I first fell for Gatsby, who turns 90 today — an “old sport” by any measure. He was 50 even then, but he appeared to me as Robert Redford in a pink Ralph Lauren suit and those “shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel” that set Daisy sobbing in Chapter 5. How could a freckle-faced, Catholic-raised virgin resist that kind of bad boy: rich and handsome, with the best party house in town, even if he never did mingle?

　　本文涉及英美文学内容，开篇第一句提及“盖茨比”。第一段采取“故事开篇”结构，从作者青少年时期的感受做切入点，简要回顾盖茨比的故事情节。考生需对“盖茨比”、“黛西”等《了不起的盖茨比》信息有简单的了解。

　　Gatsby seems the kind of guy who would always have been popular. But the truth is more complicated. “The Great Gatsby” was published on April 10, 1925. Max Perkins, F. Scott Fitzgerald's editor, thought it a masterpiece. The then-29-year-old Fitzgerald wrote of the novel before it was published, “It represents about a year's work and I think it's about ten years better than anything I've done.”

　　第二段深入介绍小说与作者信息，作为背景知识补充，可快速阅读。

　　And it did receive some praise in its early days, for sure. The New York Times called it “a curious book, a mystical, glamorous story of today.” But others weren't enamored. The New York World ran a review under the headline “F. Scott Fitzgerald's Latest a Dud” (ouch!), and Perkins wrote at the time that so many people attacked him over the book that he felt “bruised.”

　　第三段展示媒体对小说的评论。注意文中“But”一词，转折词“but, yet, still, however, nevertheless”的出现意味着文意的转变。“And”句是对小说的赞赏，“But”句提出反面观点，认为小说乏善可陈，受到广泛攻击。

　　Sales were lackluster too. The first printing of Fitzgerald's debut novel, “This Side of Paradise,” had sold out in days, and Charles Scribner's Sons went back to press 11 more times in two years to sell almost 50,000 copies. Fitzgerald's follow-up, “The Beautiful and the Damned,” also sold well enough to put 50,000 copies into print. But the 20,000-copy first run of “The Great Gatsby” was followed by a mere 3,000 second print run, and no third. “Gatsby” was never out of print in the years before Fitzgerald died — at age 44, 15 years after its publication — only because Scribner's still had unsold copies from those first two printings.

　　第四段关注小说销售业绩。第一句中的“too”是个提示词，表示该段的观点与上一段相仿。“debut”首秀, “press”出版社, “first run”第一版等专业术语可做了解。

　　In fall 1940, Fitzgerald, writing to his wife, Zelda, of a new novel he was working on, lamented, “I don't suppose anyone will be much interested in what I have to say this time and it may be the last novel I'll ever write.” The last Scribner's royalty check before he died that December was for $13.13.

　　本段介绍小说作者菲兹杰拉德写给妻子的最后一本小说。

　　Fitzgerald's friend, the literary and social critic Edmund Wilson — who said of Fitzgerald's death that he “felt robbed of some part of my own personality” — helped with the posthumous publication of Fitzgerald's unfinished “The Last Tycoon.” He and Perkins, together with other Fitzgerald friends and fans, worked to keep critical attention on Fitzgerald's work. Without them, “Gatsby” might have disappeared altogether from the American literary canon.

　　本段介绍菲兹杰拉德的朋友对他小说出版的帮助。段落中出现“双破折”，考察标点符号的阅读方式，“双破折”起解释说明、重复介绍的作用，可以省略。

　　It was World War II, though, that gave “The Great Gatsby” a real boost in readership. As the war came to a close, 150,000 pocket-sized “Armed Service Edition” paperbacks were sent to soldiers, men who were perhaps left dreaming of swapping their uniforms for all those monogrammed shirts, and almost certainly of Daisy.

　　本段介绍二战对小说出版的推动力。第一句为主题句，“a real boost”, 高频词“boost”再次出现，同义词“promote”, “thrust”, “hoist”等均为促进的含义。

　　How the almost-forgotten novel ended up being chosen for this distribution isn't clear. Maureen Corrigan, in her book about “Gatsby,” “So We Read On,” speculates that Nicholas Wreden, a member of the book industry's Council on Books in Wartime who also happened to be the manager of Scribner's bookstore, may have had a hand in it, a hand perhaps guided by Perkins. The cover of the soldiers' edition, in selling Gatsby as “the greatest of the ‘racketeers' in American fiction,” may have led some to open it expecting Dashiell Hammett. That idea was perpetuated by the movie tie-in edition released by Bantam a few years later; on its cover, Howard Da Silva, as the character George Wilson, points a gun at a bare-chested and very buff Alan Ladd as Gatsby — a paperback that was reprinted five times by 1954.

　　The Bantam success influenced Scribner's reissue of the novel, first in collected-work volumes, then in a 1957 student paperback. Sales of the latter — designed for baby boomers needing something beyond textbook excerpts to test their literary mettle — rose from 12,000 in its first year to 36,000 in 1958, 100,000 each year by 1960, and three times that before Robert Redford donned that pink Lauren suit.

　　多段落评讲《了不起的盖茨比》小说获得成功的原因。段落内结合部分金融知识，如“baby boomers”出自美国二战后著名的“baby boom”婴儿潮一词，大量的数字作证小说的销售进步。

　　Were students reading “Gatsby” because of its literary heft or because it was teachable? Likely both, but in any event the result was an explosion of scholarly analysis paralleling the growth in sales and the dawning recognition of an American classic. This week, 90 years after its publication, “The Great Gatsby” is a phenomenon, having spent 476 weeks — more than nine years in total — on one national bestseller list, and “timed out” of most of the others. Internationally it has sold more than 25 million copies. It's impossible to say how many scholarly articles it has given rise to, but a Google search of “Gatsby” returns 34 million hits.

　　Happy 90th, Old Sport. And many more.

　　末尾总结升华，强调《了不起的盖茨比》的成功经历了时间的考验，展示出全文的“积极正面”态度，与对该小说的肯定观点。