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|title=Careless People Murder Mayhem and the Invention of the Great Gatsby

|author=Sarah Churchwell

|publisher=Virago Press

|date=March 2014

|website=http://www.uea.ac.uk/american-studies/people/profile/s-churchwell

|video=lH59uXkMNaU

|summary=This exquisitely crafted, meticulously researched, entertaining, fascinating, witty and insightful biography sparkles with the spirit of the jazz age, charting F. Scott Fitzgerald's inspiration for his magnum opus "The Great Gatsby". It is an elegiac masterpiece that plays on the reader's senses like a sad symphony as tales of lost dreams unfold.

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In this accomplished literary biography Professor Churchwell expertly weaves together three guest lists- the Fitzgeralds and literary cast of New York, the sensationalist tragic murder victims and suspects of New Brunswick, New Jersey and the careless characters of F. Scott's novel using the Fitzgeralds' archives, newspaper clippings, literary scrapbooks,diary entries and anecdotes to link the stories and chronicle the heedless hedonism of the 1920s. It is not only a meticulously researched tribute tracing the genesis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s plot skeleton, which he roughly sketched in pencil in the back of a book, entitled Man’s Hope, but it also sparkles with sophisticated vocabulary fizzing with the effervescence of a glass of champagne providing new treats for the reader with each inviting chapter.