SOURCE: "Real Use and Real Abuse of Folklore in the Writer's Subconscious: F. Scott Fitzgerald," in New Voices in American Studies, edited by Ray B. Browne, Donald M. Winkelman, and Allen Hayman, Purdue University Studies, 1966, pp. 102-12.

In the following essay, Coffin presents F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as a retelling of an old folk tale with elements similar to those of John Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci."

The asininity and arrogance of the psychologists and mythographers who have undertaken literary interpretation in the last few decades rages on. I used to think that Erich Fromm's idiotic interpretation of "Little Red Cap" (his loaded name for "Little Red Riding Hood")¹ was a nadir below which this school could not sink, but I was naive. Since that essay, in 1951, a blaze of equally preposterous remarks on everything from Hamlet to The Hamlet has consumed scholarship. The latest...