From The Independent-Churchwell shows that the Hall-Mills case, in which a 34-year-old mother-of-two and her married lover, an Episcopal minister, were found shot through the head in a field outside New Brunswick, was a murder whose lurid coverage exploded into print at the very moment Fitzgerald began his protracted struggle with the novel. This crime, she argues, shadows and informs the novel and suggests a hinterland to its composition that is far darker, and stranger, than previously acknowledged.
Well, maybe. Part of literature's enduring grip is that it's always a bit of a mystery. The problem with forging a cast-iron relationship between life and art is that it can become absurdly reductive. Eleanor Mills was indeed married to "a pale, nervous little man", a possible model for Wilson the mechanic in Gatsby, but Fitzgerald drew on so much personal material, "plagiarising his existence" as one friend said, that it's hard to isolate a single source.
Fitzgerald himself contributes to the confusion as the author of countless contradictory zingers: "Parties are a form of suicide," he said, but he was an Olympic party animal. Churchwell is good on the role of parties in the making of Gatsby. "Gate-crash" is a Twenties term, and so are more than 100 synonyms for "drunk", ranging from "squiffy" to "stinko".
More here-
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books-arts/truelife-murders-add-spice-to-gatsby-legend-29347972.html
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