A Favorite Thing

I've got a 1951 Bantam paperback edition of The Great Gatsby. I found it ten years ago at a junk store in northwestern Iowa, among paperbacks like The Thorn Birds and Rosemary's Baby and such. On the cover illustration, Daisy is in evening wear, not looking very Daisyish, in my opinion: she's looking down cooly at a seated Gatsby. On the back there's a quote from John O'Hara, and that's the really priceless thing. It's 1951, remember. O'Hara says this: "All Fitzgerald was was our best novelist.... The stuff is here. The stuff is very much here, and it's mellow."