I’ve just finished an article for the next issue of the Raconteur magazine looking at two famous fictional men who created their own identities: Jay Gatsby, from F.Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, ‘The Great Gatsby’ and Don Draper from the TV series ‘Mad Men.’ Clearly the latter was based on the former but they are both fascinating in their own ways. My item looks at how similar they are and wonders why they attempted to erase all evidence of their previous lives.
I’ve called them the made-up men because they’re nearly always men in literature and life, although there are some notable made-up women. So I hope this will be part of a series of features looking at the phenomenon of people who live a lie. I want to do a similar comparison of two other types of deceivers - one literary and one real - and there are a number of others from literature and life that I’ll be researching. However, there’s the small matter of an election to get through first, so let me fire up that back burner.
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