“That slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York.”

I was just reading Chapter 1 of “The Great Gatsby” to an friend of mine who couldn’t sleep.  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of Long Island (where I grew up) makes me laugh:

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York — and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. 

 

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