The Pretty Good Gatsby?

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a writer devoted to revision and rewriting. He anguished over the title of The Great Gatsby and was never pleased with it. Fitzgerald considered these alternate titles:

Gold-hatted Gatsby
The High Bouncing Lover
Trimalchio in West Egg
Ash Heaps and Millionaires
Under the Red White and Blue

The first two titles refer to the epigraph at the beginning of the novel, which was written by Fitzgerald but attributed to one of his characters. Trimalchio was a thrower of parties in Ancient Rome.

Fitzgerald was equally famous for his sentence craft. He wrote some of the most beautiful and provocative sentences in the English language. For today's post, pick a sentence from one of the first four chapters of The Great Gatsby. Explain why you chose it and why it spoke to you. Then try to imitate the sentence's structure (and tone, if you like) in a sentence of your own.

Here's one I especially like.

"In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars" (43).

It's a typical Gatsbian sentence with an incongruous reference to color and of course champagne and secrets. The simile of the moths is evocative of the party-goers, who are temporary, insubstantial, and drawn to the literal and figurative light of Gatsby's parties. 

Here's my version:

On their silver Christmas boys and girls rolled and scampered like new puppies among the anticipations and the sugar cookies and the paper ribbons.