Weeks 1 and 2: F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (1925)

Our first novel this semester will be F. Scott Fitzgerald's best-known work, and one of the finest American novels of the modernist period, The Great Gatsby. When the Modern Library ranked the Top 100 English-Language Novels of the 20th Century in 1998, Gatsby came in second, and was the highest-ranking American entry (bookended by James Joyce's Ulysses [#1] and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [#3]), however while the book received positive reviews upon its publication in 1925, it failed to sell as many copies as its predecessors (This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned) and at the time of Fitzgerald's death fifteen years later, it was out of print and virtually forgotten.

The book begins with these iconic lines:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had."

and from the get-go we know that we're in the milieu of full-fledged Jazz Age opulence. While we'll see the rhythms and energy of jazz factor into Harlem Renaissance fiction like our next book, Nella Larsen's Passing, for Fitzgerald it's more about the glamorous trappings of that lifestyle: the decadence of a war-weary 20s culture that lived as if there was no tomorrow, flaunting prohibition laws and spending profligately. This valorization of the moneyed classes had roots in his upbringing in prestigious schools, culminating in his time at Princeton, but the sensitive young writer was able to see beyond mere starry-eyed adulation to find sadness and emptiness behind well-cultivated bon vivant personae, as the opening lines to "The Rich Boy" (a short story published one year after Gatbsy) attest:

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.

(These lines, by the way, are often misquoted. Quote/Counterquote offers a great analysis of this common mistake.)

Beyond class, gender plays a major role in shaping the characters we find here and the fates of folks like Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker will give us much to talk about.

Here's our reading schedule for The Great Gatsby:

• Thurs. August 29: chapters 1–3
• Tues. September 3: chapters 4–7 
• Thurs. September 5: chapters 8–9

and a few links to supplemental materials:

• The New York Times review from April 19, 1925: [link]
• Fitzgerald's Times obituary from December 23, 1940: [link]
• Time Magazine's listing for Gatsby as part of its "100 Best English Novels from 1923 to the Present," including a link to their original review: [link] 
• George Remus, Cincinnati's own larger-than-life inspiration for Jay Gatsby: [link]
• Pop Chart Lab offers a poster-sized chart of the novel's character interactions by chapter: [link]

legendary comic Andy Kaufman reads Gatsby in its entirety as part of his act

a dramatization of the same from the Kaufman biopic, Man on the Moon