GATSBY TURNS 100!

Thomas Fahy via ZOOM

The upcoming centennial of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) offers an exciting opportunity to revisit this masterpiece and to consider some of the ways it continues to teach us about American culture. Why do we keep re-reading, adapting, and talking about this text? What makes it so enduring? This course will approach The Great Gatsby in a variety of ways. We will consider some of its biographical influences, its dialogue with other artist movements such as modernism, and its deft critical assessment of American cultural trends—from telephones and automobiles to eugenics and immigration policy. We will also examine some of the “Gatsby cluster” short stories that Fitzgerald used to test out some of the themes and characters for the novel. The Great Gatsby earned Fitzgerald his highest praise as a writer, yet the book did not sell well. In fact, boxes of them were still collecting dust in the Scribners’ warehouse at the time of Fitzgerald’s death in 1940. How can we account for its lack of popularity? And how did the novel resurface to become one of the great American novels?

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[A Zoom link will be sent to you prior to each session, typically on the day before your class and the morning of your class.  If you have any questions or need help getting online, feel free to call us at 516-480-5733 and we’ll get right back to you with assistance.]