April 12-13, 2025: A Great Gatsby Centennial: Fellow GatsbyStudiers

[On April 10th,1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was publishedby Charles Scribner’s Sons. While I have myproblems with Gatsby, it remains one of our most influential andimportant novels, and one that opens up so many AmericanStudies contexts. Sothis week I’ve highlighted a handful of them, leading up to this weekend postfeaturing fellow GatsbyStudiers!]

Four greatpublic scholarly takes on Fitzgerald’s novel, and a request for more!

1)     MatthewTeutsch: My friend and online collaborator Matthew has written aboutFitzgerald’s novel multiple times, but I particularly enjoyed the chance toread this multi-part account (part two is linked at the bottom) of hisexcellent Fulbright lecture on the book (and not because he engages sothoughtfully with my own takes, although I sure do appreciate that).

2)     StephaniePowell Watts: In that lecture Matthew also engages with Watts’s take on thebook in this LitHub piece, which remains one of the single most thoughtful intersectionsof autobiography and analysis I’ve ever encountered. A must-read!

3)     WesleyMorris: Morris’s intro to the 2021 Modern Library edition of the novel,reprinted by The Paris Review at that hyperlink, is also a must-read(honestly all four of these pieces are for anyone who wants to engage withFitzgerald’s novel beyond its own stunning prose). I particularly like that hedoesn’t take for granted our reading of the book—yes, it’s often assigned byteachers, including me, but we should still think long and hard about why weread it, as Morris models so thoughtfully here.

4)     Jillian Cantor: I triedto engage with Daisy Buchanan a lot and Myrtle Wilson a bit in my earlier poststhis week, but there’s still much more to say about women in Fitzgerald’snovel, and Cantor’s LitHub piece says a great deal very powerfully.

5)     Add your suggestions (including your own work)here!

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Takes on Fitzgerald’s novel or its contexts, yours or others’?