(Oddly, though, neither the book nor Fitzgerald are very popular on contemporary college courses.)Ĭorrigan presents a persuasive argument for Gatsby as an example of literary noir in fact, her favourite film adaptation was a 1949 gangster picture starring Alan Ladd (see poster above). In an amusing bit of detective work, Corrigan scours academic journals from the 40s and 50s, trying to locate mentions of the book to track its ascent to its current popularity. One of the most fascinating chapters concerns the book’s revival, attributable to many factors, including something called Armed Services Editions (ASEs), cheap paperbacks distributed to soldiers during the second world war. Much of its second printing was still in the Scribner’s warehouse when Fitzgerald died, prematurely, at 44 in 1940, fifteen years after Gatsby’s publication! Reviews – by both professional critics and some of the author’s closest friends – were mixed, and sales were modest. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece wasn’t always so admired, however. After finishing it, if you ever doubted, you’ll agree with her.į.

NPR book critic and Georgetown University instructor Maureen Corrigan’s So We Read On is a thoughtful, entertaining and highly accessible book about The Great Gatsby, which she proudly calls the greatest American novel ever. With rigor, wit, and an evangelistic persuasiveness, Corrigan will leave readers inspired to grab their old paperback copies of Gatsby and re-experience this great novel in an entirely new light. Drawing on her experience as a reader, lecturer, and critic, her book will be a rousing consideration of Gatsby: not just its literary achievements, but also its path to 'classic' (its initial lukewarm reception has been a form of cold comfort to struggling novelists for decades), its under-acknowledged debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its commentaries on race, class, and gender.

No matter when or how recently you've read the novel, Corrigan offers a fresh perspective on what makes it so enduringly relevant and powerful. Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for 'Fresh Air' and a Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out that while Gatsby may be the novel most Americans have read, it's also the ones most of us read too soon - when we were 'too young, too defensive emotionally, too ignorant about the life-deforming powers of regret' to really understand all that Fitzgerald was saying ('it's not the green light, stupid, it's Gatsby's reaching for it,' as she puts it). But do even its biggest fans know all there is to appreciate about The Great Gatsby?

It's a book that has remained current for over half a century, fighting off critics and changing tastes in fiction. It's a staple on almost every high school reading list in the country.

So We Read On by Maureen Corrigan