But how well do we really know The Great Gatsby? As Maureen Corrigan, Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out, while Fitzgerald’s masterpiece may be one of the most popular novels in America, many of us first read it when we were too young to fully comprehend its power. I think you get that sense in Fitzgerald of someone who remade himself but was also aware at times in his life that he was pretending to be someone he was not.The “Fresh Air” book critic investigates the enduring power of The Great Gatsby - “The Great American Novel we all think we’ve read, but really haven’t.”Ĭonceived nearly a century ago by a man who died believing himself a failure, it’s now a revered classic and a rite of passage in the reading lives of millions. He was always kind of on the outside looking in and hoping to be good enough for Princeton, to be good enough for the crowd on the Riviera who he hung out with - Gerald and Sara Murphy, the Hemingways, etc. Fitzgerald never owned a home - he always rented. His parents never owned a home, for instance, they always rented. Paul, Minn., whose parents didn't quite measure up to their neighbors. , he was also that Midwestern boy from St. So a lot of events are predicted in this novel. That car crash in which Myrtle Wilson is killed, Tom's mistress, there are two other car crashes that preceded that car crash. Events that occur in the novel, they're foretold many times. She grew up near an area where part of the book is set in Queens, N.Y., which is described as The Valley of Ashes because it was a dump for coal-burning ashes.Īnd, most importantly, film noir, hard-boiled detective fiction and The Great Gatsby - they're all stories that are obsessed with the presence of fate. While Corrigan is hardly alone in her evaluation of The Great Gatsby, she's perhaps unique in her ability to write in such a lively and engaging way about the book, Fitzgerald's life and the era in which it's set - the 1920s.Ĭorrigan has read The Great Gatsby more than 50 times and has taught it to generations of college students. The doomed beauty of trying - that's what this novel is about.' to be the boat against the current, even though failure and death inevitably await you.

'You can't escape the past, but isn't it noble to try?' she says. She's written a new book about it called So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.Ĭorrigan says she loves The Great Gatsby in part because of its message that it's admirable to try to beat your own fate. How?īut today Corrigan considers The Great Gatsby to be the greatest American novel - and it's the novel she loves more than any other. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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So We Read On by Maureen Corrigan