Bill Nack: The closing lines of "The Great Gatsby"

Fitzgerald's classic  final lines.

Man Meets Book!

If you STILL haven’t gotten around to reading The Great Gatsby, here’s an interesting option.

Borne Back Ceaselessly Into the Past
By BEN BRANTLEY

The most compelling love affair being conducted on a New York stage this season isn’t between a man and woman. (Or a man and a man, a woman and a woman or a boy and a horse.) It is between a man and a book.

“Gatz,” the work of singular imagination and intelligence that opened Wednesday night at the Public Theater, chronicles one reader’s gradual but unconditional seduction by a single, ravishing novel. That novel happens to be perhaps the finest written by an American, “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 tale of pursuing the unattainable in the Jazz Age. . . .

Go here for full "Gatz" review

Gatsby’s Green Light Beckons -- Oh, Really?

New York Times
February 17, 2008
Gatsby’s Green Light Beckons a New Set of Strivers
By SARA RIMER

BOSTON — Jinzhao Wang, 14, who immigrated two years ago from China, has never seen anything like the huge mansions that loomed over Long Island Sound in glamorous 1920s New York. But F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, “The Great Gatsby,” with its themes of possibility and aspiration, speaks to her.

She is inspired by the green light at the end of the dock, which for Jay Gatsby, the self-made millionaire from North Dakota, symbolizes the upper-class woman he longs for. “Green color always represents hope,” Jinzhao said.

“My green light?” said Jinzhao, who has been studying “Gatsby” in her sophomore English class at the Boston Latin School. “My green light is Harvard.”

Some educators say the best way to engage racially and ethnically diverse students in reading is with books that mirror their lives and culture. But others say that while a variety of literary voices is important, “Gatsby” — still required reading at half the high schools in the country — resonates powerfully among urban adolescents, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants, who are striving to ascend in 21st-century America.

“They all understand what it is to strive for something,” said Susan Moran, who is the director of the English program at Boston Latin and who has been teaching “Gatsby” for 32 years, starting at South Boston High School, “to want to be someone you’re not, to want to achieve something that’s just beyond reach, whether it’s professional success or wealth or idealized love — or a 4.0 or admission to Harvard.”
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For full story go here


Robinson G. Meyer wasn’t buying all this striving.
To the Editor:

''The Great Gatsby'' is no Great American Fable of accomplished dreams; it is a cautionary tragedy. Its characters discard their morals to attain pleasure or to quench their ambitions, and, by the novel's end, they all wind up hollow and disaffected.

As a high school junior, I see many students make the same mistakes today. In the pursuit of the false happiness that a Harvard acceptance will bring, students' ethical standards buckle. They cheat on tests. They lie on résumés. They live by mottos like ''Get Rich or Die Tryin'.'' Then, suffering from the same malaise as the characters in ''Gatsby,'' they fry brain cells over the weekend.

This is why I am extremely dismayed that Boston Latin students interpreted F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece to be ''inspirational'' and ''hopeful.''

''The Great Gatsby'' is our greatest testament to the perils of the American Dream, and my favorite book. Have they missed its point?

Robinson G. Meyer
Pennington, N.J., Feb. 18, 2008
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And all this raises again the question of great literature being about maps or growth.

Scottie Fitzgerald Takes Her Father's Measure

Here's what Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan (Scottie)-- Scott and Zelda's daughter --has to say about the role of writers in our society:

"Good writers are essentially muckrakers, exposing the scandalous condition of the human soul. It is their job to strip veneers from situations and personalities. The rest of us accept our fellow beings at face value, and swallow what we can't accept. Writers can't: they have to prod, poke, question, test, doubt, and challenge, which requires a constant flow of fresh victims and fresh experience."

Does she nail F. Scott Fitzgerald, the writer, or miss the mark?

Scottie is on the right in this photo. Is she out of step with her famous parents? Don't be too quick to judge.

Gatsby for the Grad

Out of ideas on what to say on that graduation card to the nephew you haven’t seen in three years? The one who (somewhat amazingly by most family estimates) now has his diploma in hand and is finally leaving Old Siwash U.? Because the chances are good that he spent more time playing around on the computer than reading the books assigned in his general education literature courses, here’s a not so gentle hint you could send his way.

Send him to this page on the web site “gradspot.” There he will find suggestions that a newly minted grad burdened with serious student loan debts and a serious reading deficit to match might find useful. "gradspot," in the fashion so popular today, promotes fixes based on style over substance. Here’s their pitch on handling the pesky book display problem twenty-somethings face.
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25 Books That Look Good and Read Even Better
Building a sexy library

By Orli Van Mourik

“After graduating college, I found my new Ikean bookshelves filled with nothing but books from various classes in Victorian Lit (all of which were marked with a big orange “Used” sticker) and several well-thumbed copies of US Weekly. Though my collection did manage to bring to the fore a couple of potential suitor’s obsessions with Britney’s latest drinking binges or the use of simile in Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, I wanted a library that inspired sexy pseudo-intellectual banter, not just weed out the weirdos. So I started by building one book at a time, and I eventually came up with what I think is the best androgynous library for looking (and maybe even being) sexily smart.”

And which book leads this hot, I mean Hot! list? What is the sure fire open sesame book to “sexy pseudo-intellectual banter”? Right. You guessed it. It’s The Great Gatsby.

And, in homage to the reading-challenged undergrad’s staff of life, CliffsNotes, "gradspot" dishes up this breezy synopsis:

“Gatsby loves Daisy, but Daisy’s married to Tom. Tom loves Daisy, but he’s having an affair with Myrtle. Tom confronts Gatsby and Daisy. Daisy and Gatsby leave in a tizzy, mowing down Myrtle on their way home. Melodrama ensues.”

Then "gradspot" chips in with this deeply felt “Reason to read.” And don't you think Myrtle's sister would get it?

Reason to read:

“This short novel reads like an incredibly erudite episode of 'Days of Our Lives.' Fitzgerald paints an indelible picture of the glamour, gaudiness, and depravity of the roaring ‘20s that’ll make us feel a little bit better about our own drinking and carousing.”
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Hope the nephew appreciates your thoughtful graduation advice. If he sees value rather than humor in this instant library recovery project, I suggest you forget about including a check with the card–-it's clear the young grad would only use the long green in the clubs. He quickly learned in college that books and reading made his head hurt more than hangovers.

The Great Gatsby Public Service Announcement

This PSA supporting The Big Read has been modified for participating reading communities across the country. Do you think it catches the essence of what Gatsby is about? The readers in the PSA are all certain that they "Love this book!" but, after all, this is an ad. If you "love" this book, try writing a short PSA that gets at what you love about it. Or, on a more ambitious level, produce a video (30 sec. to 1 minute in length) that can be posted on this site. [I can download YouTube videos. That's the full extent of my technical expertise.]

The Great Gatsby, “Discontinued Title”

"As the cover of this 1934 Modern Library edition stamped “Discontinued Title” suggests, The Great Gatsby was never a commercial success during Fitzgerald’s lifetime. In a 1936 letter to the series’ editor, Bennett Cerf, Fitzgerald blamed Gatsby’s failure on its size, noting consumers’ preference for bulky books. Eleven years after its first publication, Fitzgerald estimated that The Great Gatsby had sold fewer than 25,000 copies in America, excluding the weak sales of the Modern Library edition. Fitzgerald suggested Cerf include the weightier Tender Is the Night alongside Gatsby in the Modern Library line (Letters, pp. 557-558). However, as this cover shows, Modern Library not only declined to pick up Tender, the publisher also discontinued Gatsby.

"The Modern Library reprint is noteworthy for Fitzgerald’s introduction, which includes his defense of his subject matter: “. . . I had recently been kidded half haywire by critics who felt that my material was such as to preclude all dealing with mature persons in a mature world. But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with” (p. ix)."
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This is from the F. Scott Fitzgerald Centenary website which was launched in 1996, the 100th anniversary of his birth. The site is designed to increase awareness of a great American writer and to celebrate his writings, his life, and his relationship with other writers of the twentieth century. The website draws extensively on books, photographs, and related materials in the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald at at the Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina. GO HERE to enjoy this amazing resource.