Introduction

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."

Conceived 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. 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.

Offering a fresh perspective on what makes Gatsby great-and utterly unusual-So We Read On takes us into archives, high school classrooms, and even out onto the Long Island Sound to explore the novel's hidden depths, a journey whose revelations include Gatsby's surprising debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its rocky path to recognition as a "classic," and its profound commentaries on the national themes of race, class, and gender.

With rigor, wit, and infectious enthusiasm, Corrigan inspires us to re-experience the greatness of Gatsby and cuts to the heart of why we are, as a culture, "borne back ceaselessly" into its thrall. Along the way, she spins a new and fascinating story of her own.

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Discussion Questions

1) When did you first read The Great Gatsby? How has your interpretation of the novel changed since then?

2) Fitzgerald thought that the sales of Gatsby were hurt by the fact that there are no sympathetic female characters in the novel. What do you think? What is the place of omen in Gatsby? How does the novel regard the emancipated “flapper” figure of the 1920s?

3) What do the famous last words of The Great Gatsby mean? “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

4) Corrigan notes that, unlike most of its peers in the American canon, Gatsby is a novel that foregrounds class instead of race, and she calls Gatsby “America’s greatest novel about class.” Do you agree? What determines class and status in Gatsby, and are these qualities fluid or fixed, or some combination of the two? What does the novel ultimately say about the “American dream” of rising up through hard work? How does Gatsby’s story comment on that dream?

5) When we first meet Gatsby at the end of chapter 1, he’s stretching his arms out to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock across Long Island Sound. Corrigan says that everyone in the novel is stretching out their arms for someone or something out of their grasp. Why? What are the principal characters reaching for?

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