On The Great Gatsby – 100 Years
by Jill Hunting
Hello, everyone! From Pasadena, California, this is Jill Hunting for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club.
My choice for the 2025 Summer Read is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. This year marks the 100th anniversary of its publication. When I revisited the novel recently, I noticed plot points I had forgotten and rediscovered the author’s fluid, poetic language.
Gatsby is a good read for hot weather. Early on, when the narrator sees his cousin after some years, it’s summer. Daisy is lying limply on a divan, wearing a white dress as fluttery as her voice. “I’m p-paralyzed with happiness,” she coos in that way some southern females have.
If it’s been a while since you read the book, or you’re new to it, I recommend treating yourself to this short classic of American fiction, or listening to an audiobook, such as Tim Robbins’s absorbing interpretation. You could compare it to one of the film adaptations, but they disappoint. As Fitzgerald said of his early reviews, none of them “had the slightest idea what the book is about.”
He was only 28 when Gatsby was published. It was moderately successful at first. By the time he died an alcoholic, at the age of 44, his books had not just been remaindered, they were out of print. A few years earlier, he and Sheilah Graham scoured bookshops looking for any of his titles. Not a single bookseller had one in stock.
Fitzgerald did not come from money. Born in Minnesota, he went East to college, to Princeton. I knew a boy like him. One of his roommates was a mean little guy named for an ancestor, one of the Founding Fathers. The other was a star athlete like Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan. They were the type who size up a potential rival by asking, “Where did you prep?” The three roommates hated each other. I can imagine the incipient writer Fitzgerald observing his fellow Princetonians, internalizing the sting of their perception that he’s inferior, and one day modeling Daisy’s brutish husband after them.
Gatsby had not come from money, either, but through underworld ties he had grown rich. Weekends found him hosting lavish parties at his Long Island mansion—located across from, but not on, the old-money side. The partygoers don’t know Gatsby, they just show up. They are not A- but B-listers. When Gatsby orchestrates for Daisy to visit, while showing her around he tosses the silk shirts in his closet. She looks on and cries, saying they are beautiful, but they are gaudy and loud. They signify that Daisy could never marry this man who idealizes her but whose origins will forever betray him. Someone may attend an Ivy League university and live in a Manhattan tower, but if he comes from Queens, no gilded escalator can truly elevate him.
At a hundred years old, The Great Gatsby is timeless in its themes of a man trapped in an illusion, a love triangle, and careless people who get away with things. The author who yearned to be recognized as a serious writer didn’t know it, but he did get there, well beyond his dream.
