Typically Gatsby

Article in Big Read and Themes

Suggestions for Further Reading

Alternate versions of The Great Gatsby

• The movie starring Robert Redford & Mia Farrow

• Audio book on CD or cassette

• En Español: El Gran Gatsby [traducción: Julia Martin]

• Trimalchio: an early version of The Great Gatsby

Adaptations or retellings

• Jake, Reinvented by Gordon Korman

Set in an American High School with teenage characters.

• Black Money by Ross Macdonald.

A retelling in 1960's California.

• The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian

Features events and characters from the novel as historical background.

Literary Criticism / About the novel

• Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Great Gatsby: a collection of critical essays edited by Ernest H. Lockridge.

• The Great Gatsby: the limits of wonder by Richard Lehan.

• Readings on The Great Gatsby ed. by Katie de Koster

 Did You Know? -- Fitzgerald originally entitled the book Trimalchio in West Egg,
 after a character in the Satyricon by Petronius. The character is a wealthy man known 
 for throwing lavish dinner parties.

Scott and Zelda

Other novels and stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Taps at Reveille

• Babylon Revisited, and other stories

• The Beautiful and Damned

• Tender is the Night

• This Side of Paradise

• The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald edited by Bryant Mangum

• Six Tales of the Jazz Age

• The Basil and Josephine Stories

• The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Essential Fitzgerald

• Afternoon of an Author: a selection of uncollected stories and essays

The lives of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

• The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald

• The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald

• The Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Save Me the Waltz [an autobiographical novel] by Zelda Fitzgerald

• Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald by James R. Mellow

• Zelda, a biography by Nancy Mitford

• The Crack-up {by} F. Scott Fitzgerald, with other uncollected pieces, note-books, and unpublished letters, together with letters to Fitzgerald from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Wolfe and John Dos Passos, and essays and poems

• Beloved Infidel: the education of a woman by Sheilah Graham and Gerold Frank

• The Far Side of Paradise: a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Arthur Mizener

• Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Matthew Bruccoli

Did You Know? -- Fitzgerald was friends with Ernest Hemingway, and Scott makes
 an appearance in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, a collection of anecdotes about expatriate
 life in 1920's Paris.

What Else Were They Reading in the 1920's?

Some bestsellers of the time

1920 Zane Grey, The Man of the Forest

1921 Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

1924 Edna Ferber, So Big

1925 Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

1926 John Erskine, The Private Life of Helen of Troy

1927 Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

1928 Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

1929 Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

"The Lost Generation" & other literary voices

Ernest Hemingway (try The Sun Also Rises - 1926)

John dos Passos (try *Manhattan Transfer - 1925)

Sherwood Anderson

T. S. Eliot

Dashiell Hammet

Langston Hughes

Zora Neale Hurston

Dorothy Parker

Damon Runyon

Thomas Wolfe

Virginia Woolf

High Society, at home and abroad

Ludwig Bemelmans, Hotel Bemelmans

John O'Hara (try Appointment in Samarra)

Booth Tarkington

Evelyn Waugh

Edith Wharton (try Twilight Sleep)

P. G. Wodehouse

Did You Know? -- Dan Cody, Gatsby's mentor, owns the yacht named Tuolomee -- it was
 probably named after the gold fields in northern California.

A Great Age, Old Sport

Historical fiction set in the Jazz Age

• Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis

• Bandbox by Thomas Mallon

• Blue Bottle Club by Penelope Stokes

• Carter Beats the Devil by Glen Gold

• Daisy Dalrymple series by Carola Dunn

• Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

• Free Love by Annette Meyers

• Gatsby's Girl by Caroline Preston

• Jazz by Toni Morrison

• Legs by William Kennedy

• Oh, Play That Thing by Roddy Doyle

• A Place Called Rainwater by Dorothy Garlock

• Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow

• Road to Perdition by Max Allen Collins

• Sea Glass by Anita Shreve

Did You Know? -- 1922 The setting of The Great Gatsby is the year 1922.
 Also in 1922: The Eskimo Pie is patented, construction begins on Yankee Stadium,
 Howard Carter opens King Tut's Tomb, and the Teapot Dome Scandal.
 Check out:  Tutankhamun: the untold story by Thomas Hoving
-- 1925 The Great Gatsby was published in 1925.
 Also in 1925 The New Yorker magazine is first published, the Chrysler Corporation is
 founded, Calvin Coolidge takes office as president, the frisbee is invented, and 
 the Scopes trial is held in Tennesee. Check out:  In the Time of Silent Cal by Jules Abels
 Monkey Town  by Ronald Kidd.

Get in the Mood

Music from the 1920's

Louis Armstrong - The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings (4 CD's & a book) - CD ARMSTRONG Mel Bay - Mel Bay Presents Songs of the Jazz Age (book with CD) - 781.65 MEL Russ Columbo - Prisoner of Love: 23 crooning hits, 1928-1934 - CD COLUMBO Johnny Dodds - Great Original Performances, 1923-1929 - CD DODDS Jelly Roll Morton - The Chicago Years - CD MORTON Bessie Smith - Bessie Smith - CD SMITH Ethel Waters - Ethel Waters - CD WATERS Various performers - Favorites of the Roaring Twenties, from the original recordings (2 CDs) - CD FAVORITES

Related Movies:

Under the Biltmore Clock. American Playhouse, 1986 (70 min.) Based on the story "Myra Meets His Family" by F. Scott Fitzgerald - VT 813 UNDER The Last Time I Saw Paris. MGM, 1954 (116 min.) Based on the story "Babylon Revisited" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. - VT LAST Bernice Bobs Her Hair originally aired on PBS, 1976. (48 min.) Based on the story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald. - VT 813 BERNICE The Last of the Belles. Originally aired on ABC TV, 1974. The story of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald's meeting. - VT LAST F. Scott Fitzgerald, the great American Dreamer. Biography series., A & E Home Video, 1997 (50 min.) - VT 92 FITZGERALD The Cotton Club. Beacon Films, 1982 (29 min.) Jazz music in New York - VT 781 COTTON Irving Berlin's Alexander's Ragtime Band. Twentieth Century Fox, 1938 (109 min.) 1938 Academy Award winner for Best Musical Score. - VT ALEXANDER'S Did You Know? The character of Meyer Wolfsheim is based on Arnold Rothstein, who fixed the 1919 World Series. Although the novel doesn't discuss it at length, readers at the time would have known the details of the allusion. Find out more about the events and characters surroudning the scandal: -- The Chicago "Black Sox" Baseball Scandal: a headline court case by Michael J. Pellowski - 345.026 PELLOWSKI -- Blue Ruin: a novel of the 1919 World Series by Brendan Byrd - F BOYD. Or watch the movie: Eight Men Out

Flappers, Bathtub Gin, & Jazz: Nonfiction about the Roaring Twenties:

Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: writers running wild in the Twenties by Marion Meade - 810.9 MEADE Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940: how Americans lived through the "Roaring Twenties" by David E. Kyvig - 973.91 KYVIG The Damned and the Beautiful: American youth in the 1920's by Paula S. Fass - 301.43 FASS Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, a lost generation love story by Amanda Vaill - 920 VAILL Exile's Return: a literary odyssey of the 1920's by Malcolm Cowley - 810.9 COWLEY Fashions of a Decade: the 1920's by Jacqueline Herald - 391.09 HERALD The Jazz Age: the 20's by the editors of Time-Life Books - 973.91 JAZZ New World Coming: the 1920's and the making of modern America by Nathan Miller - 973.91 MILLER Only Yesterday: an informal history of the nineteen-twenties by Frederick Lewis Allen - 973.91 ALLEN Posing a Threat: flappers, chorus girls, and other brazen performers of the American 1920's by Angela J. Latham - 305.42 LATHAM Redeeming the Time: a people's history of the 1920's and the New Deal by Page Smith - 973.91 SMITH Rumrunning and the Roaring Twenties: prohibition on the Michigan-Ontario Waterway by Philip P. Mason - 364.133 MASON Top Drawer: American high society from the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties by Mary Cable - 301.44 CABLE