Building Your Library: The Great Gatsby

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Recommended Reading: The Great Gatsby

'“I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it—overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.” Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

These last summer days are quickly fading, though the summer of 2019 has provided plenty of sweltering and empty city days. I can’t help but imagine Jordan Baker uttering this line as she, Nick, and Tom frantically drive the streets of New York on a holiday weekend like the Fourth fo July, when most of the city disappears. I love holiday weekends in New York. The streets empty leaving those of us who stay behind with a rare feeling of being alone in the city.

My book recommendation this week is tied to my last one in my mind. I have taught Passing and The Great Gatsby in quick succession in the past, and they were only published a few years apart with The Great Gatsby appearing in 1925. Passing, you’ll recall, was published in 1928.

While much of The Great Gatsby is set on Long Island it is still the quintessential New York novel, with urban literary scholar Lieven Ameel recently publishing a piece documenting the ways the novel has been used in urban planning projects since its publication, at once illustrating the power of Fitzgerald’s urban descriptions as well as the role literature can play in influencing urban planning.

To read The Great Gatsby is to become lost in the rarified world of the Jazz Age as it was lived by the elites of the era, and every page throbs with the energy of New York on the edge in the form of wild parties, clandestine meetings, and overripe descriptions.

But it isn’t just New York the city, Fitzgerald captures the greater metropolitan New York by writing Long Island, that strange island that both is and is not New York. Originally populated by the Lenape, then later claimed by Puritans escaping the dogmatic environs of New England, by the late nineteenth-century Long Island was a site for the summer homes of the Gilded-Age elite, particularly those new Industrial families. In The House of Mirth we read a hint of those houses under construction that Fitzgerald’s characters buy and populate, but in 1920s a new Long Island came onto the horizon as Robert Moses (often called New York’s Baron Haussmann) began building his empire of parkways. Those parkways laid the literal groundwork for the construction of the Long Island suburbs and white flight from the city. In a strange and unknown way, The Great Gatsby reads like a farewell to not only the Jazz Age, but to the city before the suburban explosion.

While Fitzgerald’s narrator identifies the novel not as a tale of New York but of the west:

“I now see that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

The Great Gatsby is still easily the most well-known novel of New York of all time, and, therefore, an important addition to the bookshelf of any metropolitanism. Like Baudelaire, this particular novel is a touchstone of New York City literature along with being a conventional part of the 20th century canon of American literature. For those who have already read it I recommend reading it again rather than reading Fitzgerald’s other commonly known New York City novel The Beautiful and the Damned which, despite its totalizing title is a mundane novel by comparison that I personally wish I had never read, so save your Fitzgerald dollars and pick up a nice copy of The Great Gatsby and stay tuned for next week’s post, where I’ll continue my thoughts on Gatsby.

Have you read The Great Gatsby? If so, was it for school or personal pleasure? Tell me in the comments below!