So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and How It Endures by Maureen Corrigan (review)

Maureen Corrigan’s So We Read On moves forward with the spirit and energy of a triumphal march. Corrigan is, after all, telling the story of how Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby rose from a near death to become “our Great American Novel,” and how, in her view, it endures as one of the “modernist masterworks,” a work to be set alongside Ulysses and The Wasteland (23, 176). Along the way, Corrigan reconstructs in detail the moments when The Great Gatsby almost ceased to be. Gatsby was published to critical applause in 1925, but sales were disappointing and Scribners wound up warehousing the second printing. When Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940, the novel was out of print and sales and royalties had dwindled to nothing. Writers of Fitzgerald’s obituaries who bothered to mention Gatsby generally dismissed it as a frivolous relic of the Jazz Age. In May 1940, six months before his death, Fitzgerald had pleaded with his editor Max Perkins to consider bringing back Gatsby as a “25 cent” pocketbook. He worried that when his daughter “Scottie assures her friends I was an author” she’ll learn “no book is procurable” (214).

If only to set the stage for the story of Gatsby’s dramatic return as The Great American Novel, Corrigan reconstructs Fitzgerald’s personal failures—his years of alcoholism and writer’s blocks—and keys them to the crucial dates and dead ends in the book’s publication history. She draws upon the usual and expected resources of Fitzgerald scholarship, but she also explores some untraveled routes in reading and re-reading the novel. She has, it’s evident, steeped herself in Fitzgerald biographies and autobiographical material (Scott’s, Zelda’s, and their daughter Scottie’s), attended to minute details of the novel’s composition history, reception, and sales figures, and, when it suits her, has drawn lessons from the cheesiest pieces of popular culture and the most sacred academic rituals of canon formation. She takes “the Great Gatsby Boat Tour” through Long Island Sound, which, even with its costumed passengers and ersatz feel, fills out a map of Gatsby’s New York. The chapter titled “Rhapsody in Noir” reveals, in surprising and persuasive illustrations, the connections between Gatsby and the hardboiled school of fiction headed by Dashiell Hammett and the 1920s “gals-guts-and-guns” pulpsters. Her commentary on Alan Ladd’s forgotten1949 Gatsby—afilm noir with a tough machine gun toting Gatsby—throws an interesting light on Jay Gatz’s midwestern origins and his relation to his dissolute mentor, Dan Cody.

Looking for the early signs of the book’s revival in the 1940s and 1950s, Corrigan notes, as other scholars have, that the critic Edmund Wilson, the writer Dorothy Parker, and other friends edited and collected Fitzgerald’s work in the years just after his death. Their concerted and individual efforts set in motion a Fitzgerald revival. And, mirabile dictu, she finds the beginnings of a new life in the Armed Services Edition of The Great Gatsby—one of many books printed in paperback and distributed free to American troops toward the end of World War II. She discovers still other indications of the novel’s rebirth deep in the stacks of the Library of Congress. Poring over discontinued American Literature anthologies, handbooks, and literary histories, she concludes that in these textbook worlds of the 1940s neither the novel nor Fitzgerald had an existence. Not until 1955 does she find the first excerpt from Gatsby making an appearance in a college anthology. Fitzgerald’s masterpiece was then on its way to becoming “required reading” in high schools and college literature courses (227).

In her introduction, Corrigan declares that she wrote So We Read On “above all, [as] a personal excursion into the novel I love more than any other” (15). In her final chapter, “I Didn’t...