Jeremy Jordan as Jay Gatsby in “The Great Gatsby.” (Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

From its Roots at Princeton University to Broadway Musical

By Donald H. Sanborn III

First published by Charles Scribner’s Sons on April 10, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age classic The Great Gatsby turns 100 this spring. In advance of the centennial, Fitzgerald and the novel have received renewed attention, having been the subjects, respectively, of a new volume of biographies and at least two musicals — one of which is enjoying a successful run on Broadway.

The Great Gatsby centers on narrator Nick Carraway’s encounters with the mysterious, slightly crooked nouveau riche millionaire Jay Gatsby. Nick finds himself involved in Gatsby’s plans to win back his lost love, Daisy, a debutante who is Nick’s cousin. Daisy rejected Gatsby when they were younger, because of the latter’s poverty at that time. Instead, Daisy chose the imperious, conservative socialite Tom Buchannan.

Other characters include Daisy’s friend (and Nick’s girlfriend) Jordan Baker, an acerbic golfer; garage owner and mechanic George B. Wilson, who is manipulated by Tom into taking the action that leads to the plot’s conclusion; and George’s wife Myrtle, whose disappointment in her marriage leads to an affair with Tom.

The novel has roots in the time that Fitzgerald (1896-1940) spent at Princeton University, which he attended from 1913-1917. As a student, the aspiring author wrote for the Triangle Club, the Princeton Tiger, and Nassau Literary Review.

During his sophomore year, Fitzgerald returned home to Saint Paul, Minn., during Christmas break. There, he met and fell in love with Ginevra King. The Chicago socialite became the basis for several of Fitzgerald’s characters — particularly Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship mirrors Fitzgerald’s courtship of King. Prefiguring a line in the novel, King’s father disdainfully told Fitzgerald, “Poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls.” (Eventually King married a wealthy Chicago businessman, and Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre.)

Charlotte MacInnes (Daisy), Isaac Powell (Gatsby), and ensemble members in the American Repertory Theater world premiere of “Gatsby.” (Photo by Julieta Cervantes)

A Composite Biography

Fitzgerald’s time at Princeton is covered in multiple chapters of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). Edited by Niklas Salmose and David Rennie, the volume compiles the work of multiple biographers.

Salmose explains that he and Rennie divided Fitzgerald’s “life into two-year segments,” and offered each segment to a Fitzgerald scholar. “What we were hoping for was that this process would unpack some things about Fitzgerald — maybe not unknown, but things that are not emphasized in traditional biography, which tends to focus on major events.”

Ronald Berman covers the period from 1912-1913, which coincides with Fitzgerald’s first year at Princeton University. According to Salmose, Berman examines the “educational situation in the U.S.” at that time, as well as “Fitzgerald’s academic failures at Princeton.”

Rennie’s chapter on 1914-1915 examines the young Fitzgerald’s athletic aspirations. Fitzgerald tried out for the University’s “football team and failed,” Salmose points out, adding that failure is a theme in “a lot of Fitzgerald writing. But he liked other sports too.” Attributing Fitzgerald’s athletic interests to his years at Princeton, Salmose notes that the character of Jordan Baker is a golfer.

Covering 1916-1917, James L.W. West III examines the “love story between Fitzgerald and Ginevra King,” Salmose says. “Although she lived in Chicago, she came to visit him at Princeton several times. Love, as a theme — especially failed love — an idealization of woman that came of his story with Ginevra, has been hugely influential in his characterization of femininity.” Salmose includes as examples Rosalind in This Side of Paradise and Daisy in The Great Gatsby.

Noting Fitzgerald’s participation in the Triangle Club, Salmose observes, “He learned a lot of his literary craft through thinking about theater. That’s why I think it is interesting that later in life he failed so completely in translating his literary competence into drama.” He points to the unsuccessful 1923 play The Vegetable, and “his failure as a screenwriter in Hollywood, which you would think he would be apt for. I think it says something about the difficulties he had in translating literary prose to other media forms. He was destined to be a prose writer.”

So We Read On

Maureen Corrigan
(Photo by Nina Subin)

In a 2015 interview with NJ.com, Maureen Corrigan — author of So We Read On: How “The Great Gatsby” Came to Be and Why It Endures (Little, Brown and Company, 2014) — contemplates ways in which Fitzgerald’s student days inspired the novel: “Fitzgerald threw himself into the theater at Princeton,” she says. “While he wasn’t a successful playwright, many scholars of ‘Gatsby,’ including myself, point out that Fitzgerald’s greatest novel is graced with a tight dramatic structure: every chapter revolves around a party of some sort, from the dinner party at the Buchanans in Chapter One to Gatsby’s poorly attended funeral at the conclusion.”

Speaking with me over Zoom, Corrigan, who is the book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, elaborates, “These gatherings are inherently dramatic — you have people talking, you have conflict, and I think that’s indebted to the work that Fitzgerald did in theater.” She points to the “compactness of how he nails emotions, and presents so much through dialogue.” She adds that Fitzgerald “knew how to pack a lot into a few phrases.”

Corrigan observes that Fitzgerald’s time at Princeton University must have developed his skills by forcing him “to write on deadline. He wrote a lot of plays in a short period of time.” She also considers the “fact that he was writing knowing there would be an audience for what he wrote. Getting that affirmation from the audience must have been good for him, because he was somebody who needed to be told, ‘You’re worthwhile.’”

In the course of researching her book, Corrigan spent a week visiting the Princeton University Library to examine the F. Scott Fitzgerald papers. Asked about the impressions left by this experience, Corrigan replies, “I was working on a tight deadline for this book. Every day, I arrived at Firestone Library the minute it opened, and I stayed until it closed.” She enthuses about perusing Fitzgerald’s letters, “some of which I hadn’t seen before; I loved having Fitzgerald’s voice in my head for hours at a time every day.”

The library’s collection includes Francis Cugat’s painting for the iconic cover of The Great Gatsby. Corrigan says that the original is “infinitely weirder than you can guess from looking at the book jacket cover … there are numbers floating in the night sky. It’s a strange and captivating painting; no wonder Fitzgerald wanted it. Ernest Hemingway said that it looked like the cover for a bad sci-fi novel. He was so terrible; I think he was jealous, as usual!”

“I really felt so privileged to be in this almost sacred space, where so much of Fitzgerald is gathered in one place,” says Corrigan. “That’s thanks to Scottie Fitzgerald, who was determined to keep those manuscripts together, as well as many of her father’s letters. She could have sold them off to private collectors; any of us who care about Fitzgerald are indebted to her for keeping that treasure trove intact.”

Gatsby: An American Myth

Corrigan is working as a literary consultant to the creators of a musical, Gatsby: An American Myth. The show has a book by Pulitzer Prize in Drama winner Martyna Majok, a Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts.

The musical’s lyrics are by singer-songwriter Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine, and the music is by Welch and Thomas Bartlett. Gatsby: An American Myth premiered in June 2024 at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Conn.

Martyna Majok
(Photo by Josiah Bania)

On March 31 at 6:30 p.m. Majok will participate in a Lewis Center for the Arts panel discussion, “The Greatness of Gatsby.” It will take place at the Chancellor Green Library rotunda.

Majok reveres the novel. She considers The Great Gatsby to be “our great American myth, in the way of the ancient Greeks. To me it is the most moving and honest translation of the American soul. It’s a clear-eyed, but still hopeful, compassionate look at the American mentality. The dream is beautiful — that you can achieve the glory of this world with hard work — though the means by which many have pursued it has been devastatingly destructive. But the dream itself is beautiful.”

Asked how she describes the titular “myth,” Majok replies, “It’s the American Dream itself; that if you just work hard enough, certainly you’ll be able to achieve these great heights — the promise of an ethos of ‘it’s all within your grasp.’ But as an immigrant who came from a working-class world, I’ve seen people work really hard and not be able to achieve that dream, and then internalize this toxic shame that makes them feel, ‘What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I achieve what they’re promising I should be able to?’ We [as a culture] are vocal about the possibilities and the dream, but not so much about limitations, and obstacles. We don’t all start off at the same level … with the same resources.”

She recalls the challenge of dramatizing the novel, especially given its use of narration. “How do you make it dramatic and propulsive, while still retaining that beauty of language, and transcendent opinion of the world?” Majok asks rhetorically, adding that the collaborators are interested in investigating the novel as a “memory play” from Nick’s viewpoint.

“ART was our first production — we learned a lot from it,” says Majok. “This idea of Nick as both guide and seeker, within and without the narrative, is moving to me. He holds the memory of Gatsby. Nick starts the story in the wake of grief for a man who essentially reawakened his belief in living.”

Majok continues, “When I first reread the novel and realized it was set four years after the end of a world war and a pandemic that collectively killed a third of the world, I found my first emotional entry point. Nick finds in Gatsby something that awakens his faith in life and wonder, after witnessing horrific death and destruction. And then that wonder, too, is destroyed.”

She adds, “I think of The Glass Menagerie as a way that we dramatically host memory on stage. To me, Nick is trying to piece memories back together — literally and dramatically ‘re-membering’ the past to try to understand how the world could kill something so beautiful.”

“Gatsby resonates for me so much, as somebody who just never feels that he’s enough, who’s always looking over his shoulder for when someone’s going to take the thing that he worked for,” Majok says. “Things that he ultimately achieved by shady means, by the way, after failing to get them the honest way — he went to school, he was a janitor while he was at school, he did manual labor. All of these things didn’t do it. He couldn’t get to a safe financial place until he turned to crime — which is also a very American story.”

Corrigan observes that in Gatsby: An American Myth the “female characters are given their own selfhood, especially the character of Myrtle. She’s given a backstory that’s hinted at in the novel, but isn’t really developed. You start to feel for Myrtle in a way that the novel doesn’t quite allow us to do, because Nick doesn’t know what to make of her.”

Samantha Pauly (center) and cast in “The Great Gatsby.” (Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

The Broadway Musical

Nathan Tysen and Kait Kerrigan. (Photo by Justin Patterson)

Expanding the roles of the female characters also is a priority of another musical adaptation of The Great Gatsby. This show has a book by Kait Kerrigan, lyrics by Nathan Tysen, and music by Jason Howland. Following its successful 2023 premiere at the Paper Mill Playhouse, it opened in 2024 at the Broadway Theatre, where it currently is running.

“I wanted to make sure that if you loved the novel, there would be a place for you to enjoy the things that you loved about the novel,” Kerrigan says. “The thing that I don’t think translates well onto stage is the narration — because by and large, it’s static; it’s not moving the story forward, it’s moving one character’s emotional journey forward.”

Kerrigan elaborates, “In order to grow the story into something that works on the stage, you have to dive in a little deeper with the other characters — which for me was an opportunity to get into the heads of the female characters,” She points to a scene, invented by the collaborators, in which Daisy and Jordan play golf together.

“I wanted there to be a moment where two female characters were on stage, talking about being a woman in the 1920s, which felt like something that was a radical moment in the history of America; and a dichotomy — of suddenly feeling a sense of freedom, and also feeling the constraints of the world that you’re living inside of, more than you’ve ever felt them before.”

She suggests that in the novel, even a male character such as Gatsby is “a bit of a cipher; he needs to be for the novel to work. It’s all about the mystery of Gatsby. While we wanted to retain enough of the mystery, we also wanted to get into the psyche of this person who drives the plot. Nick doesn’t drive the plot of the story; he drives the emotional arc of the story. The plot is driven by Gatsby, who wants something very badly. In order to watch that on stage, it’s helpful to get in the psyche of that person, and understand him better.”

Tysen describes Howland’s music as a “jazz-influenced contemporary pop score. The 1920s music and dance, at that time, was new … dangerous and edgy. We wanted to explore what that means for today. We wanted to lean into the music of the time, but not let it feel like a museum piece. There’s a big nod to big band, jazz, and blues from New Orleans — but our horn section is more Bruno Mars, less Benny Goodman.”

He adds, “For the diegetic party songs, I looked at a lot of Cole Porter; I used more internal rhyme than I typically do in my writing, fully embracing the wordplay. For the internal moments, we leaned into story and universal emotions, wanting the songs to feel less locked into the period, and hopefully more timeless.”

Describing the creators’ collaboration with Director Marc Bruni, Tysen relates that the song “Secondhand Suit” originally was to be “sung in a car by Myrtle as Tom drives her to his secret apartment. Marc said, ‘Cars on stage … are a challenge, because there’s nowhere for anyone to go. The stage can feel static.’ He asked, ‘Can there be a second location that we visit within the song that justifies some dance?’ We found one, and it transformed the song into an exciting production number for the middle of Act One.”

At 100, “What Makes Gatsby Great?”

In So We Read On Corrigan rhetorically asks, “What makes Gatsby Great?” Now that the novel has reached its centennial, the question merits revisiting.

Asked how she would answer the question 10 years after posing it, Corrigan offers, Gatsby gives us the American myth, the American Dream, of meritocracy. It makes the dream irresistible, believes in that dream — and simultaneously undermines it. It’s a complex, nuanced, exploration of the promise of America.”

She adds, “Fitzgerald writes about the American Dream in language that’s so gorgeous, you can’t resist it. And yet, when you think about the plot, the fact that the main dreamer — Jay Gatsby — lies dead in his swimming pool by the end of the novel, you realize, ‘wait a minute, something else is going on here, as well. It’s not just a celebration; it’s also a radical criticism of the American myth of the meritocracy.”

Majok says, “I think Fitzgerald understood us as Americans. I feel deeply seen, as an immigrant, in this book. Fitzgerald had a clear-eyed view of who we were, who we are, and who we’re potentially becoming.” She describes the story as “our national myth.”

She likens her mother, who “cleaned houses and worked in factories when we first came to America,” to George Wilson, “who worked hard but just wasn’t considered enough. He gave his finite life to honest work that wasn’t valued. I dare anyone to look at my mother’s broken immigrant body and tell me ‘she just didn’t work hard enough’ at pursuing her dreams.”

“To me, there is so much of the immigrant in Gatsby, as somebody who has to change his name, change the way he looks — to present desirably to a dominant culture, to be able to move up in the ways that he has,” Majok adds. “Some Americans don’t have to make that choice, but some feel they do to be able to ‘make it.’ Some have to aim to be exceptional, just to be safe.”

Describing the story and show as both “emotional and spectacular,” Tysen quotes a remark by Kerrigan, who says that the story is “An American tragedy, disguised as the best party you’ve ever seen.”

Kerrigan observes similarities between Fitzgerald’s time and ours. In addition to “a moment of profound change when it comes to technology,” she finds a parallel between the Spanish Flu (of 2018) and COVID-19. “There’s so much possibility, but also so much uncertainty. That’s something that the book really dives into … and captures a moment that feels deeply American, and deeply connected to the era that we’re living in right now — while also being far enough away that you can process it.”

She adds that Fitzgerald “was shaped by his experiences at Princeton — experiences connected to class. This is a story that is ultimately about class. One of the reasons that we cast the show in the way that we cast it was because the story of class is something that affects all races, and all genders.”

Kerrigan is pleased to add that publisher “Charles Scribner’s grandson, who is now the head of Scriber’s, saw the show and was excited to know that it was funny! There’s a tragedy at the end, but it’s all the more tragic because you’ve been laughing and feeling connected to these characters.”

Salmose reports that he and Rennie are at work on a new project due later this year: Gatsby at 100 (University of Minnesota Press). “This is a book that covers each chapter of The Great Gatsby with essays by different authors,” promises Salmose. “The point of this book is to think exactly, ‘What is Gatsby at 100 years, and why is it still engaging? Why is it still being taught in undergraduate classes?”

He says, “I think there are several things working here. One thing is the mixture of universal and historical (which I think is always successful). People are embedded in the Jazz Age … we like to be transported in that way, to a particular time.” But he notes that much of the novel’s themes are “universal — striving for idealism, dreaming of success, gaming a particular goal, excess in capitalism, and racial issues.”

Salmose concludes that The Great Gatsby is “both a time machine back, but also a time machine propelling itself in the future.”