The Great Gatsby

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss F Scott Fitzgerald’s finest novel, published in 1925, one of the great American novels of the twentieth century. It is told by Nick Carraway, neighbour and friend of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby. In the age of jazz and prohibition, Gatsby hosts lavish parties at his opulent home across the bay from Daisy Buchanan, in the hope she’ll attend one of them and they can be reunited. They were lovers as teenagers but she had given him up for a richer man who she soon married, and Gatsby is obsessed with winning her back.

The image above is of Robert Redford as Gatsby in a scene from the film ‘The Great Gatsby’, 1974.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Sarah Churchwell 2 episodes
  Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of London
• Philip McGowan No other episodes
  Professor of American Literature at Queen's University, Belfast
• William Blazek No other episodes
  Associate Professor and Reader in American Literature at Liverpool Hope University

Reading list

• The Great Gatsby and Modern Times
  Ronald Berman (University of Illinois Press, 1994) Google Books →
• The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald's World of Ideas
  Ronald Berman (University of Alabama Press, 1997) Google Books →
• The Great Gatsby
  Harold Bloom (ed.) (Chelsea House, 2006) Google Books →
• Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
  J. Bryer and C. Barks (eds.) (Scribner, 2002)
• Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby
  Sarah Churchwell (Virago Press, 2013) Google Books →
• So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures
  Maureen Corrigan (Little, Brown, 2014) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald
  Kirk Curnutt (Cambridge University Press, 2007) Google Books →
• Critical Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
  Scott Donaldson (ed.) (G. K. Hall, 1984) Google Books →
• A Life in Letters
  F. Scott Fitzgerald (ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli) (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994) Google Books →
• F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context
  B. Mangum (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2013) Google Books →
• Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
  Timo Muller (ed.) (De Gruyter, 2017)

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Programme ID: m000r4tq

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000r4tq

Auto-category: 813.52 (American fiction, 1900-1999)