Many of us remember reading The Great Gatsby in our high school English class – and not exactly loving it. What was it about this slim novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald that was supposedly so great, we wondered. And more to the point, why had it remained popular while other worthy books had slowly faded away?
Maureen Corrigan, makes an impassioned case for why The Great Gatsby deserves a second, third, and even fourth look in her delightful book, So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why it Endures. Gatsby is the one Great American Novel we think we’ve read, but probably haven’t, she writes. Pick it up again, and we’re likely to discover a rich and intricately designed novel with layers of meaning that eluded our earlier selves.
Corrigan is critic-in-residence at Georgetown University and the book critic on NPR’s award-winning program, Fresh Air. She has traveled the country as part of the Big Read program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts to talk about her favorite book.
