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.
→ Listen 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)
Related episodes
-
Citizen Kane
15 Dec, 2022 790 Recreational and performing arts -
Edith Wharton
4 Oct, 2018 810 American literature in English -
James Joyce’s Ulysses
14 Jun, 2012 820 English and Old English literatures -
Proust
17 Apr, 2003 840 French and related literatures -
Mrs Dalloway
3 Jul, 2014 820 English and Old English literatures -
Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
26 Nov, 2009 820 English and Old English literatures -
Bohemianism
9 Oct, 2003 700 Arts -
The Novel
11 Nov, 1999 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism -
Literary Modernism
26 Apr, 2001 820 English and Old English literatures -
Faust
23 Dec, 2004 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
Programme ID: m000r4tq
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000r4tq
Auto-category: 813.52 (American fiction, 1900-1999)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello, The Great Gatsby is now seen as F. Scott Fitzgerald's finest novel and one of the greatest of American novels.