The Great Gatsby: The 1926 Broadway Script
Owen Davis’s stage version, which ran on Broadway the year after the novel came out, printed for the first time.
The first adaptation came within a year. Read what Broadway made of the novel while it was new.
You know the novel, and you want the earliest version of it anyone made.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: the story and its people, as a play.
Changes: the novel into a script, staged by George Cukor, whose production leaned on the jazz, the adultery and the crime.
Owen Davis’s script for the stage adaptation that ran at the Ambassador Theater in New York, printed for the first time, with photographs of the sets and actors, reviews and publicity clippings from Fitzgerald’s scrapbooks. The introduction looks at how George Cukor’s production played up the jazz, the adultery and the crime.
Whose story is it?
the stage’s. A play has no narrator to hide behind.
How much time does it ask?
142 pages in hardcover, with set and cast photographs, reviews and publicity clippings from Fitzgerald’s scrapbooks. Edited by James L. W. West III and Anne Margaret Daniel.
Cambridge University Press: the script of the 1926 stage adaptation by Owen Davis, which ran at the Ambassador Theater in New York.
Where to find it
Buy the hardcover — Bookshop.org
Other ways to get it: Hardcover — Amazon · Ebook — Kobo · Kindle — Amazon
Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby · Find at your library — WorldCat
Common questions
Was The Great Gatsby a Broadway play?
Yes. Owen Davis adapted it for the stage in 1926, the year after the novel came out, and George Cukor directed it at the Ambassador Theater in New York. Cambridge University Press printed the script for the first time in 2024.
More ways into West Egg: The Scribner paperback (“The Only Authorized Edition”) · The Penguin Classics edition, introduction by Min Jin Lee · The Norton Critical Edition, ed. David Alworth