So We Read On by Maureen Corrigan (2014)
A critic’s book about how the novel came to be and why people keep reading it.
The novel became a classic for reasons, and some of them are not the ones you were taught.
You want someone who has read it many times to explain what everyone else sees in it.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: the novel at the centre, read closely.
Changes: the form: this is nonfiction by the book critic of NPR’s Fresh Air, on the novel’s making, its roots in hard-boiled crime fiction, and what it says about race, class and gender.
Whose story is it?
the novel’s own life, and Fitzgerald’s.
How much time does it ask?
352 pages, from Little, Brown.
Little, Brown: So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.
Where to find it
Buy the paperback — Bookshop.org
Other ways to get it: Paperback — Amazon · Ebook — Kobo · Kindle — Amazon
Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby · Find at your library — WorldCat
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