Maureen Corrigan
“‘ . . . or is the book unpopular’: The Great Gatsby at 100”
In May of 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a letter to Maxwell Perkins in which he abruptly detoured from updates about his work in Hollywood, to his thoughts about The Great Gatsby and his own literary legacy: “I wish I were in print. . . . Would the 25 cent press keep Gatsby in the public eye — or is the book unpopular. Has it had its chance?” In this centennial year of the publication of Gatsby, critic and scholar Maureen Corrigan considers how posterity has responded to Fitzgerald’s despairing question.
Maureen Corrigan is The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism in the Department of English at Georgetown University. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania with a concentration in the social criticism of John Ruskin and William Morris. She received her B.A. in English from Fordham University. For the past 35 years, Corrigan has been the weekly book critic on the Peabody Award-winning NPR program, Fresh Air. Her book, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures (2014) was selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review. Her literary memoir, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, was published by Random House in 2005. She has received the 2023 John Seigenthaler Legends Award, the 2023 Kukula Award for Excellence in Non-Fiction Reviewing from Washington Monthly Magazine, The National Book Critics Circle 2018 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and the 1999 Edgar Award in Criticism.