Posted on 04/10/2025 11:35:30 AM PDT by Borges
On the exact 100th anniversary of the publication date of “The Great Gatsby,” the Library of Congress is producing a full reading of the novel, livestreamed from our Thomas Jefferson building on Capitol Hill. Be an old sport and join us in-person or online to experience this classic American novel which entered the public domain in 2021.
My thoughts exactly. To me, it was readable, but not the greatest thing in print like so many seem to proclaim it to be. And besides, it was one of the cheaper Easton Press volumes. Maybe even one of their come-on give aways if I remember correctly. Like they were trying to dump it.
Like anything written today....sad.
I tried to watch the 1974 Gatsby movie with Robert Redford.
I had the same reaction as my attempt to read The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway:
Upper-class twits upon whom I wished horrible deaths.
One line I always remembered was whenever you feel like criticizing someone, remember not everyone has had the advantages toy have had. That has stuck with me.
I didn’t like it in high school, but it grew on me when I had it again in collage.
How many politicians are striving after the money and power, to catch up with their “old money” friends whom they envy? Ditto, those in the political establishment. How many guys get smitten by a girl, and do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do? The symbolism, beloved by English teachers, seemed trite to me. The story echos various strands of Eccleasties.
That and “To Kill a Mockingbird”. For most, they’re the last books they’ll ever read.
Liberals ahead of their time.
From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie’s wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.
Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only once, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named Etty in the garden. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O. R. P. Schraeders, and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia, and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand. The Dancies came, too, and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over sixty, and Maurice A. Flink, and the Hammerheads, and Beluga the tobacco importer, and Beluga’s girls.
From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the state senator and Newton Orchid, who controlled Films Par Excellence, and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Don S. Schwartze (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the movies in one way or another. And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife. Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B. (“Rot-Gut.”) Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly — they came to gamble, and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably next day.
A man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he became known as “the boarder.”— I doubt if he had any other home. Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’donavan and Lester Meyer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S. W. Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.
Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person, but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names — Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela, or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.
In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O’brien came there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer, who had his nose shot off in the war, and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his fiancee, and Ardita Fitz-Peters and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip, with a man reputed to be her chauffeur, and a prince of something, whom we called Duke, and whose name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.
All these people came to Gatsby’s house in the summer.
How many movies have been made trying to make it interesting and compelling?
It’s a fantastic novel. Beautiful prose, haunting. What’s your issue with it? I will say that it is virtually plotless till the very end. Is that a big sticking point with you?
It was the quintessential party scene of American lit. All the rest are poor imitations.
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