Associate Professor Granville Ganter, Ph.D., Discusses the Legacy of 'The Great Gatsby' on its 100th Anniversary

https://thetablet.org/catholic-f-scott-fitzgerald-greaty-gatsby-turns-100/

By Bill Miller

GREAT NECK, N.Y. — When writer F. Scott Fitzgerald died at age 44 in 1940, his family was denied a request to bury him in a Catholic cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. 

A local bishop had declared Fitzgerald an apostate. Although raised Catholic in Minnesota and Maryland, he reportedly lapsed as an adult. But he also embraced a lifestyle of drinking and debauchery during the Roaring ’20s. 

Fitzgerald famously attended the raucous “Jazz Age” parties on Long Island’s “Gold Coast,” as described in his most notable work, “The Great Gatsby,” published in 1925. This boozy lifestyle continued through much of the 1930s. He eventually achieved a period of sobriety when he moved to Los Angeles in 1937, but died of a heart attack in 1940.  

While Fitzgerald died before his writings gained fame, “The Great Gatsby” is now celebrated as a classic novel that has been in print for 100 years. Its protagonist, a millionaire of mysterious origins named Jay Gatsby, strives for success and wealth to win back the love of a woman he had courted five years earlier. 

Dr. Granville Ganter, an English professor at St. John’s University, said the book is “a short, clean novel with a lot of subtlety to it, and it doesn’t require a lot of intellectual background to understand it.” 

“Almost everybody,” he added, “reads ‘The Great Gatsby’ in high school.”

Ganter said the novel holds up after a century in print because “It’s about the American dream.” 

“It speaks to the universal idea that you can come to the United States from anonymous origins, shuck your past, and become something better,” Ganter said. “That’s a fairly attractive myth about America, which people still live to this day.” 

However, Gatsby’s story also shows how ambitions and desires can bring consequences. 

At first, Gatsby is absent from the constant partying at his Long Island mansion, which fuels rampant speculation among guests about how he got rich. 

The reader eventually learns that Gatsby, a veteran of World War I, probably made his fortune as a bootlegger of illegal liquor. The Jazz Age coincided with the unlawful sale of alcohol during Prohibition (1920-1933).  

The reader also sees Gatsby concoct an elaborate plan to win back his former lover, the married Daisy Buchanan. To that end, Gatsby involves his next-door neighbor, Nick Carraway, the story’s narrator, who happens to be a distant cousin of Daisy. 

In the end, Gatsby’s romantic aims spell his doom.  

Spoiler alert: Daisy’s jealous husband, the cheating Tom Buchanan, uses the accidental death of his mistress, Myrtle, to eliminate Gatsby. He tells Myrtle’s husband, George, that Gatsby was responsible for the auto-pedestrian collision that killed her. 

George gets revenge, fatally shooting Gatsby. 

Fitzgerald wrote the novel while living on Long Island. Modern-day residents will recognize some of the locations for which he used alternative names. 

For example, Ganter said, the community “West Egg, the neighborhood of Gatsby and Nick, is Great Neck, New York, where Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, lived. Across the Long Island Sound is “East Egg,” home to Daisy and Tom, which is Little Neck in real life, Ganter said. 

Other familiarities include the characters driving into Manhattan on the Queensboro Bridge or taking the train to Penn Station, and partying at the Plaza Hotel. 

The Fitzgerald family relocated to Paris and joined a post-World War I collective of expatriate American writers called the “Lost Generation.” Among them was Ernest Hemingway; his “A Moveable Feast” is a vivid description of their shenanigans.  

By 1940, Fitzgerald was a recovering alcoholic working as a Hollywood script editor, estranged from Zelda, and believing his short stories and novels were critical and financial flops. That changed after his death when the American Red Cross provided books for GIs headed overseas during World War II. Among the titles was “The Great Gatsby.” 

The novel subsequently gained a new life that continues today, Ganter said. 

Along the way, the novel has been adapted into film and Broadway musicals with Jay Gatsby portrayed by leading actors such as Warner Baxter, Alan Ladd, Kirk Douglas (in a radio adaptation), Robert Redford, and Leonardo DiCaprio. 

The passing years have also shown that Fitzgerald did not totally abandon Catholicism.  

“I think, largely, he was tortured by it,” Ganter said of the writer’s conflicted feelings about the faith, noting that Fitzgerald’s family requested his burial in a Catholic cemetery because that’s what he wanted.  

“At first, they wouldn’t let them bury him there,” Ganter said. “But then later, after World War II, when his book became far more famous, they decided that he deserved a Catholic burial.” 

The author’s daughter, Frances Scott “Scottie” Fitzgerald, eventually got permission to bury her parents together at St. Mary Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland.  

Their monument includes the final line from “The Great Gatsby.” It reads, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”