Maureen Corrigan

So We Read On

How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why it Endures

Little, Brown, September 2014

If MOBY-DICK is the greatest American novel you’ve never read, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY is the greatest American novel you think you’ve read.  Had Maureen been told in high school that she’d go on to read GATSBY more than fifty times, she’d have said that was about as likely as an African American being elected president in her lifetime…

Corrigan has since become one of the novel’s most vocal proponents. She’s travelled the country, visiting town halls and public libraries, to lead discussions of GATSBY on behalf of the National Endowment for the Arts’ “The Big Read” program; she’s taught it to her classes at Georgetown, where she is a professor of literature; she was the keynote speaker at the 2011 F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference in Rockville, MD.  SO WE READ ON will be informed by those experiences, and by her twenty-plus years of reading and writing about books as the weekly book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air.

SO WE READ ON: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why it Endures follows in the tradition of other great books about great books: Sarah Bakewell’s ON MONTAIGNE (2010), Alain de Botton’s HOW PROUST CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE, (1997), Ron Rosenbaum’s THE SHAKESPEARE WARS (2006), and William Deresiewicz’s A JANE AUSTEN EDUCATION (2011).

For those who haven’t experienced THE GREAT GATSBY since high school, and for those who’ve been re-reading it ever since, SO WE READ ON is a book you’ll be grateful to discover.