The “Great Gatsby” glut
If you’ve been planning to read (or reread) “The Great Gatsby,” your biggest challenge now might be deciding on which edition.
Every Jan. 1, books, songs, movies and other copyrighted works more than 95 years old enter the public domain. This year, that includes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, first published in 1925, as well as the Virginia Woolf novel “Mrs. Dalloway.”
Scribner, which had held the rights to “Gatsby” since it first appeared, reissued the novel in 2018 with a new introduction by two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. Now, in addition, readers can choose versions with introductions by John Grisham (Vintage Classics), Min Jin Lee (Penguin Classics), Malcolm Bradbury (Everyman’s Library) and Wesley Morris, a critic-at-large for The Times (Modern Library). In March, Norton Critical Editions will publish the novel with an introduction and annotations by Harvard scholar David J. Alworth.
Four of those editions are issued by imprints at one publisher, Penguin Random House. Tom Perry, publisher of Modern Library, said that some decisions about what to bring under his division’s umbrella, like “The Great Gatsby,” are easier than others.
“Deciding to publish ‘Gatsby’ or ‘A Passage to India’ didn’t require a lot of mulling over,” he said. “While we are spending more time trying to expand the current classics canon by finding more overlooked books and underpublished voices, like the poetry of Chika Sagawa or ‘There Is Confusion,’ by Jessie Redmon Fauset, to not publish these 20thcentury classics when they become available would be like not putting ‘MobyDick’ on the 19th-century shelf.”
If you prefer reinvention to reinterpretation, the
“The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Novel Adaptation,” by K. Woodman-Maynard.
lapse of copyright protection also means that writers and artists can mine the characters and plots of a work for their own purposes without having to ask permission or pay a fee. K. Woodman-Maynard, for example, has adapted “Gatsby” into a graphic novel (Candlewick Press). Illustrator Adam Simpson has created extensive art for a new edition (Black Dog & Leventhal). Independently published variations on the novel include “The Gay Gatsby,” by B.A. Baker, and, in the tradition of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” “The Great Gatsby Undead,” by Kristen Briggs. (From the promotional copy: “Gatsby doesn’t seem to eat anything, and has an aversion to silver, garlic and the sun, but good friends are hard to come by.”)
The most ambitious early entry in the re-imagining game might be “Nick” (Little, Brown), a novel by Michael Farris Smith that tells the story of Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald’s narrator, before he arrived on Long Island and became caught in Gatsby’s orbit. The book follows his harrowing experiences in World War I and time later spent in New Orleans.
“Gatsby” is often cited as a — if not the — great American novel, and the new editions allow for fresh analysis, nearly a century later, of what our ideas of “American” now entail.