Celebrate a Century of The Great Gatsby With a Professor Who’s Read It 100 Times
Posted in Announcement Course Information News Story | Tagged Department of English, Faculty, Faculty Publications
Our very own Maureen Corrigan was recently featured in a news story on the College of Arts & Sciences’ page; check out the following excerpt:
In April, Georgetown professor Maureen Corrigan celebrated the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald the best way she knows how – by rereading the novel.
“Just to freshen my grasp on it, because it is kind of an elusive novel,” Corrigan says. “And I don’t get tired of rereading it. I always feel like I’m rewarded by rereading it. It’s not just this kind of mechanical exercise. It’s a pleasure.”
Corrigan would know.
She is the Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism in the Department of English and an expert on Fitzgerald’s work. She’s lost count of the number of times she’s read the book, but it is well over a hundred. Corrigan is also the book critic on NPR’s Fresh Air and author of So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.
For Corrigan, who teaches about Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s writing in her Fitzgerald & His Circle class, the novel is freshly topical. In an article for NPR, she wrote that “great works of art are great, in part, because they continue to have something to say to the present.”
Gatsby, Corrigan says, is “both timeless and time-bound.”
The novel is set in New York City after a large wave of immigrants arrived to the city from Europe between 1880 and 1920. During that period, Corrigan says, there was a sentiment shared among some residents that the city should not accommodate the immigrants. There was also, she adds, a nervousness about the internal migration of African Americans from Southern rural areas into the city.
“You see that in the novel, and that feels very much of our time, where you’ve got this nativist sentiment,” Corrigan says.
In short, we’re living in the age of Tom Buchanan and the bullying that he embodies, she explains, referring to a character in Gatsby who espouses racist views and eugenics.
Corrigan calls Gatsby the “first modern great American novel” because of the book’s accessibility and its use of ordinary language. She also says Fitzgerald’s classic is “our great American novel that foregrounds class” for the way it poignantly illuminates truths about human aspiration.
Interested in learning more about Gatsby and Fitzgerald? Prof. Corrigan is teaching ENGL 4155-01: “Fitzgerald and American Mythmaking” in Fall 2025; register today to take part in a century-long American tradition!