(source: www.yourenglishclass.com/the-great-gatsby-chapter-one/)

Attention, all Princeton literature geeks! Our favorite literary Tiger, F. Scott Fitzgerald, is getting some serious time in the limelight lately, as two separate New York Times articles over the past two days can attest.  The occasion?  The Public Theater in Manhattan just opened a new, eight-hour dramatic reading of The Great Gatsby, called Gatz, and it’s taking the New York theater world by storm. NYTimes theater critic Ben Brantley called the piece “one of the most exciting and improbable accomplishments in theater in recent years,” and tickets are selling like hot cakes.  Today’s NYTimes article talks about Gatz as a theatrical phenomenon; yesterday’s piece focused on how to take a modern-day tour of Gatsby’s Long Island, including the house where Fitzgerald wrote the novel in the Twenties.

Fitzgerald, who entered Princeton in the Class of 1917, enlisted in WWI before graduating, but not before immortalizing his years here in his semi-autobiographical first novel, This Side of Paradise. In it, he famously sketched out flapper-era Princeton in all its misogynistic glory, giving us gems like this:

“I want to go to Princeton,” said Amory. “I don’t know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.”

Many of  Fitzgerald’s original papers, including skits he wrote for Triangle while he was here, can be found in Princeton’s Firestone archives.  They’re right alongside those of other literary great J.D. Salinger.