The first drops in a deluge of ‘Great Gatsby’ adaptations

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel “The Great Gatsby” entered the public domain on Jan. 1, 2021. The book is already a staple of American life; it has been taught in schools for decades, and Hollywood blockbuster movie adaptations starring handsome actors have been followed, generation after generation, by other Hollywood blockbuster movie adaptations starring other handsome actors. But now, anybody can print and sell their own edition of what is widely considered to be one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century. 

Dozens of publishers have been waiting eagerly for this moment, and as a result, the U.S. book market is now flooded with new editions of “Gatsby.” Hardcover editions, pocket paperback editions, annotated editions, illustrated editions – everyone with an oar in the water is hoping to cash in on the book without paying duties to the original publisher, Scribner.

Right alongside all those new editions of “Gatsby” will come adaptations, fantasias, Broadway musicals, and streaming series, along with literary pastiches of all kinds. Two of the highest-profile examples of the latter genre are “The Fortunate Ones,” Ed Tarkington’s lightly modernized transplanting of “Gatsby” to the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, and “Nick,” in which Michael Farris Smith tells the backstory of “Gatsby” narrator Nick Carraway. 

The appearance of such books – and we can safely assume these two are the first drops in a coming deluge – raises several sets of interconnected questions. 

The fact that the market is now suddenly saturated with “The Great Gatsby” editions naturally invites reappraisal: Is “Gatsby,” in fact, all that great? It’s a slight thing – under 200 pages in most editions – and it exhibits neither the control of its predecessor, “The Beautiful and Damned,” nor the artistic sweep and bravado of its successor, Fitzgerald’s masterpiece “Tender Is the Night.” It’s true that “Gatsby” memorably dramatizes the tawdry yearning for self-reinvention that characterized the 1920s, but it’s also a wan, predictable thing. “He has been given imagination without intellectual control of it,” writer and critic Edmund Wilson once wrote of his friend Fitzgerald, “he has been given the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.” A bit too harsh, certainly, but as essentially true as every other verdict Wilson ever handed down.

So why the veneration? Why this unseemly mad rush of publishers eager to get their new editions into consumers' hands? 

It’s possible the bookstores are a secondary hope behind classrooms: “The Great Gatsby” is a seemingly permanent staple of high school English curricula across the country, in ways that certainly aren’t shared by, for instance, Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway” or “Manhattan Transfer” by John Dos Passos, two considerably better novels that also came into public domain in January. 

As mentioned, "The Great Gatsby" is short. It’s the kind of thing you can assign to moody high school students without provoking too much grumbling. And the teachers assigning it now had it assigned to them when they were in school. And for all Fitzgerald’s coruscating narrative brilliance, “The Great Gatsby” is also a simple, straightforward tale of greed and overreach – easy fare for book reports. It’s immensely more accessible than “Tender Is the Night” and might as well be a different species from “Mrs Dalloway.”

Whether or not “The Great Gatsby” is over-venerated, there still remains the question of all these adaptations that are sure to appear now that the book is in the public domain. Even in a somewhat thin or predictable novel, Fitzgerald is still a great American author, a daunting model for future imitators. 

Michael Farris Smith’s “Nick” is a perfect, cautionary case-in-point. Smith has done a great deal of research into the Europe and America of World War I and postwar era, and he’s obviously given much thought to what “The Great Gatsby” hints about Nick Carraway’s past. But although the book is dutiful historical fiction, it lacks anything like the genius that animates “Gatsby” – which is unfortunate, because its subject matter invites direct comparison. Furthermore, a compelling reason for why anybody should care about Nick without that element is entirely absent; after all, even Brutus’ friends admitted that he was pretty boring until the Ides of March.

Likewise “The Fortunate Ones”: does anybody care about “The Great Gatsby” if it’s no longer “The Great Gatsby”? Ed Tarkington’s novel stars young Charlie Boykin, disadvantaged son of a single mother, who finds himself in the posh Yeatman School and surrounded by the wealthiest scions of Belle Meade, Tennessee, and begins to love their affluent world. It’s true that something of the essence of Jay Gatsby’s self-destroying discontent charges the pages of “The Fortunate Ones,” but for the most part, the patient doesn’t survive the transplant. It’s likely that only “Gatsby” can really be “Gatsby.”

Either way, readers will have plenty of opportunities to sort out these and other questions. And in the meantime, they’ll also have plenty of options if they decide to revisit the old-school classic itself.