This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times.
Beyond the skyscrapers of Manhattan and the boxy industry of Queens, the lawns stretch, the houses grow and the city gives way to villages. Out here on Long Island, the Great Neck Library sits on an unruffled inlet that might not be so different from the “courtesy bay” separating East Egg and West Egg in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel “The Great Gatsby.”
Inside, canvases evoke the world of the novel. Pink hydrangeas bloom in the character Daisy’s garden. Gatsby’s yellow Rolls-Royce cuts across a meadow, the driver and passenger shadowy abstractions. Nearby, East Egg/West Egg landscapes pulse with fluorescent pink shot through with black, each beneath a moody twilight sky.
“I can imagine he had a view of the Sound,” said the painter of the canvases, Catherine Abrams, about Fitzgerald, who had spent time living in Great Neck on Long Island Sound while writing the novel. “So most probably, I mean, as an author, had experienced this sky.”
The Great Neck show, “The Great Gatsby Revisited: An Art Exhibition by Catherine Abrams,” which opened March 1, closes Wednesday. But several active exhibits — in Minnesota, New Jersey and South Carolina — continue to mark the 100th anniversary of the novel, which debuted on April 10, 1925.
The novel — and the celebration — has its deepest roots in Fitzgerald’s hometown, St. Paul, Minn. A letter that Fitzgerald, then 22, wrote in 1919 is one item included in the Minnesota Historical Society’s exhibit, “That’s My Middle West: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s St. Paul,” running through May 31.
In response to a letter a local librarian had written to his mother, Fitzgerald himself replied, saying he had written a few short stories and his first novel, “This Side of Paradise,” was to be published.
“And of course, then the book changed his life,” said Kate Hujda, the historical society’s curator of manuscripts. The letter he wrote, she added, is “a snapshot of him kind of at the very cusp of fame, right before his whole life would change.”
The exhibit, curated by Hujda and Jenny McElroy, the society’s library manager, takes its title from a line in Gatsby when the narrator, Nick Carraway, waxes poetic about his Midwestern hometown. The exhibit, in turn, rhapsodizes about Fitzgerald. As McElroy put it, “We get to tell the story of a hometown boy who rises to fame — which, who doesn’t love a hometown boy, right?”
Objects in a case, including his birth announcement and a reproduction of a photo of him as a baby, set the scene, and displays explore his growing-up years and meteoric rise. His Midwestern roots are underscored with a map showing his home, dancing school and social club, and his class clown persona shines through in snapshots of him and his friends, and in some early writing he did in a textbook, “The Farewell Address of George Washington.”
Patrick Coleman, the former acquisitions librarian at the historical society, remembered the thrill of discovering the textbook. He said that, on the front free endpaper, Fitzgerald had written a “frighteningly spot-on” self-assessment.
“Playwrite [sic], poet, novelist, essayist, philosopher, loafer, useless, disagreeable, silly, talented, weak, strong, clever, trivial, a waste,” the young Fitzgerald wrote. “In short a very parody, a mockery of one who might have been more but whom nature and circumstance render less. With apologies for living, Francis Scott Fitzgerald.”
And, Coleman added, “He’s signed this with this incredible flourish under the last letter, and you can just see him doing that.”
Nearby sits Fitzgerald’s World War I service record where, in the “return to civil life” section, to a question on occupation, he wrote, “was student — am now writer.”
And then it was so: A copy of “This Side of Paradise” — which Fitzgerald signed for the historical society — follows, along with many editions of “The Great Gatsby.”
A sequined party dress, made in the 1920s, nods to Zelda, Fitzgerald’s wife and muse; a manual typewriter acknowledges the era’s analog means of production.
At Princeton University, the eyes from the original Gatsby cover are featured prominently in the centennial celebration.
Fitzgerald attended Princeton from 1913 to 1917, before dropping out to join the military, and the university now holds the F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald Papers in its Special Collections. The archive includes “Celestial Eyes,” the 1924 Francis Cugat painting that became the novel’s cover.
Dan Linke, the acting associate university librarian for Special Collections, said William Noel, the associate university librarian for Special Collections who died last year, had wanted to “take the Cugat cover and project it onto a building somewhere.”
That idea stuck with Linke and his colleagues. So, for the centenary, the university partnered with the Arts Council of Princeton on a Gatsby-inspired mural near campus.
“When I sat down,” said Allison Wong, an artist from Edison, N.J., who responded to the council’s call for pitches, “I just sort of thought to myself, ‘What are the most iconic symbols from the book?’”
Her design was chosen, and the mural, “Bright Lights” (unveiled March 24, and up through early June), features the Rolls-Royce, the green light and the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg.
Linke said Special Collections staff members view the mural as a tribute to their former boss. “What he would’ve said about the mural is — and you know he would’ve said this — ‘It’s awesome,’” Linke said, banging a hand on the table and using a colorful adjective.
The celestial eyes greet patrons of the Tiger Tea Room, on campus in Firestone Library, where “Living Forever: The Archive of The Great Gatsby” runs through November.
Large-scale reproductions of Special Collections materials track the novel’s creation, including pages from the earliest surviving manuscript draft, written in Fitzgerald’s neat cursive.
Emma M. Sarconi — the Special Collections reference and outreach specialist, who curated the show with Jennifer Garcon, the librarian for Modern and Contemporary Special Collections — said the carefully written draft reveals “just what a meticulous craft he put into this book.”
“It started in the early 1900s with his relationship with Ginevra [King]” — the woman widely believed to have inspired the character of Daisy — “and we’re still crafting the novel right up until the moment of publication,” she said.
There is also a reproduction of the Armed Services Edition of the book, distributed to American G.I.s during World War II, which many credit with catapulting the book to success after a tepid initial reception.
Before the title entered the public domain at the end of 2020, it had sold more than 21 million copies; reproductions of the covers of some of its foreign-language editions are on view here.
At the University of South Carolina, students from the jazz ensemble visited the Gatsby exhibition one time and played 1920s-era jazz. That fits with the philosophy behind the university’s show, “‘Something significant, elemental, and profound’: Celebrating 100 Years of ‘The Great Gatsby,’” (through July 18).
The curator, Michael C. Weisenburg, director of the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, wanted to evoke the world of the Fitzgeralds and the novel. He did so by drawing from the university’s Matthew J. & Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, which includes more than 4,400 books, periodicals and personal objects collected by Bruccoli and his wife, with Frances, known as Scottie, the Fitzgeralds’ daughter.
Weisenburg pulled objects like Ginevra King’s calling card, and her dance card, on which Fitzgerald’s name is written, with the next dance crossed out.
After King and Fitzgerald parted ways, Fitzgerald met Zelda, who gave him an engraved silver flask. That flask is on view, along with a letter in which Fitzgerald — a lapsed Catholic — wrote that “Zelda’s the only god I have left now.”
Seeing these kinds of objects up close is powerful, said Kirk Curnutt, the executive director of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society and a professor at Troy University. “In a weird way, it becomes a little bit like a talisman or something,” he added.
The show also provides glimpses of the Fitzgeralds’ life together, including sheets of paper from the couple’s attempt to draw up a budget. “There’s literally a line — and it’s all just handwritten with pencil — it just says ‘wild parties’ and then a number,” Weisenburg said.
Much of the exhibit highlights the book’s life beyond that first 1925 edition, including as a musical (twice) and a feature film (at least four times).
On one wall hangs original Charles M. Schulz “Peanuts” artwork referencing Gatsby. There’s a Daisy Buchanan porcelain doll, a ceramic Christmas village version of Gatsby’s mansion, even an F. Scott Fitzgerald finger puppet.
Of the book’s reach, Hujda said, “There’s a passage where Gatsby says, ‘Can’t repeat the past? Of course you can repeat the past.’ And he’s very obsessed with the past. And I think that feeling of wanting to return to a time in our lives when things were better, things were different, is a very human impulse.”
She added, “And that last line? It’s just gold.”
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