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The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Presents Gatsby Centennial Readings
On April 10, 2025, The Great Gatsby---widely heralded as among the greatest of all American novels---celebrates its centennial. The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society is marking this landmark with a weekly chapter-by-chapter reading of the novel featuring eleven of the most significant American fiction writers of our day. Episodes will be released weekly beginning on February 13. Here is the schedule:
February 13 Chapter 1 Jonathan Franzen
February 20 Chapter 2 Jane Smiley
February 27 Chapter 3 Ann Beattie
March 6 Chapter 4 Joseph O’Neill
March 13 Chapter 5 Robert Olen Butler
March 20 Chapter 6 Richard Russo
March 27 Chapter 7 Kim Stanley Robinson/ Maxine Hong Kingston
April 3 Chapter 8 Francine Prose
April 10 Chapter 9 Gish Jen/ Alice McDermott
Episodes are also available for download on the Fitzgerald Society website (www.fscottfitzgeraldsociety.org) and on the Society's YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@f.scottfitzgeraldsociety8488). It's truly a different and unique experience luxuriating in Fitzgerald's luminescent prose hearing his cadences read aloud by these voices.
The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Presents Gatsby Centennial Readings
Gatsby@100 Chapter 5 featuring Robert Olen Butler
Robert Olen Butler is the author of sixteen novels, six short story collections, and a non-fiction book on The Process of Writing Fiction; his most recent book is his 2021 novel Late City, with his new novel Twice Around a Marriage scheduled for Fall 2025 publication.
His 1992 short story collection A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain won the Pulitzer Prize. His short stories have received two Pushcart Prizes and have been reprinted in four annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories and in eight annual editions of New Stories from the South and have won two National Magazine Awards. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
In chapter 5 of The Great Gatsby the hero finally reunites with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan, after five years. Narrator Nick Carraway watches in amazement as Gatsby goes from a nervous, anxious "mooncalf" into a suave romantic who impresses Daisy with his custom-made shirts. As the centerpiece of Gatsby, chapter 5 makes us question whether Gatsby's dream of winning back Daisy might just come true.