St. Paul kicks off yearlong celebration of 100 years of ‘The Great Gatsby’

Is “The Great Gatsby” really all that great? A year’s worth of events, a slew of new books and a bunch of teenagers in Scotland say “yes.”

The Friends of the St. Paul Library already has kicked off a year of events to celebrate the 100th anniversary of “Gatsby.” The book has been in the “great American novel” conversation for eight decades, and Friends’ Alayne Hopkins says they’re interested in why people never stop talking about it.

St. Paul native F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is about a remote millionaire named Jay Gatsby, who engages in a doomed romance with Daisy Buchanan, runs afoul of her husband, Tom, and leads the antics of his reckless Jazz Age buddies.

“It’s looking at class and social inequality. Racism, certainly, is addressed in the novel, along with that kind of associated ‘otherness.’ And the position that women had in society,” said Hopkins, senior director of programs and services for the Friends. “All of those sorts of questions exist today.”

That’s probably why “Gatsby” seems to be everywhere — along with the fact that it came into the public domain a few years ago, meaning it’s open season on its story and characters. There’s a musical version currently on Broadway and “Gatz,” a six-hour adaptation of the book that previously played at Walker Art Center, will appear off-Broadway this November. There’s a new graphic novel version and numerous “sequels,” including the upcoming “The Gatsby Gambit,” in which the title character’s sister solves the murder of everyone’s least favorite Gatsby character: wealthy, boorish Tom Buchanan.

Clearly, we are still pondering “Gatsby.” Which is why the Friends wonder, as Hopkins asks, “Does reading ‘The Great Gatsby’ in 2025 give us any new insights? Do we still see ourselves in it? These are questions that hopefully people will be talking about all year.”

That would be nothing different for Mark Taylor. “The Great Gatsby” is his favorite novel and he talks about it a lot, especially when he’s giving 90-minute tours of Fitzgerald sites in St. Paul’s Summit Hill neighborhood. His hope is to give patrons a sense of what it was like for Fitzgerald to grow up there in the early 1900s.

“You really are stepping back in time on the tour because the neighborhood is so well preserved. Obviously, things have changed, but I like to say if we could magically time-travel Fitzgerald to the present day, he’d recognize the neighborhood,” said Taylor. Sites visited include the former home of the St. Paul Academy, where the writer attended school; the University Club, where Fitzgerald socialized; the house where he wrote his first novel, “This Side of Paradise,” and an apartment building where he lived with wife Zelda. “You do get a sense of what it was like for him to grow up here, and I’d like for people to learn more about his life and how St. Paul influenced him, as a person and as a writer,” Taylor said.

Those topics will be addressed throughout the year of programming, which includes exhibits at both Mia (coming in September) and the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS), a live reading of the entire novel, talks about flappers and other Jazz Age topics, a comment “box” on the Friends’ site where readers can debate if “Gatsby” is the great American novel and the launch event for “F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography,” which can be viewed at the Friends’ website.

That book’s editors, Niklas Salmose and David Rennie,actually have two new books for the centennial, “Composite Biography” and the upcoming “Gatsby @ 100,” also to be published by the University of Minnesota Press. In the latter, they join seven other writers who each explore a section of the classic.

Salmose, who teaches the world’s only master course on the writer, “F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age” at Sweden’s Linnaeus University, draws connections between the toxic oligarchs in “The Great Gatsby” and those of today. And co-editor Rennie, who teaches in Scotland, insists that most of the book’s themes are as current as whatever your phone just notified you about: “the desire for dominance, to pursue wealth and power, but also the terrible costs of attempting to build toward those dreams.”

Despite the 1920s setting, Rennie said, his high school students found plenty to relate to in the Fitzgerald masterpiece, which includes this observation: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

That, of course, could describe a heck of a lot of people on Instagram.

“There are always new connections,” said Rennie, whose students noted that a break-up that occurs in person in the novel would likely take place on an app today. “A lot of the comparisons they talked about were social media influencers, people who want power and attention but don’t necessarily feel empathy for the people they use to get them.”

Rennie said his students also respond to the aesthetics of the Jazz Age, particularly the Art Deco that was spotlighted in Baz Luhrmann’s film adaptation, with Leonardo Di Caprio as the title character. But there are many entry points to “Gatsby.”

“I’m excited about the different partners the Friends is pairing with, like Mia and MNHS,” said Taylor. “I think you’re going to see how the novel has really influenced film, fashion and pop culture. It has a much wider reach than a lot of other 100-year-old novels.”

That’s why Hopkins says the Friends are approaching “Gatsby” in so many ways.

“There’ll be a one-person theater performance, an art exhibit [at Mia], other exhibits that will look at the context of both Fitzgerald’s life and the time in which he was writing: Who are other writers who were writing in Minnesota in the ‘20s? We want to center the programming around this piece of literature but also look at these other kinds of artistic expression,” said Hopkins.

Of interest in all of that, said Salmose, is the complexity of a writer who was ahead of his time but also looked toward the past.

“There always seems a tension in Fitzgerald’s work where he creates or contributes to the creation of a new youth movement — the flapper, sexually liberated women, celebrating the development of things like the motorcar — but also there’s a theme of Victorian disapproval for the kind of excess that becomes synonymous with those things,” said Salmose, who believes Fitzgerald was, for instance, attuned to the environmental cost of the Industrial Age.

Because of that complexity, it may take a whole year to wrap our heads around “The Great Gatsby.” Rennie thinks it’s perfect that it will be happening in St. Paul.

“‘The Great Gatsby’ has almost transcended the novel in the way ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is uber-ubiquitous or the Sistine Chapel, which everyone knows even if they’re not an art historian,” said Rennie. “It’s not just a novel. It’s a cultural event, a central coordinate in our understanding of the past and the present.”

What: Fitzgerald in St. Paul.

When: Through Nov. 9.

Where: Throughout the Twin Cities, including Summit Hill neighborhood, Urban Growler and George Latimer Central Library in St. Paul, as well as Mia in Minneapolis.

Information: thefriends.org/fitzgerald.