Get Ready to Read Big
Tomorrow, the National Endowment for the Arts kicks off The Big Read, a month-long initiative meant to encourage book learnin’ nationwide. This year, the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C. is encouraging you to pick up F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and read it with your fellow Washingtonians through the month of May. Planned Gatsby-related activities include a film festival, lectures, and historical walking tours (full schedule here).
Activities surrounding last year’s pick, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, drew on Hurston’s tenure at Howard University and her time living in the Shaw neighborhood. But why pick F. Scott, who lived in Minnesota, New York City, Paris, and Hollywood, but didn’t live any closer to the District than Towson?
“The NEA gives us a list of books to choose from,” admits Michon Boston, D.C. Big Read project director. “We have lots of community members who are very avid readers, and so it’s easy to get a little frustrated by the limitations of the list.” This year’s list of 16 novels includes Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (next year: Hemingway urban safaris and extended abortion metaphor walking tours?)
Still, “we try to find ways to make these books relevant to D.C. readers,” says Boston. This year, Big Read activities will focus on Jazz-era Washington, with a walking tour through the Dupont and Kalorama neighborhoods, teatime readings, and 1920s dances.
Photo by Matthew Abadi
5 Responses to “Get Ready to Read Big”
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April 23rd, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Perhaps because Fitzgerald rests eternally in Rockville, Md.
April 23rd, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Perhaps it was chosen because of his reliable use of ethnic and racial stereotypes. Perfect for DC!
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:47 pm
CPO - care to elaborate? Gatsby’s got some racist characters in it (although I’d say they’re not portrayed in a positive light), but the book’s largely about the inability of Gatsby to ‘pass’ in a rich, white world - that even by the 20s the ‘american dream’ in terms of social mobility was a myth
April 23rd, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Owen, you’re not wrong. That is what the book is about. But it is also populated by secondary characters–some Jewish, some African American, described in what we would recognize today as defamatory or racist terms. Big nosed greedy Jews. Wild eyed “bucks.” I’m not saying it is not an American classic, but it is also a product of its era which was undoubtedly rife with racism and antisemitism. I was just saying that for a city with a black majority, that prides itself on its diversity, Fitzgerald’s casual racism is going to stick in many a craw.
But heck, I’ll (re)read it and have the conversation–which I guess is the point.
April 23rd, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Yeah, I see your point, and will reread. Yay big read!
I’m not sure what to say about stereotypes - I would be inclined to say more a product of the times, although w Wolfsheim’s character, supposedly based on a real person (this dude - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Rothstein) would it have been better if he’d been cast as an Italian mobster? Remember, too, that it’s Gatsby’s association with immmigrant criminals that keeps him from being accepted by the white upper class - so for the story to work, some amount of stereotyping - immigrant criminals - was going to be necessary to show Gatsby’s ‘otherness.’
As a ‘passing’ novel pointing out the racism of the 20s, especially among America’s ‘old’ money - that there are some stereotypes - maybe a product of its era, maybe something Fitzgerald was intentionally using to make his point about white America v immigrants (in a time of increased isolationism in the US), mobility, etc. I’ve read that Fitzgerald intentionally tried to make Gatsby’s background unclear - though Gatz might be assumed to be Jewish, that there are lots of other possibilities.
Anyway, a rambling way to say I’m not sure we can reliably read the stereotypes as Fitzgerald being a racist in a novel that’s talking about race in the 20s and racism and classicism in America’s elite.