The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald set during the Jazz Age on Long Island. Since its first publication in 1925, the novel has been widely considered to be a literary masterwork and a contender for the title of the Great American Novel. It has been adapted across various media, including stage, film, television, radio, literature, graphic novels, and video games.
The earliest adaptation occurred with a 1926 Broadway play directed by George Cukor and starring James Rennie and Florence Eldridge. Subsequent stage productions included musicals, such as a 1956 production by the Yale Dramatic Association and several Broadway shows.
The novel has also inspired ballets and operas, with a notable performance by the New York Metropolitan Opera. The novel's entry into the public domain in 2021 sparked renewed interest in the material, leading to adaptations in new mediums such as graphic novels and video games.
In the spring of 1925, William Brady, a veteran theatrical impresario and promoter of prize fights, undertook the first stage adaptation. Brady acquired the rights only a few days after first reading the novel. The script was written by the American dramatist Owen Davis, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for his play, Icebound.[1] Davis altered the structure of the novel, rearranging the action in chronological order, eliminating prominent elements such as the valley of ashes and the scene in the Plaza Hotel, and inventing minor characters.[2]
With some changes in the cast, the production moved to Chicago, where it opened on August 1. Its popularity again led to an extension of the run, which came to an end in late September.[6] A brief one-week return engagement at New York's Shubert Theater began on October 4, after which a road production traveled to several other cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Louis, Denver, and Minneapolis.[7] As F. Scott Fitzgerald was vacationing in Europe at the time, he never saw the 1926 Broadway play,[4] but his agent Harold Ober sent him telegrams quoting the glowing reviews of the production.[4] The success of the 1926 Broadway play led to the 1926 film adaptation by director Herbert Brenon.
In the wake of the successful 1926 Broadway play, other productions followed. In July 2006, Simon Levy's stage adaptation, directed by David Esbjornson, premiered at the Guthrie Theater to commemorate the opening of its new theater.[8] 2010 saw the debut of Gatz, an off-Broadway production by Elevator Repair Service.[9] The show is structured around a live reading of the entire novel, which a businessman has found on his desk. Staged with a dinner break and two intermissions, the experience runs for eight hours.[10]
Musicals
The Yale Dramatic Association performed the first musical production of The Great Gatsby in Summer 1956.[11][12] For the production, Aubrey L. Goodman adapted Fitzgerald's novel and wrote the lyrics for 14 songs by composer Robert E. Morgan. The show was performed in the University Theatre at Yale University to sold-out performances.[13] The cast included a young Dick Cavett who played a brash young society photographer in the first act and Gatsby's father in the second act.[14][15] After the Yale production, a number of musical adaptations followed.
A second musical adaptation debuted in Spring 1998, undertaken by Stage One, with Colin Stevens as Gatsby and Ann Marcuson as Jordan Baker.[16] Directed by Phil Smith with an original score by Thomas Johnson, this jazz adaptation premiered at the Pavilion Theatre in Rhyl, Wales. As a jazz adaptation, Johnson's original score emphasized saxophone and brass sextet instruments.[16] The production received considerable press coverage.[16]
The novel has also been adapted for ballet performances. There was a ballet adaptation in 1991.[21] In 2009, BalletMet premiered a version at the Capitol Theatre in Columbus, Ohio.[22] In 2010, The Washington Ballet premiered a version at the Kennedy Center. The show received an encore run the following year.[23]
Beginning in 2015, The Great Gatsby: The Immersive Show was London's longest-running immersive show, at seven years. A New York performance of the show occurred in several rooms of the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan. It was also performed in Ireland, Wales, Belgium, and South Korea.[10] In 2022, The Great Gatsby: A Live Radio Play premiered. The show is not broadcast over the radio, but rather, features actors on-stage pretending to be radio performers in 1942.[25]
Contemporary reviews suggest it may have been the most faithful adaptation of the novel, and the film received generally positive reviews from critics.[27][28] Despite these positive reviews, the reception by writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda proved more ambivalent. According to actress Lois Wilson, who played Daisy in the film, she met Fitzgerald in Hollywood, and the author indicated he liked the film.[28] "As far as I know, he approved of the film when it was released," Wilson recalled.[28] Supporting this claim, Fitzgerald pasted positive reviews of the film in his scrapbook.[28]
Fitzgerald's wife Zelda Sayre, however, held the film in low regard. While living in Los Angeles in early 1927, the couple viewed the film at a nearby theater and walked out midway through the screening.[29] "We saw The Great Gatsby at the movies," Zelda later wrote to their daughter Scottie and her nanny. "It's ROTTEN and awful and terrible and we left."[29] The film is now considered lost, and a trailer of the film at the National Archives is all that is known to exist.[27]
With the advent of sound films, actor Clark Gable conversed with Fitzgerald in Hollywood about remaking The Great Gatsby as a star vehicle for himself in the early 1930s.[30] Gable and writer John O'Hara pressed Paramount Pictures to allow them to do a sound remake with O'Hara writing the screenplay, but their efforts failed, and Fitzgerald died in 1940.[30] Soon after, the publication of the Armed Services Edition of the novel during World War II and the concurrent promotional efforts by the author's friend Edmund Wilson led to a Fitzgerald revival.[31]
In 2021, visual effects company DNEG Animation announced they would be producing an animated film adaptation of the novel directed by William Joyce and written by Brian Selznick.[34]
Upon The Great Gatsby's entry to the public domain in 2021, retellings and expansions became legal to publish. Michael Farris Smith's 2021 novel Nick imagines the backstory of Nick Carraway.[38] Although first written in 2014, Smith's publishers waited until Gatsby's copyright lapsed in 2021 to release it.[39] That same year saw the publication of The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo, a retelling with elements of the fantasy genre while tackling issues of race and sexuality,[40] and The Pursued and the Pursuing by AJ Odasso, a queer partial retelling and sequel in which Jay Gatsby survives.[41]Anna-Marie McLemore's queer retelling, Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix, was released in 2022 and was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.[42]
Graphic novels
The first graphic novel adaptation was in 2007 by Nicki Greenberg, who published The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Adaptation in Australia.[43] Because the original novel was still protected by copyright laws in the United States, this version was never published in the U.S. The second version, The Great Gatsby: The Graphic Novel, was adapted by Fred Fordham and illustrated by Aya Morton in 2020.
In 2021, K. Woodman-Maynard adapted and illustrated The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, which was published by Candlewick Press.[44] This was the first graphic novel adaptation of the original novel to be published after it entered the public domain in 2021. In June 2021, Clover Press debuted the first of seven periodical comic books, faithfully adapting The Great Gatsby. In 2024, IDW Publishing announced Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theater, a three-part miniseries where Gatsby will team up with Sherlock Holmes, Dracula and the Time Traveller from H.G. Wells' The Time Machine to battle the King of the Monsters, with Gatsby funding a version of the anti-kaiju defense team G-Force.[45]
Radio
Kirk Douglas voiced Gatsby in a 1950 radio adaptation.
The Great Gatsby was adapted as a radio play in 1939.[46] In 1950, a half-hour-long adaptation for CBS' Family Hour of Stars starred Kirk Douglas as Gatsby.[47] The novel was read aloud by Trevor White for the BBC World Service in ten parts in 2008. In a 2012 BBC Radio 4 broadcast, The Great Gatsby took the form of a Classic Serial dramatization. It was created by dramatist Robert Forrest.[48]
Video games
In 2010, Oberon Media released a casual hidden object game called Classic Adventures: The Great Gatsby.[49] In 2011, developer Charlie Hoey and editor Pete Smith created an 8-bit-style online game of The Great Gatsby called The Great Gatsby for NES.[50] In 2022, after the Adobe Flash end of life, they adapted this game to an actual NESROM file, which can also be played on their website.[51] In 2013, Slate released a short symbolic adaptation called The Great Gatsby: The Video Game.[52][53]
Mellow, James R. (1984). Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company. p.281. ISBN0-395-34412-3– via Internet Archive. Hollywood," [Zelda] wrote Scottie, "is not gay like the magazines say but very quiet. The stars almost never go out in public and every place closes at mid-night." They had been to see a screening of The Great Gatsby, she wrote: "It's ROTTEN and awful and terrible and we left.
"Miss Cotner Appears in Yale Drama School Play". Wilmington News-Journal. Wilmington, Ohio. May 7, 1956. p.11. Retrieved October 8, 2024– via Newspapers.com. Miss Robyn Cotner... appeared in the Yale Dramatic Association's production of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the first musical adaptation of the novel... She takes the role of Daisy Buchanan in the play. There were five performances...
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