Six Degrees of The Great Gatsby

In the most famous novel of the Jazz Age, Nick Carraway is a Midwest-born Yale graduate who arrives in New York to work in bond trading after serving in World War I. Nick rents a house in West Egg, a nouveau riche community on Long Island, and he's thrown into the upper echelons of society life when he reconnects with his cousin Daisy. Daisy has married Tom Buchanan, a white supremacist philanderer,... and they live nearby in the old money enclave of East Egg with their three-year-old daughter. Nick also strikes up a friendship with his next-door neighbor, the mysterious, fabulously wealthy Gatsby, who throws lavish nightly parties. Nick soon learns that Gatsby has been in love with Daisy since he met her years ago in Louisville he has bought his home in West Egg to be closer to her in the hopes that they can rekindle their romance now that he's made his fortune. Nick agrees to help them reconnect, inviting Daisy to Gatsby's house, and setting off a chain of events that will ultimately crush Gatsby's hopes and leave a wake of destruction. Fitzgerald's defining work was published in 1925 the original title, Trimalchio in West Egg didn't stick and in its day, it was largely regarded as a disappointment, at least compared to his two previous novels (This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned). It wasn't until after Fitzgerald's death that Gatsby came to be regarded as one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century, landing a permanent spot on high school reading lists. Equal parts mystery, romance and social commentary, The Great Gatsby is both an historical document and a tragedy with the staying power of Shakespeare. The Great Gatsby's impact on literature has been enormous. Its universal themes of class-consciousness, aspiration, love and the corrupting influence of money can be seen in the works of J.D. Salinger and John O'Hara, among many others in the generations that followed. Fitzgerald's personal associations with Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker (not to mention Ring Lardner, Edmund Wilson and Gertrude Stein) made for a mutual, if not entirely generous, exchange of influences. The book has served as a manual of sorts writers like Richard Yates have studied it for its economical use of dialogue and seamless plot construction. And Gatsby characters actually live on in Chris Bohjalian's contemporary novel The Double Bind. With its iconic characters, colorful setting and lyrical prose, Fitzgerald's extraordinary story is, nearly a century later, a part of our cultural legacy.

Both Hemingway and Fitzgerald were Midwesterners, passionate writers, and tragic figures of 20th Century literature, and as such, these contemporaries will in some ways forever be linked. This relationship has been well-chronicled, but perhaps nowhere as amusingly and pathetically as in A Moveable Feast. Hemingway's semi-fictionalized account of living in Paris in the 1920s recalls his run-ins with Fitzgerald, and his famously tormented wife, Zelda just after Gatsby was released. In one... memorable episode, the envious, ambitious Hemingway agrees to help the slightly elder and more famous Fitzgerald pick up his car in Lyon. The ill-fated, booze-soaked journey ends with Fitzgerald stuck in a hotel room convinced he's about to die, while Hemingway feasts alone in the downstairs dining room. A later scene in which Hemingway recalls Fitzgerald asking him to assess his manhood underscores Hemingway's shamelessness in exploiting his "friend." When Hemingway finally reads The Great Gatsby himself, he admits, in backhanded Hemingway-ese, that the book floors him with its genius. Meanwhile, Fitzgerald is credited with jumpstarting Hemingway's career, as he introduced Hemingway to his editor at Scribner's who later published The Sun Also Rises.

Longtime friends, Parker and Fitzgerald met at the famed Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel in New York and were rumored to have had a fling in the 1920s, while both were married to other people. Parker was said to be an early supporter of Fitzgerald's work, though the slightly older Parker was by then a prominent literary figure in her own right. Including the original Portable Dorothy Parker as Parker edited... it in 1944 a selection of poems and short stories as well as essays, book and theater reviews and letters, this anthology covers the depth of her talents, which go well beyond her famous wit. Running through Parker's work, especially in stories like "The Big Blonde" and "The Standard of Living," is the same vein of social commentary one finds in Gatsby with special attention paid to race and class relations, the war between the sexes and the excesses of the era though, unsurprisingly, Parker is a more biting critic. The anthology is also an historical testament to their personal relationship, which continued on some level for decades, until they were both working as screenwriters in Hollywood: It includes an interview in which Parker alludes to Fitzgerald's work ethic and misfortunes, and a letter she sent to him in 1934. In the end, it was Parker, who at Fitzgerald's funeral in 1940, honored his great contribution to the literary world by repeating a line from Gatsby: "Poor son of a bitch."

Like Fitzgerald, Richard Yates is held up as a great American novelist whose work was underappreciated in its day. (Fitzgerald, at least, has been canonized, while Yates is still considered a "writer's writer.") Yates wrote admiringly about Fitzgerald's influence on his work, revealing that he studied it relentlessly when teaching himself how to write. "The Great Gatsby turned out to be the most nourishing novel I read" he wrote in The New... York Times Book Review. "It gains range as it gathers momentum, until the end of it leaves you with a stunning illumination of the world." Yates' masterful Revolutionary Road, like Gatsby, is set in a post-war period of optimism, only in this case it's 30 years later, after World War Two. Frank and April Wheeler are a young couple who have moved to a Connecticut town to raise their children. But even as they self-consciously adopt the suburban lifestyle, they begin to suspect that it's a sham. The only thread holding the Wheelers' marriage together is the conviction that they're better, more bohemian and more interesting than their neighbors until they find themselves tragically entombed in their bourgeois roles. Yates's still-relevant book builds on Gatsby's themes of social mobility, self-made mythologies and the dark revelation that the American dream has been oversold.

Any number of short stories collected in the anthology Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker might qualify as Fitzgerald-inspired but there are two in particular that seem to echo Gatsby: John O'Hara's "Drawing Room B" and J.D. Salinger's "Slight Rebellion off Madison." O'Hara's story, written in 1947, concerns Leda Pentleigh, an aging actress on a train from New York to Chicago who is consumed with thoughts of her celebrity... (or current lack thereof). When a young actor approaches her for advice, her bruised ego stomps all over her best intentions. Published in 1946, "Slight Rebellion" features the pre-Catcher in the Rye debut of Holden Caulfield it would become the basis of Chapter 17 in the novel. Holden goes on a date with his girlfriend Sally. Depressed, he reveals his disillusionment with prep school and New York and urges her to run away with him. She refuses, and he later drunk-dials her and ends up alone and ashamed on Madison Avenue, waiting for the bus. O'Hara and Salinger each cited Fitzgerald as an important influence in their work and it shows: both stories concern characters whose authenticity is smothered by the constraints of class and status, both feature singular narrative styles, and both embody the spot-on dialogue and savvy commentary on social hypocrisies common in Fitzgerald's work.

While many other authors have heaped praise on The Great Gatsby, Chris Bohjalian goes a little further in this quirky mystery novel he writes its characters and plot into his own story. The plot concerns Laurel Estabrook, who, as a University of Vermont student, was assaulted while biking on a rural back road. Now an employee at a local homeless shelter in Burlington, she receives a box of photos from a former... resident, Bobbie Crocker, who has recently died. In the box, Laurel finds clues to Crocker's past he was apparently a successful photographer who fell on hard times due to mental illness. As she delves deeper, she's disturbed to find images of her hometown, West Egg, and one of herself that was taken, she suspects, on the very day she was attacked. Increasingly obsessed, Laurel starts to uncover connections to the Buchanan family and she becomes convinced that Bobbie was Daisy and Gatsby's long-lost illegitimate son. As far as homages go, The Double Bind's narrative style is uniquely Bohjalian's and its leitmotifs of self-invention and personal tragedy are only loosely connected to Gatsby's. Yet for fans of the original, The Double Bind offers a parallel universe in which Fitzgerald's fictions actually come off the page and mingle with reality.