'The Great Gatsby' at 100: Long Island's Gold Coast is backdrop for Fitzgerald's classic American novel

"The Great Gatsby," a century old this month, packs a lot into its 180 pages: love, death, money and the American dream, unfolding primarily, its narrator recounts, in "one of the strangest communities in North America ... on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York."

On that portion of Long Island’s North Shore known as the Gold Coast, Jay Gatsby buys a waterfront estate and displays accoutrements of wealth — tailored shirts by the roomful, huge parties, a hydrofoil — to win back Daisy Buchanan, the love of his life who summers just across the bay but is, inconveniently, married to Tom Buchanan.

Why did F. Scott Fitzgerald set the classic novel of America’s jazz age on Long Island? The simplest explanation is because it was a place he knew. During a brief, undistinguished military career, he was stationed at Camp Mills in Mineola, and from 1922 to 1924, he and his wife, Zelda, rented on Gateway Drive in what is now Great Neck Estates. "Our nifty little Babbit-house," as Zelda called it, rented to the Fitzgeralds for the equivalent of about $5,000 per month and last sold in 2016, for $3 million.

The Fitzgeralds and others connected to the theater and movie business in New York City moved into the area after the introduction of the federal income tax, when vast Gilded Age estates "started to be broken up and subdivided into the villages that now exist, so that normal people were able to start purchasing homes," said Alice Kasten, past president of the Great Neck Historical Society.

On Long Island, Fitzgerald biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes, the author met blue-blood World War I hero and polo star Tommy Hitchcock, sensing in him the "ruthlessness, even brutality" that would shape the character of Tom Buchanan. Fitzgerald was neighbors with Edward Fuller, whose huge brokerage firm would soon go bankrupt amid fraud claims and who was an associate of baseball Black Sox scheme orchestrator Arnold Rothstein. Rothstein was the model for Gatsby business associate Meyer Wolfsheim, who favors cuff links made of human teeth.

If Fitzgerald needed inspiration for the alcohol-soaked gatherings that feature prominently in "Gatsby’s" plot, he could have drawn from his own life during this period. He drank prodigiously and was once removed from the lawn of the Doubleday estate in Oyster Bay, where he was dancing in homage to the visiting Joseph Conrad. Fitzgerald may have also modeled Gatsby’s parties on those he attended at Keewaydin, the Sands Point estate of New York World editor Herbert Bayard Swope, Meyers writes.

Long Island, or at least the idea of a place like it — geographically adjacent to the city but culturally distinct, highly economically stratified — was the obvious setting for what Georgetown University English Professor Maureen Corrigan called, in an interview, "the greatest American novel about class." The "compressed geography" of the place makes believable the class friction that is essential to "Gatsby’s" plot and freights with significance its characters’ journeys from the North Shore to the city, or even from one part of the North Shore to another, said Corrigan, author of the 2014 "So We Read On," about the novel. (This premise is complicated by the 2020 documentary "Gatsby in Connecticut: The Untold Story," which skillfully argues that Fitzgerald’s model was not Long Island but Westport.)

West Egg and East Egg, just 20 miles from New York City, are often read as stand-ins for Kings Point and Sands Point, real places separated by a real body of water, Manhasset Bay. West Egg, readers soon learn, is "the less fashionable of the two." It is where narrator Nick Carraway rents a waterfront bungalow for the improbable inflation-adjusted sum of $1,322 per month. He lives next to Gatsby and estimates Gatsby’s 40-acre estate would rent for the inflation-adjusted sum of a quarter-million dollars per season, a plausible price but less than what you might pay this coming August to live south of the highway in East Hampton.

If, as Fitzgerald scholar and Troy University professor Kirk Curnutt said in an interview, "Gatsby" can be read as a "meditation on American geography," it is also a meditation on real estate.

Carraway’s sophisticated eye immediately detects that Gatsby’s mansion, like his money, is recent vintage, a gaudy replica of something ancient from Europe that is "spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy."

The old-money palaces of East Egg are visible across the bay, as is the famous shimmering green flickering light from the Buchanans’ dock. Readers realize, even if Gatsby never does, that this bay is a gulf.

"The way I talk about this is in terms of class," said Paula Uruburu, a Hofstra University English professor. Gatsby "keeps throwing these parties in hopes that Daisy will come, but no self-respecting person from East Egg, who comes from old money and a good family, would want to attend one of those parties," Uruburu said. At one party Daisy does attend, she is appalled by this "unprecedented ‘place’ that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village."

"Gatsby’s" Long Island may borrow from the geography of the real place but if Fitzgerald’s aim had been journalistic verisimilitude, we would say he fell short.

Beyond the coastal sliver, the bulk of the place may as well not exist, though Hempstead and Southampton do get mentioned in passing by a secondary character. The populace has been similarly reduced. Somebody must care for all those pools and rolling lawns, but they are not shown, and that former fishing village carries no trace of fishermen.

The few working-class avatars who make cameos are grotesque and rarely named. They live in the city, in unfashionable neighborhoods of Manhattan or, like Tom’s mistress Myrtle Wilson and her husband, George, in purgatorial Queens. (The "valley of ashes" where they live was based on a real place known as the Corona Dump, where 50 million cubic yards of refuse were deposited in "reeking" hills up to 30 feet high, according to a 1994 Port Authority environmental study) 

Wealth takes up space. The rest of us get cramped together.

- Kirk Curnutt, Fitzgerald scholar and professor at Troy University

Erasure of the poor and racially or ethnically undesirable on "Gatsby’s" Long Island anticipates "the contemporary problem of gentrification," Curnutt said. "Wealth takes up space. The rest of us get cramped together." "Gatsby’s" nastiest bits — Tom’s consorting with and beating of Myrtle, Myrtle’s gruesome death by automobile — occur in the cramped city, narrated in lurid close-up. Gatsby’s suburban murder, by contrast, is seen only in its aftermath, the cool tableau of his corpse floating in a marble pool, the only hint of gore "a thin red circle in the water."

"Gatsby" ends a chapter later. It is night and Carraway, sitting on the North Shore beach, thinks of his dead friend’s wonder upon first spotting the green light at the end of the Buchanans’ dock. The symbolism of this light and the nature of Gatsby’s wonder are unclear. Their ambiguity has launched high school English papers by the uncounted thousands. Suffice it to say they are evanescent and grand, linked to the sense of the sublime Carraway imagines Dutch sailors had upon their first encounter with Long Island when it was no familiar suburb but the gateway to a New World: "face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to (man’s) capacity for wonder."

I think he died knowing he had written at least one great novel, and it broke his heart that people weren’t reading it.

- Maureen Corrigan, professor at Georgetown University

"Gatsby," written and published after Fitzgerald’s Long Island years, got mixed reviews and sold tepidly. Fitzgerald died poor at 44 in Hollywood in 1940, ruined by alcoholism and alienated from many of the people he had considered friends. "I think he died knowing he had written at least one great novel, and it broke his heart that people weren’t reading it," Corrigan said.

People started reading "Gatsby" in large numbers after more than 150,000 volumes were distributed to American GIs in World War II. The writers Dorothy Parker and Edmund Wilson championed Fitzgerald’s work and "Gatsby" has been a staple of high school English classes since the late 1950s or early 1960s. Some 25 million copies have sold since 1940, with as many as 500,000 selling annually.

"Gatsby" has been adapted for movies, plays, a musical and an opera. People started using the word Gatsbyesque in written English no later than 1977, according to the database Lexis-Nexis. Usage includes but is not limited to references to homes, staircases in homes and the political career of George Santos, the former Republican congressman from Long Island, whose representatives declined to make him available for an interview. On or about May 13, 2013, "Gatsby" became a meme. That is when, according to the website Know Your Meme, a series of Tumblr posts featuring an image of Gatsby holding up a glass in toast — Leonardo DiCaprio, from Baz Luhrmann's 2013 movie — received more than 1 million notes. The meme still circulates, spread by anyone with web access and a snappy line of text to add to the image. Gatsby has been freed from, but remains in conversation with, the novel that birthed him, in a way that Fitzgerald could scarcely have imagined. 

Gatsby the meme

In May 2013, "Gatsby" became a meme, according to the website Know Your Meme, when a series of Tumblr posts featuring an image of Gatsby holding up a glass in toast — Leonardo DiCaprio, from Baz Luhrmann's 2013 movie — received more than 1 million notes. The meme still circulates, spread by anyone with web access and a snappy line of text to add to the image. 

Caption: Alamy Stock Photo/Pictorial Press Ltd

"Gatsby’s" Long Island is mostly gone. Were it possible to write such a novel today, said Lawrence Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, in an email, "the modern Gatsby would more likely be an Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, Korean or Sephardic Jew."

But the original endures, selling briskly every fall in bookstores like Huntington’s The Next Chapter and checked out of Long Island libraries 2,467 times last year.

One reason, said writer Jay Cantor, whose novels include "Great Neck" and who grew up in that community, is the universality of its central theme. "Gatsby is a book about longing," he said. "It’s probably one of the great prose-poetry embodiments of longing, of longing that is something more than longing for wealth."

Gatsby events happening on LI

• Great Neck Library — Murder-mystery party, 1920s car show, swing dancing, Fitzgerald lecture, Gatsby movie showings — check library website for dates
• Mineola Memorial Library — 1920s-themed celebration of the anniversary of publication on April 23 with live jazz
• Levittown Public Library — Gold Coast mansions tour on May 15
• Babylon Public Library — Book discussion April 10, movie showing April 11 
• Lindenhurst Memorial Library — Discuss the novel and make 1920s-themed appetizers April 14. Flapper costumes encouraged 

Caption: A 3-D printed model of the Gatsby Mansion, which is being constructed by the Great Neck Public Library for an upcoming event.