To kick off the 2024 Winter Read of The Great Gatsby, join us for an evening with Maureen Corrigan, NPR Fresh Air book critic and author of So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures. 

Conceived nearly a century ago by a man who died believing himself a failure, The Great Gatsby is now a revered classic and a rite of passage in the reading lives of millions. But how well do we really know Gatsby? As Maureen Corrigan, Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out, while Fitzgerald’s masterpiece may be one of the most popular novels in America, many of us first read it when we were too young to fully comprehend its power.

Offering a fresh perspective on what makes Gatsby great — and utterly unusual — So We Read On takes us into archives, high school classrooms, and even out onto the Long Island Sound to explore the novel’s hidden depths, a journey whose revelations include Gatsby's surprising debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its rocky path to recognition as a “classic,” and its profound commentaries on the national themes of race, class, and gender.

With rigor, wit, and infectious enthusiasm, Corrigan inspires us to re-experience the greatness of Gatsby and cuts to the heart of why we are, as a culture, “borne back ceaselessly” into its thrall. Along the way, she spins a new and fascinating story of her own.

Registration is required. A book signing with Chapter One will follow. This event will also be livestreamed, and a recording will be available to view through March 15, 2024.

Maureen Corrigan is America’s most trusted and beloved book critic. Her distinctive voice is at once incisive and accessible, like a well-read friend who always sends you home with a good book to read. For more than twenty years Maureen has been the book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. She is also a columnist for The Washington Post and The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism at Georgetown University. She is the author of two books of her own: Leave me Alone I’m Reading and So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why it Endures, which was named one of the ten best books of the year by Library Journal. Aside from her writings for The Washington Post and The Village Voice, Maureen has also written reviews for The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Nation among others. She serves on the advisory panel of The American Heritage Dictionary, is an associate editor of and contributor to Mystery and Suspense Writers, as well as the winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism. She has served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and has also been on the judges’ panel for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.