MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
F. Scott Fitzgerald's beloved classic "The Great Gatsby" is 100 years old today. The novel has been adapted numerous times, including a new musical that opened on Broadway last year. Now, "Gatsby" got decent reviews when it was first published in 1925, but it was actually not a commercial success, and that disappointment came at an important time in the life of its author.
KIRK CURNUTT: He's essentially past his commercial peak already, but he wants to be taken seriously as an artist. This is somebody that really sits down and puts the pedal to the metal and comes up with a book that nobody expected.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
That's Kirk Curnutt. He's executive director of the Fitzgerald Society, which is an international fan club with over 500 members. The group likes to celebrate Fitzgerald's full repertoire.
CURNUTT: We try not to let him get stereotyped as a one-hit wonder because he was not by any means. But I think "Gatsby" endures because it really is saying something about America.
MARTIN: Author Claire Anderson-Wheeler didn't grow up in the U.S., but she remembers the first time she picked up the book at 14.
CLAIRE ANDERSON-WHEELER: I couldn't believe that so much was being said about such a slim little novel.
FADEL: Years later, "The Great Gatsby" inspired Anderson-Wheeler's new novel titled "The Gatsby Gambit." Her novel, which has a slightly more contemporary lens, centers on a female character but sticks with the ideas of the classic.
ANDERSON-WHEELER: Some of the questions that I was interested in exploring are very much related to those ideas of money, class, power, really how the 1% operate, and what Fitzgerald would have called the careless people that he identified as the Buchanans.
MARTIN: But what makes the book relevant a century after its publication?
ANDERSON-WHEELER: We continue to be gripped, obviously, tormented even by the issues of social inequality, and Fitzgerald's famously attributed quote of the rich are different.
MARTIN: (Reading) And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Happy 100th birthday to "The Great Gatsby," no longer in its young and more vulnerable years. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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