The Great Gatsby: The 1926 Broadway Script

The cultural ubiquity of The Great Gatsby is such that it is tempting to think we know almost all there is to say about it. But F. Scott Fitzgerald's most famous work still has the capacity to surprise us. Perhaps few admirers of the novel know that it was also adapted for the stage by Owen Davis. In 1926 a successful production ran at the Ambassador Theater in New York City. This edition presents, for the first time in print, the original Broadway script: a fascinating social and literary document, now all but forgotten. The play re-forged Fitzgerald's novel into a fast-moving dramatization of parties and bootlegging, dancing and drinking, hot jazz, adultery and violence. It afforded an evening of first-rate entertainment for Manhattan theatergoers. Incorporating photographs of the original sets and actors, reviews, and publicity pasted into Fitzgerald's scrapbooks, this volume lifts the curtain anew on a singular drama.

'Owen Davis's play The Great Gatsby, which had a successful Broadway run in 1926, reimagined and even recast Fitzgerald's book in ways that gave it resonance both as an expression of the Roaring Twenties zeitgeist, and after, as an approach to the ways the novel, in a new form, still tells the American story. With Anne Margaret Daniel and James L. W. West III's perceptive and instructive introduction providing context, this engrossing script has its own story to tell and insights to Fitzgerald to reveal. And like the novel, it cuts to the heart of America.' Linda Patterson Miller, Distinguished Professor of English, Penn State Abington

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