“I am immensely grateful for this recognition of the value of my work and its potential to alter conversations in my fields of specialization, medieval literature and the history of emotion,” McNamer said. “For me, this will serve as inspiration to think more boldly and creatively not only about my current book project, but about how the methods I develop might help others to model their research questions and practices.”

McNamer is one of 223 fellows in this year’s cohort of awardees working across 55 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields. Each year since 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded fellowships to trailblazing artists, scientists and scholars. The fellows receive a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions,” the foundation .  

In 2023, , the interim provost and the former interim dean of the College of the Arts & Sciences, was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in theatre arts and performance studies. , a professor in the School of Foreign Service, also won the award that year.

“Being named a Guggenheim Fellow is one of the most significant forms of recognition that a scholar can receive,” said ������Ƶ & Sciences Dean . “Sarah McNamer richly deserves this honor. Her research has made an indelible and lasting impact on the field of English, the study of the medieval period and our understanding of human emotions.”

The History of Emotion

McNamer’s primary research interest is in the interplay between medieval literature and the history of emotion.

“The history of emotion may be an unfamiliar concept to some, but the idea that emotions — like everything else about us humans — have histories, and are in part socially and culturally constructed, was one that I began to explore early in my graduate studies,” she said. “A core question of, ‘How do literary texts both reflect and generate affective experience in history?’ has motivated my research.”

She is currently working on a book, Affect and Audience in the Work of the Pearl Poet. The Pearl Poet, also known as the Gawain Poet, is the unknown author of the late 14th-century poems, “Pearl” and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” The identity and cultural location of this elusive author remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of English literary history, McNamer said, and she plans to use the Guggenheim grant to help support her research.

“I’ve always been interested in theorizing affect historically and exploring how literary texts generate affective experience in history,” she said. “For this poet, such questions are especially challenging, because basic facts about his historical coordinates are unknown. We know he wrote sometime in the second half of the 14th century, but for whom was he writing, when, where, for what occasions?”

In addition to being a Guggenheim Fellow, McNamer was as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Historical Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, for the , which will also support her research for the book. 

“This will be an ideal locus for research and writing in the company of other scholars from across the disciplines in the coming academic year,” McNamer said. 

Her book, , won the from the Conference on Christianity and Literature, and her critical edition, translation and commentary of received the for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies. 

“Georgetown faculty have a long and distinguished record of producing pathbreaking research in the humanities,” Edelstein said. “Professor McNamer’s scholarship demonstrates how the study of literature can illuminate the human condition and, by doing so, help us better understand society’s past, present and future.”

Exploring the Medieval Past

McNamer grew up in Montana, where she said she was “taught by some formidable Irish nuns in Catholic schools.”

She went on to study English at Harvard University and was drawn to literary study from the beginning. But McNamer said she had little interest in the distant past until her professor, Derek Pearsall, “opened up the medieval world to me and I began to see how rich and strange and fascinating it was.”

During a gap year in college, she traveled around the world, and to her, the Middle Ages began to have the same lure as experiencing other cultures. McNamer taught English in Japan, which helped form her love of teaching and sent her on the path to academia. 

She earned an MPhil in English Studies (Medieval Period) from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and a Ph.D. in English from University of California, Los Angeles. She also served as a Junior Fellow of comparative literature at Harvard Society of Fellows from 1995-97 and 1998-99. 

McNamer started at Georgetown on Jan. 1, 2000, a date she said “seemed auspicious.” 

“I look back to the distant past on a daily basis, but my start date also oriented me towards thinking about the future: how can we think about medieval literature and culture with fresh, 21st-century approaches?,” she said.

McNamer has taught undergraduate and graduate level courses at Georgetown that include Chaucer, Ways of Reading, Global Medieval Literatures, The Art of Short Fiction and Premodern Worlds: 500-1500. From 2017 to 2023, McNamer served as director of the .

“I’m grateful that Georgetown has been so forward-looking and supportive,” McNamer said. “And, of course, we have amazing students at Georgetown. Exploring the medieval past with them has been a joy.”

(Top image by Judy Licht)

“Because what it tends to suggest when someone says you can do anything with something is that it also means you can do nothing with it,” Hensley said.

It helps to have concrete examples of what English majors are doing with their careers. That’s why the English department posts on its website and launched an events series last month called, “The English Major in the World.” 

As the use of artificial intelligence rises, recent suggest that demand for humanities majors, like English, is increasing, as organizations look for graduates with creative and critical thinking skills. “The capacity for authentic thought is turning out to be an incredibly marketable skill,” Hensley said.

This new events series aims to lean into those strengths. 

“Part of the purpose for this series is to give some concrete specificity to the kind of life plots that are available to people who come out of Georgetown with an English degree,” Hensley said. “And the truth of the matter is that those life plots are incredibly varied, all incredibly dynamic and they really range widely, but each one of them is very specific and real.”

A Diverse Range of Careers

The inaugural event in February featured a talk between , the Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism, and Aiden Johnson (C’19), an English alum who works as a senior producer at BBC Studios. 

The next event is scheduled for April 9 and will be a conversation with Corrigan; Kitty Eisele, a podcast producer and former longtime NPR journalist; and Kate Rosenberger, a senior talent recruiter and audible lead for The Great Courses. The plan is to host one to two “English Major in the World” events per semester, Hensley said.

“We hope this will become an ongoing series to really be able to start telling the story of the range and diversity of career outcomes that our students are able to have,” he said.

This series was born out of conversations between Hensley, Corrigan, , a professor and chair of the Department of English, and , the dean of the ������Ƶ & Sciences. 

Corrigan had already been moderating a public humanities events series with authors and thought about finding additional ways to help English students think about their career paths.

“I really do believe you can do anything with an English degree,” Corrigan said. “I really do believe that humanities degrees don’t age. You gain a wealth of knowledge from close reading and literary history and familiarity with some of the best that’s been known and thought in the world. That will take you places.”

Johnson, who majored in English and minored in journalism, took “five or six classes” with Corrigan and estimates that he spent roughly half of his English major with her. Corrigan’s courses, Johnson said, helped him learn to “think in a clear way that wasn’t necessarily limiting.”

“I always felt like her classes were built upon this social contract that if you are engaged and invested and curious and willing to participate, you won’t get penalized for trying something new and seeing if it works,” Johnson said.

In his senior producer role at BBC Studios, Johnson supports BBC’s talent strategy and content production in the United States. He also works closely with BBC broadcaster Katty Kay and helps produce her interviews, specials and reported features. That includes writing memos, briefs and scripts.

The main thing that his English degree has taught him, Johnson said, is how to “tell a good story, hear a good story and understand what a good story is.” That means being able to read and synthesize information and explain why it’s relevant and important to people, he said.

English Majors Are Everywhere

Corrigan wants students to know that in today’s unpredictable world and job market, it’s an advantage to have an English degree. She hopes this series empowers them.

“There’s no ‘X equals Y’ clear path, but I think that by giving our students kind of a menu of possibilities over the next few years and hearing how people got the positions that they’re in, that maybe it will help give them some practical ideas,” Corrigan said. “It will also help embolden them to believe in their degree and to believe in themselves.”

English majors are everywhere. Hensley said he has seen graduates go on to work in education, journalism and media, government, marketing and publication relations, the entertainment industry, law, finance, consulting and nongovernmental organizations, among other industries.

Hensley said he has also observed that with the rise of algorithmic language engines, critical thinking skills and the ability to create authentic connections are increasingly more valuable. 

“CEOs all over America are increasingly desperate to recruit and retain people who have done the work that enables them to be real thinkers,” he said.

For Corrigan, learning and teaching the humanities are essential to living; it’s like breathing. There’s a certain transcendence, she said, to “having so much great art in your head.” 

“The humanities is life,” Corrigan said. “I feel like it’s my secular religion. I really do. I feel like I don’t think I could get through the day without the voices of amazing writers that I have in my head, who are constantly in my brain, commenting or helping me see things that I would otherwise not notice. I think that those writers give me a sense of possibility and communion beyond my day-to-day life.”

Alameddine joined the Department of English’s in 2023 and was previously the Lannan Medical Humanities Scholar-In-Residence in spring of 2023. He won the Lannan Prize for Fiction in 2021. 

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is about the 63-year-old Raja and his mother, Zalfa, who live together in a tiny Beirut apartment. Told through the voice of Raja, the book traces the stories of Raja and of his home in Lebanon across six decades.

Alameddine has authored seven novels, one short story collection and one non-fiction book. The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is his most recent novel and was published in September. His 2014 novel, An Unnecessary Woman, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Alameddine has also received the , the 2025 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from and the . 

The ������Ƶ & Sciences talked to Alameddine shortly after he received the National Book Award for Fiction in a New York City ceremony. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You didn’t study writing at university. How did writing become part of your life?

Reading has always been a part of my life. I’ve been reading as long as I can remember. Before he died, my father reminded me that when I was four, he asked what I wanted to do, and I said, “I want to become a writer.” When I was four, my idea of writing was writing Superman comics and Batman comics, because that’s what I read. So it was always that I read a lot, but I didn’t start writing ’till relatively late in life.

I started writing because I didn’t like what I was reading. The first book was about the AIDS crisis and the Lebanese civil war. We were in the midst of the AIDS crisis, and I did not like how it was being represented, so I sat down and wrote what I saw, and that book [Koolaids: The Art of War] got published.

Have your motivations for writing changed over time?

I always think I write for revenge, which is a very good thing to do. There was an interview with me in a magazine, maybe four or five years ago, and they put one thing that I said on Instagram or Facebook or something. And I don’t hang out that much there, but somebody pointed it out to me, and it said that I still write because I want all the kids who didn’t invite me to their parties in kindergarten to go, “Oh, my God, we should have invited him to that.” I want everybody to regret not being my boyfriend. I want everybody to regret not inviting me to the great parties. And I hate parties, but I want to be invited.

So that’s always the joke in the back of my head, it’s revenge. But primarily I still write because I want to see the books I don’t see, which is a good thing, because nobody else can do it but me. I don’t see the books that I think should be out there, so I write them. It doesn’t mean that they’re better or anything. It’s just a different kind of book.

A lot of people have mentioned the unique voice of Raja. How did his voice develop? 

That’s a difficult question, because it’s important to realize that I don’t believe you develop a voice. It’s there. You just unearth it. A lot of writing classes will tell you, “Find your voice.” And I consider that bull—-. Your voice is always there. You’ve never lost it.

The lovely thing about Raja and why I like it is because, in certain segments of the novel, Raja is just sitting and telling a story. And if the story is good, it tells itself. There are things that I did that take it beyond that. But this interview is not a discussion on how you structure it. The second section, that’s pure storytelling. Somebody sitting on a comfortable sofa and telling the story, saying, “And let me tell you what happened here, and let me tell you what happened there.” So that’s sort of the voice. 

So, if you want to say the voice is what matters, the voice is just somebody telling a story, somebody with a sense of humor. And, you know, again, for me, what makes Raja charming is that he has a sense of humor. And it’s his self deprecating kind of humor. He makes fun of himself, he makes fun of his mother. He makes fun of everything. 

Could you talk about Raja’s relationship with the city of Beirut?

Beirut is important. But every novel, if it’s any good, the setting is important. His relationship to the city is the same sort of relationship that one has with something that is capricious. It offers great solace, and at the same time, it can offer destruction. And so that when you have a capricious God or a capricious city, the relationship becomes in some ways unstable. 

I think part of the problem with this country is that everything seems to be predictable, that we forget that life is not predictable. In Beirut, you don’t know if the electricity is going to come on or never come on. You go out, you don’t know if the traffic light is going to work or not. Whereas when you live, say, in Germany or in parts of the United States, where everything is predictable, then you forget that sometimes you get a monsoon, sometimes you get an earthquake. We don’t seem to be prepared for the randomness of life.

What has your experience been of writing about the unexpected in a culture that prioritizes writing about the everyday, the mundane, the predictable? 

I’ve always felt like an outsider, whether I was writing or not. My writing has always felt like outsider writing. That does not mean that I was not respected or appreciated, but for the most part, I don’t really represent the dominant culture. Particularly when I first started, my first book was relatively shocking. It took a long time for other people to come in, and other writers, to begin to see the world the way that I do. But that’s normal. If you are to start writing, you will write what you see. 

What’s important to know, I came from a background where I grew up in a civil war. Then I went through the AIDS epidemic, where I lost so many friends. I started a gay soccer team, half of them died within three years. Half of them, we’re talking like 40. So there were 20 people who died. So I know that I cannot rely on anything, and still I do. It comforts me to know that when I press this button, the computer comes on. 

So I started believing that, you know, everything will turn out the way I expect it to. But there’s a part of me that knows, and this is what I write about, that knows that, no, this is not it. So it has to do with how one grows up. When I get too comfortable, I start getting depressed without knowing why. Usually it’s because I’m in my head, and I’m at home all the time. So I start thinking, “Oh, my troubles are like the biggest thing.” But it’s important I put myself in situations where I remind myself that life is not predictable. It’s not always calm and collected.

In the book, there’s a lot of tragedy. What is the role of art in times of tragedy?

Let’s just say, this is a question that cannot be answered. There are many, many roles for art. One of them is entertainment, distraction. The other is being a witness, just recording and witnessing what is happening. And there are some that will tell you that it’s about inspiring. Literature, books have many, many purposes, and different readers use it for different things. 

What is the purpose of literature? We’ve been arguing that for generations. It’s like, was Shakespeare trying to create art, or was he just trying to entertain and make a living? And did his work inspire people to do something that they weren’t? It’s a long question. 

Usually, when I’m sitting down to write, it’s about making a sentence work. It’s about moving from one thing to the next and finally, getting a book. I don’t think in terms of, I am writing to do this or that. Once a book is done, once a play is written, once a movie is done, what happens is between the reader and the book. I don’t know what the purpose of writing is. 

In a quote commonly attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, she said the purpose of life is to live it. So you can say the purpose of art is to make it. The purpose of literature is to write it. Everything else is secondary.

(Photo of Rabih Alameddine by Oliver Wasow)

Ortiz, a beloved faculty member in the ������Ƶ & Sciences and celebrated scholar of Latinx literature, queer theory and gender studies, died Aug. 18 in DC. He was 63.

For many, Ortiz, who worked at Georgetown for over 25 years, was more than a colleague or professor, he was their lifeline on campus. Ortiz exuded positivity and built community wherever he went. And his laugh lit up rooms. His friends have described it as loud, resonant, jovial, contagious and inclusive.

“He had this chuckle that he did, sort of like a, ‘ha, ha, ha,’ almost like Santa,” , an associate professor of English, said of Ortiz’s laugh. “He had dimples, and he was a good looking person. It was like all of his features were oriented towards joy.”

“There were different versions of the Ricardo laugh but all of them were part of the same jovial, generous outlook on life,” said , the Hubert J. Cloke Director of American Studies. “He was an immensely positive person, which I think rubbed off on a lot of us.”

It was among the ways that Ortiz sought to bring people together. 

“Whatever he was laughing at, we were included in that laughter,” said , a professional lecturer in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.

“I think a lot about his laughter, because he was so joyful,” said Sonia Valencia (G’12), one of Ortiz’s former students in the who graduated with a Master of Arts in English. “He just had a unique laugh and it was infectious, and he brought light and joy into every space.”

‘A Huge Presence’

It’s hard to find a pocket of Georgetown where Ortiz wasn’t involved. 

At the time of his passing, he was the director of the , which he took over in July 2022. Ortiz began teaching at Georgetown in the fall of 1998 and served as the chair of the English department from 2015 to 2021. He taught courses across departments and programs in English, American studies, comparative literature, performing arts and women’s and gender studies. 

Ortiz also regularly taught in the Community Scholars Program for first-generation students and was a member or chair of several committees. He won numerous faculty awards. Georgetown recently set up the to honor his memory and support the work to which he dedicated his life. 

“In many ways, I think he was a model College faculty member,” said , the dean of the ������Ƶ & Sciences. “People aren’t going to forget that, and I think they will draw upon that memory to inspire themselves going forward in terms of how they’ll teach our students and act towards each other within our community.”

As a first-generation college student, Ortiz, who was born in Cuba and immigrated to Southern California with his parents at a young age, was particularly drawn to serving underrepresented and fellow first-generation students. 

He was affiliated and allied with programs, clubs and initiatives like the Georgetown Scholars Program, La Casa Latina, MEChA de Georgetown, the LGBTQ Resource Center, the , and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. 

“Ricardo was a huge presence at Georgetown, because he loved this institution and its students, and he believed in – and enjoyed – being involved in academic programs,” said , a professor of English and American Studies. 

Ortiz found connections across the university.

“Professors in departments, we stay in our own lanes,” Velez said. “But Ricardo created overlapping spaces … I think he took Georgetown’s mission [of cura personalis] as seriously as anyone ever has at Georgetown.”

‘A Fierce Advocate’

Students often turned to Ortiz for mentorship and colleagues looked up to him as a role model. 

Angie Bonilla (C’09), one of Ortiz’s former students who graduated from the College with a major in English and minor in Spanish, said she is the researcher, educator and scholar she is today because of Ortiz. 

A chancellor’s postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Bonilla wants people to remember Ortiz’s advocacy work for first-generation students and contributions to Latinx studies as a queer and Cuban literary and cultural critic.

“I want people to remember the fierce love he had for his many homelands – California, the Caribbean and DC,” Bonilla said. “I want people to remember how he was a humanist at the core, a fierce advocate for the unfinished and necessary work of protecting and cultivating the humanities in higher education.” 

Ortiz saw potential in each student, regardless of their background. 

At one point while writing her master’s thesis, Valencia told him that she didn’t belong at Georgetown. She compared herself to her peers who had already finished their work and felt her classmates were smarter than her. 

Ortiz quickly and gently shut down those thoughts.

“I didn’t have the language for this at the time, but I was, at moments, struggling with imposter syndrome,” said Valencia, who is the director of the TRIO Scholars Program at UC Irvine. “And he reassured me of the fact that I did belong there, and that I had great ideas.”

He treated colleagues the same way. 

, an associate professor in the Department of History and the American Studies Program, knew a lot about Ortiz and his work with Latinx literature before she arrived at Georgetown in 2020. She had read his writing and taught it in her classes.

Ortiz, Loza said, was a brilliant literary scholar who oozed generosity. He constantly uplifted others through compliments and wanted the people around him to feel valued.  

“He had a lot more experience at Georgetown than I did and had a large profile as a scholar,” she said. “And I just remember countless interactions where he not only made me feel like we were peers, but he also, at times, made me feel like I was teaching him something.”

‘A Sense of Mission’

As a scholar, Ortiz wrote two books on Latinx studies and dozens of academic works that covered topics in the humanities. He was an expert in Latinx literature and cultures and often analyzed it through the lenses of gender and sexuality.

“He was knowledgeable about all Latino literature,” Loza said. “In ethnic studies, especially for communities that are very large and complex, it’s hard to find scholars that actually understand the complexity of entire swaths of people, not just like one corner or one group, but he was one of those people.”

Joshua Javier Guzmán (SFS ’10), an associate professor in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA, said that he is an academic because of Ortiz. Guzmán first met Ortiz the summer before his first year at Georgetown as a Community Scholar, and Ortiz was one of the program’s instructors.

Guzmán took Ortiz’s Testimonial Fictions course as his first elective at Georgetown, and learning from Ortiz inspired Guzmán to become a professor himself.

“What Ricardo made me realize early on about the profession was that it was a social world, and that these were not just like dead writers that were scholars that we were reading in class, but actually alive,” Guzmán said. “A lot of them were his friends or he knew them and that you can know them too.”

As a professor, Ortiz fostered curiosity, Guzmán said. He taught with rigor and emboldened students to expand their worlds.

“When he gets you, he’ll give you these little nuggets, something to latch on, and when you latch on, he pushes you: Go read this. Go look at that thing. Go look that up,” Guzmán said. “It was sort of like pushing you out in the world.”

More recently, Ortiz devoted much of his time to the Master of Arts in Engaged & Public Humanities program, where he served as director.

, a professor of law and humanities in the Department of English and the founding director of the master’s program from 2019 to 2021, credits Ortiz with increasing the program’s impact by managing real, high impact internships, developing a core faculty and recruiting students interested in the humanities to join.

“The year we launched the program, we were coming out of COVID and dealing with all the issues everyone was dealing with,” Temple said. “After that, everything that I had dreamed and hoped for regarding that program, he brought into being.”

“He immediately came into that leadership role with a joy and eagerness to grow it,” said , core faculty for the master’s program. 

Ortiz was a program builder, said , the chair of the English department. 

“I think that it was in part his belief in the value and the importance of the work,” O’Malley said. “He deeply believed in the importance of the humanities, of English studies, of Latinx studies, of queer studies, of graduate studies, and he had a sense of mission for those that he thought that if no one else was doing it, it had to be done, and so it would be him.”

‘Unashamed Joy’

Ortiz loved talking about films, books and television shows – particularly reality TV. 

“We’d talk about pop culture as well as high brown literature in the same breath and with the same seriousness,” Valencia said.

And he enjoyed all of those things equally and unironically. 

“There was a kind of open and unashamed joy in what he did, in what he was reading, in what he was writing, in what his students were doing,” O’Malley said. “We’d have conversations where he would be totally fascinated and interested and enthusiastic in reality television or the novels of Jacqueline Susann – some things you might think that academics would brush off, but Ricardo had a real, authentic, totally unironic pleasure in these.”

Ortiz could also be playful – in his personality but also with his writing. “Like the way he played with words,” Valencia said. “The way he stretched language to really invite you to have that relationship with language where you know that it’s something that’s alive, something that can be stretched with multiple meanings.”

He noticed things about the world around him and took time to soak it in. Even walking to the bus stop after class, Ortiz would sometimes stop and take a picture of the sunset on campus to post on social media. 

“I think his capacity for being alive was profound,” Velez said. “Every experience mattered to him.”

Ortiz is survived by his partner, Paul O’Neill; sisters, Ana and Ana; nephews, Colin, Andrew and Daniel; and niece, Isabella.

In remembrance of Ortiz, gifts may be sent to:

The Ricardo L. Ortiz Humanities Fund
The ������Ƶ & Sciences
Georgetown University
Department 0734
Washington, DC 20073-0734

Gifts may be made online at:

“Just to freshen my grasp on it, because it is kind of an elusive novel,” Corrigan says. “And I don’t get tired of rereading it. I always feel like I’m rewarded by rereading it. It’s not just this kind of mechanical exercise. It’s a pleasure.”

Corrigan would know. 

She is the Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism in the Department of English and an expert on Fitzgerald’s work. She’s lost count of the number of times she’s read the book, but it is well over a hundred. Corrigan is also and author of So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.

For Corrigan, who teaches about Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s writing in her Fitzgerald & His Circle class, the novel is freshly topical. In an , she wrote that “great works of art are great, in part, because they continue to have something to say to the present.” 

Gatsby, Corrigan says, is “both timeless and time-bound.” 

The novel is set in New York City after a large wave of immigrants arrived to the city from Europe between 1880 and 1920. During that period, Corrigan says, there was a sentiment shared among some residents that the city should not accommodate the immigrants. There was also, she adds, a nervousness about the internal migration of African Americans from Southern rural areas into the city. 

“You see that in the novel, and that feels very much of our time, where you’ve got this nativist sentiment,” Corrigan says.

In short, we’re living in the age of Tom Buchanan and the bullying that he embodies, she explains, referring to a character in Gatsby who espouses racist views and eugenics. 

Corrigan calls Gatsby the “first modern great American novel” because of the book’s accessibility and its use of ordinary language. She also says Fitzgerald’s classic is “our great American novel that foregrounds class” for the way it poignantly illuminates truths about human aspiration.

Each year, countless students read Gatsby as part of their schools’ curriculum. More than 30 million copies have been sold, , and there have been several film and theater adaptations of the novel. Corrigan is a literary consultant on the musical production, . 

But when The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925, the novel was considered a commercial disappointment, and Fitzgerald died in 1940 believing that the book was unpopular. 

The author would be stunned at the reception on the book’s 100th anniversary.

“I think he would be so overwhelmed and touched and speechless. I mean, when he died, the last royalty check was for $13.13. If that isn’t a warning about becoming a writer, I don’t know what is,” Corrigan says. “He knew he had written something great, and he knew nobody was reading it, and that was heartbreaking.”

Gatsby endures because it tackles still relevant questions about how Americans see and define themselves. In many ways, Corrigan says, the title character of Jay Gatsby exemplifies the striving and yearning for something beyond ourselves.

“What is this yearning that maybe we can imagine is distinct to America? This yearning for something more,” she says. 

Many anniversary celebrations around Gatsby center around the Roaring Twenties and flapper outfits. But those events misinterpret the novel, Corrigan says. It’s not about the parties.

Instead, those wishing to honor Gatsby and Fitzgerald should pick up a copy of the novel and read it – for the first or 100th time. Read some of Fitzgerald’s letters, Corrigan recommends. 

“He’s one of the best letter writers ever in American literature,” she says. “He’s so present on the page in his letters.” 

Corrigan also suggests reading Fitzgerald’s essays published posthumously in The Crack-Up.

And for those in the DC area, Fitzgerald has a local connection. He and his wife, Zelda Sayre, are both buried at the cemetery next to St. Mary’s Church in Rockville. 

Corrigan still learns something new from Gatsby each time she reads it. She hopes that in some way, Fitzgerald knows of the impact the book has made. 

“At the end of the novel, we hear about man’s yearning for something commensurate with his capacity for wonder,” Corrigan says. “We all want to find something like that, don’t we?”

(Photos by Joshua Rodriguez)