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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary edge of The Spectator.

And this week, we're going to be celebrating 100 years since the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. And I'm joined by one of the languages leading authorities on the subject, Professor Sarah Churchwell, who, as well as

having written a book about 10 years ago called Careless People, Murder Mayhem, and the invention

of the Great Gatsby, has also contributed an introduction to a magnificent new centennial edition published by Cambridge

of the Great Gatsby. Sarah, welcome.

Thanks so much for having me.

You say, as maybe a kind of central argument of the introduction you contribute to this book,

that nowadays we kind of get Gatsby wrong, that our idea about the book is not borne out by what the

book actually is. Can you explain why that is? Absolutely. Well, there's sort of two ways to answer

that question. One is kind of why that is in terms of how it came about and also why that is

in terms of how it plays out, if you see what I mean. And the question of how it came about and also why that is in terms of how it plays out, if you see what I mean.

And the question of how it came about is actually the easier one, which is mostly Hollywood.

So we have all these cliches about the 1920s and about the jazz age and about the roaring 20s,

and a lot of those come to us via Hollywood. And then what's happened is that we've kind of superimposed

those cliches back onto the novel. And we've made a bunch of assumptions. And this is probably

about adaptations of Gadsby specifically, but also more broadly, just, you know, kind of films and

stories of the 20s. And then we make a bunch of assumptions about this novel that we think is

...