Death from a Thousand Cuts: A Roundtable on the 1937 Gatsby Condensation

The May 1937 condensation of The Great Gatsby syndicated in the Sunday supplements of select American newspapers included several drastic acts of textual surgery. Although the cuts may not qualify as amputation, they certainly disfigured Fitzgerald’s original text and changed the tenor of the novel’s themes. In this roundtable, nine specialists on Gatsby and modernism take on a chapter each to offer their reflections on how the novel’s scope and focus were altered by the emendations.