Leitrim writer Conor McManus is set to present a bold new take on The Great Gatsby at a major literary conference in New York later this month, marking the novel’s 100th anniversary.
The event, titled New York, New Perspectives, and The Great Gatsby, will run from June 22 to 28 and is organised by the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society in partnership with the American Literature Association. It brings together academics, scholars, and writers from around the world to examine the legacy of Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic.
McManus, who hails from Drumshanbo and is the author of Boy and Drumshanbo, will deliver a paper titled The Great Gatsby, Pulitzer, and The New York World: True Stories of the News. In it, he argues that Fitzgerald’s novel was heavily inspired by real-life news stories from the Gilded Age, drawn from turn-of-the-century New York newspapers like The New York World.
Rather than seeing Gatsby purely as a Jazz Age novel, McManus suggests Fitzgerald mined stories from a much earlier era. “The Great Gatsby is generally seen as a novel chronicling the Jazz Age in 1920s New York,” McManus said. “However, I will put forward the argument that Fitzgerald actually drew on news stories from the Gilded Age which was decades earlier. He incorporated real-world figures from that time into the novel’s characters and plot.”
In particular, McManus links Gatsby’s characters to real people connected with The New York World, including its publisher Joseph Pulitzer and three pioneering female journalists: Nelly Bly, Elizabeth Jordan, and Harriet Hubbard Ayer.
Gerry Bohan (centre) with Conor McManus and Eileen O'Toole of the Drumshanbo Written Word Press.
He draws striking parallels—comparing the novel’s mysterious Ella Kaye to Nelly Bly, golf pro Jordan Baker to Elizabeth Jordan, and Myrtle Wilson to Harriet Hubbard Ayer, whose own scandal-filled life was widely reported at the time. Even the narrator, Nick Carraway, is presented as a kind of reporter, observing Gatsby’s world with the dispassion of a journalist.
McManus’s literary work has previously appeared in Southword, The Moth, Crannóg, The Stinging Fly, and Force Ten. He has performed readings on RTÉ Radio and in the UK as part of the Cork/Coventry cultural exchange. His chapbook Boy was published in 2020, followed by Drumshanbo in 2021. He is currently working on his debut novel.
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