Gatsby@100 Chapter 2 featuring Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley is the author of seventeen novels, two collections of short stories, five books of non-fiction, eight young adult novels, and a children’s book. Her most recent book is her 2024 novel, Lucky. She has won three O. Henry Awards for her short fiction. 

In 1981, she received the Friends of American Writers Prize for her novel At Paradise Gate; in 1992, she received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Heartland Award for her novel, A Thousand Acres; and in 2006 she received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival and the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award. She was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. 

Chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby finds narrator Nick Carraway trapped in a claustrophobic rendezvous between Tom Buchanan and his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a lowly Queens gas-station owner near the Valley of Ashes. At the adulterous couples' Washington Heights love nest on 158th St, Nick meets a group of gauche wannabes: Myrtle's garish younger sister Catherine; the effete aspiring photographer Chester McKee; and his loud, brash wife Lucille. As Nick admits, the party is only the second time in his life he is drunk, and the party ends in a brutal act of violence.