The Great Gatsby: It’s a book “worth the whole damn bunch put together.” And one of its biggest fans is Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, and she just wrote So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures (Little, Brown and Company, $26). She’ll discuss Gatsby‘s legacy and “hidden depths” on Tuesday, November 11th, 7 p.m. at the Hill Center at Old Naval Hospital.

So We Read On revisits The Great Gatsby many of us first met in high school, starting with a hard look at author/tortured soul F. Scott Fitzgerald. At the same time he was inspired to write the book, he was dealing with chronic debt, an increasingly competitive friendship with Ernest Hemingway, a literally crazy wife, and alcoholism.

The disease led to Fitzgerald’s death at age 44 (and burial in Rockville, Md.). His funeral was eerily similar to his famous protagonist’s — hardly anyone came. He was proud of writing The Great Gatsby, but in his lifetime only saw it have “disappointing sales and mixed reviews.”

So We Read On examines the immediate public reception of The Great Gatsby. Some of the “elite” critics praised it, while mainstream reviewers called it “inferior” and a “dud.” The book’s themes didn’t seem to “translate well” in other countries, and may have gone completely over American readers’ heads. Fitzgerald once said, “of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one has the slightest idea what the book was about.”

Corrigan wants to share the Gatsby as Fitzgerald saw it. So We Read On takes us into archives, classrooms, and the Long Island Sound to work through mysteries in the book’s “thick ambiguity”. Though The Great Gatsby is now considered one of the ultimate American novels, So We Read On explores our strange relationship with the book. There is still a reluctance to discuss certain “un-American” themes like race, gender, and class division.

In addition to her position at NPR, Corrigan is a lecturer at Georgetown University and columnist for The Washington Post’s Book World. She won the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism. So We Read On is her second book, following literary memoir Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading.

At the event, Corrigan will be in conversation with Fitzgerald scholar Jackson Bryer. Register for free here and Hill Center recommends arriving at least 15 minutes early. Books will be for sale and complimentary Gin Rickeys will be served after the talk, courtesy of Green Hat Gin. The Gin Rickey cocktail was created in D.C. in the 1800s and makes a cameo in Chapter 7 of The Great Gatsby.