A Fitzgerald Centennial: – F. Scott Fitzgerald Society

New York, New Perspectives, and The Great Gatsby

The 17th International Fitzgerald Society Conference

was held in New York City June 22-28 2025!

Hosted by the New School, with conference director Anne Margaret Daniel

The FINAL DRAFT of the program is still available for download here:

f-scott-fitzgerald-in-nyc-conference-final-version

For photos from the conference, check out our Facebook page!

You can also read the New York Times coverage of our opening boat ride into Manhasset Bay HERE!

We opened the conference June 22 in Port Washington with a boat tour of Manhasset Bay on The Great Gatsby Tour. This unique journey between “East Egg” and “West Egg” was originally founded by former Fitzgerald Society website developer Eleanor Cox and her husband Chris Nihill in 2008. As of 2024, it has been operated by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, New York City historian and tourist leader extraordinaire and the founder of the Dorothy Parker Society. If you would like a taste of what the cruise is like, click here. Attendees are encouraged to arrive Saturday June 21 and either stay in the city to ride through the former Valley of Ashes on the LIRR as a group or to stay in either Great Neck or Port Washington (much cheaper than a night in NYC!).

We also hosted two free events open to the first 100 attendees: a June 24 reception at the Irish Consulate (with many thanks for Society member Brian Murphy for arranging). The event featured novelist Jay McInerney, who appeared not once but twice at the conference. Other attendees attended a “speakeasy cabaret” by Society member and playwright/dancer/actress Brooke di Spirito called The Broken Lute and based upon The Beautiful and Damned. This event ook place at The Back Room on Norfolk Street, which was actually once a speakeasy!

We also enjoyed a special performance of a scene from Gatz, the Elevator Repair Service’s famous word-for-word performance of Gatsby.

As if that weren’t enough, we wrapped up the conference with a harbor cruise in the Hudson River, including an up-close and personal trip around the Statue of Liberty!

Here from the 2025-26 Fitzgerald Newsletter is an account of the conference:

The Fitzgerald Society’s 17^th International Conference, “New York, New Perspectives, and The Great Gatsby,” Was a Smashing Success and Proves that if We Can Make It There (There Being New York City), We Can Make it Anywhere

From June 22-28, 2025, more than 200 members of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society met during an extremely muggy week in New York City to celebrate the 100^th birthday of the author’s Great American Novel, The Great Gatsby. Despite sweltering, 100-degree temperatures, hearty attendees spent a week roaming the metropolis as well as the Long Island environs of East and West Egg to pay tribute to the emblematic story of American literature’s most beautiful dreamer, the elusive Jay Gatsby.

Success for the week goes to the organizing team, especially site coordinator Anne Margaret Daniel, who secured use of her institution, the New School on West 11^th Street, for facilities. Gratitude as well must go to the program’s co-organizers, Maggie Gordon Froehlich and Ross K. Tangedal. They were supported by an executive Society team of president Jackson R. Bryer, vice-president William Blazek, and executive director Kirk Curnutt.

The conference unofficially kicked off on Sunday, June 22, as registrants met at Penn Station where Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, a longtime NYC tour guide, Dorothy Parker preservationist, and—most importantly—CEO of the popular excursion The Great Gatsby Boat Tour escorted us out to Port Washington for a cruise into Manhasset Bay separating Kings Point and Sands Point (Fitzgerald’s two fictional “eggs”). While the magnificent homes Fitzgerald spied in 1922-24 when he lived at 6 Gateway Drive in nearby Great Neck are long gone, the tour was far from short on opulence and grandiosity. The many mansions the tour passed by included the Spring Knoll Estate (aka Swan Manor), which features prominently in the 1993 crime flick Carlito’s Way starring Al Pacino and Sean Penn.

The tour was menaced initially by a drizzle that threatened to douse those of us who signed up for the cruise. Additionally, an interruption in the Long Island Railway meant we had to transfer to buses for the final leg of the journey. Fortunately, we were able to bribe our bus driver to take us directly to the North Hempstead Town Dock on the city’s picturesque main street. Just as we arrived, the clouds broke, the skies cleared, and the sun emerged. It also helped that Louie’s Prime Steak & Seafood had already opened for brunch, allowing folks a nice cocktail before setting to sea.

As a special bonus, New York Times reporter Stephen Kurutz and photographer Sabrina Santiago happened to be on hand to cover Kevin’s expert narration. A few days later we were shocked to wake up to a front digital page article entitled “Can’t Repeat the Past? A Gatsby Boat Tour Can” that featured great photos of Kevin, Kirk, and Steff Keim, “a lawyer from the Bronx” who wore “a loose, light pink [1920s-style] dress and a cloche hat, paired with big round sunglasses.” The article captured perfectly the enthusiasm the crowd felt for viewing the landscape that Fitzgerald so dreamily describes in his novel.

The Port Washington excursion was followed by the official opening ceremony for the week, which was held at the Glucksman Ireland House at New York University at 1 Washington Mews, a facility at which Anne Margaret has attended many an event. For the evening’s entertainment, one of our newest Society members, Jocelyn Mosman, aka The Gatsby Girl (@yourgatsbygirl / @travelstylemagic)—a devout Broadway blogger—organized a roundtable entitled “Something Gorgeous About Him: The Men of Gatsby” featuring several NYC actors. The multitalented Keivon Akbari, Michael Busani, and Cullen Gray have each appeared in separate Gatsby-inspired productions, including Immersive Gatsby, Great Gatsby!: A Pop Parody Musical, and The Great Gatsby Experience. Spurred by Jocelyn’s questions, their conversation offered a great way to appreciate how ingrained Gatsby remains in American popular culture.

Regular conference sessions began bright and early Monday morning, June 23. The many unique events of the week included

A conversation with Martyna Majok, the award-winning playwright who wrote the libretto for Gatsby: An American Myth, the musical-in-progress that was previewed in 2024 at the American Repertory Company in Boston, with music by Florence Welch (of Florence + the Machine) and Thomas Bartlett and direction by Rachel Chavkin. Martyna graciously walked us through the challenges of adapting the novel for the stage and updated us on the production’s status.
A plenary by K. Woodman-Maynard, the Minneapolis-based illustrator/writer who adapted Gatsby as a graphic novel in 2021. Katharine, as she is known off the page, discussed her adaptation’s genesis and how the book (which is gorgeous!) has been used in classrooms to encourage interest in Fitzgerald’s original.
A plenary organized by Mel Barker and Stu Wilson (directors of our 2017 conference in St. Paul) featuring Ann Donahoe, the granddaughter of Fitzgerald’s childhood friend, Charles “Sap” Donahoe. Thanks to this panel—“A Friendship Like No Other”—attendees enjoyed learning about the Montana influences that inspired another of Fitzgerald’s classic short stories, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.”
A special reading of Lorrie Kyle’s play Devotedly, With Dearest Love, an adaptation of the Fitzgeralds’ love letters, performed for only the second time ever. (The play’s first table read was at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference in Rockville, Maryland). This reading benefitted immeasurably from the talents of the Society’s resident thespian, Brooke di Spirito, who voiced Zelda and recruited one of her fellow NYC actors to play Scott. (More about Brooke in a second!).
A reception at the Irish Consulate, organized by Society member Brian Murphy, who has been a Fitzgerald stalwart since our Dublin/Waterford 2015 conference. With an amazing spread by the Consulate and a highly detailed, table-sized 3D-printed diorama of Gatsby’s mansion on loan from the Great Neck Public Library, the setting would have been a nice backdrop for conversation. Yet it was the program that really launched the festivities into hyperspace fun as conference director Anne Margaret Daniel interviewed her good friend and fellow Fitzgerald fan Jay McInerney of Bright Lights, Big City The “other Jay,” as he was known for the night, discussed his long-standing fixation with Fitzgerald, not to mention the many treasures in his Fitzgerald collection that he has built over the decades. It wasn’t his last appearance at the conference!
The Consulate event was followed by an immersive production of a Fitzgerald-styled revue performed by Brooke di Spirito and her theatrical company, The Sparrows. This unique production was staged at one of the few remaining speakeasies from the Jazz Age, the Back Room on Norfolk Street. The show drew a great deal from The Beautiful and Damned. For attendees who had never participated in immersive play before, the show captured the vibrancy and motion of the Roaring Twenties itself.
A bus excursion through Great Neck, organized by Society member Walter Raubicheck (still the only soul to have attended all seventeen Society conferences), Nilla Park, and Rob Burke. Nilla is the mother of Katharine Park, the youngest member ever of the Society who made a splash at the 2023 Växjö conference and soon after published her essay on Great Neck in the Fitzgerald Review, and she and her friend Rob were instrumental in getting us access to Merchant Marine Academy, the former estates of automobile magnate Walter P. Chrysler and fashion designer Henri Bendel, whose homes are part of the campus. But the highlight of the ride was a stop at 6 Gateway Drive, where more than 100 sweaty Fitzgerald fans crowded on the lawn of this private residence, whose occupants kindly didn’t call the police!
A subsequent keynote at the Inn at Great Neck featuring Society supporter Charles Scribner III, who signed copies of his memoir, Scribner: Five Generations in Publishing (2023), a history of the family firm that published Fitzgerald’s novels. Interviewed by Society board member Jennifer Nolan, Charlie (as we call him) regaled us with tales of his forebears’ experiences with writers as different as Edith Wharton, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, James Jones, and, of course, Scott Fitzgerald. Charlie is always gracious and giving with his time, and his conversation with Jennifer, accompanied by the much-appreciated air conditioning at the Inn, made for a delightful evening.
An amazing excerpt from Gatz performed by the Elevator Repair Service just for the Society, again organized by the inestimable Anne Margaret. The ERS, of course, dazzled the world in 2010 with its word-for-word performance of The Great Gatsby, an almost seven-hour production that the New York Times reviewer Ben Brantley rightly called a “work of singular imagination and intelligence,” one “reader’s gradual but unconditional seduction by a single, ravishing novel.” We owe a huge debt of gratitude to founder and artistic director John Collins and his castmates who gave their time and talents gratis for this once-in-a-lifetime experience.
As if that weren’t enough, Jay McInernery returned and after the ERS performance read from his novel-in-progress See You on the Other Side, which was still ten months away from publication at the time. (It hit bookstores this April 2026).
Needless to say, attendees were bedraggled by Saturday, but there was still one major event after the day’s many publications: a four-hour dinner cruise up and down the Hudson River (and around the Statue of Liberty). Hosted by World Yacht Events and managed by Steve Tanzman and Deisy Guayara, the evening of drinks, dining, and dancing was a suitably formal and fashionable fête for the Fitzgerald Society. If you ever want to take an NYC harbor cruise, we highly recommend World Yacht Events—Steve and Deisy were kind enough to come over from Hoboken, their usual port of departure, to pick us up at Pier 81 at the end of 41^st The closing was a bittersweet experience: at once a celebration of what we’d accomplished during the week, but also a recognition that most of us wouldn’t see each other for two more years.

This list of highlights doesn’t even begin to include the many marvelous presentations and papers delivered throughout the week. We should note that roughly forty percent of presenters were first-time Fitzgerald Society conference attendees, and that almost fifty percent of attendees were non-academics. As we previously noted, almost half of the forthcoming table of contents of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review features essays first presented in New York City.

NYC was, of course, a central inspiration to Fitzgerald’s writing. For much of the week conferees thought about Scott’s marvelous elegy to the metropolis, “My Lost City,” posthumously published in 1945. In this glimmering tribute, Fitzgerald meditates on the thrilling convergence of talent and genius the city hosts, but also the vanity and perspectival blindness that such magnificence eventuates, whether through landmarks like the Empire State Building or events such as 9-11. Like Fitzgerald, many of us looked around the city’s storied architecture, famous names and addresses, and its hustling, bustling energies, and like him we couldn’t help but see New York as a skyline of “white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish.”

“All built with a wish” is also a fitting description of “New York, New Perspectives, and The Great Gatsby” as well. A year later, we remain both elated and relieved that all our wishes for the week did indeed come true.

By the way…

NYC Commemorative Posters and T-Shirts Still Available!

Thanks to students at Troy University, the 17^th International Conference benefitted from some amazing artwork, in particular for our poster and T-shirt, which were both designed by the now-graduated Maddie Ashendorf. If you’ve worn out your shirt or lost your poster or even if—shhh!—you didn’t make it to New York last summer, never fear! We have several of both left. Please contact Kirk and he will happily send you an order. It will help free up space in his office! For the T-shirts, please let us know your size, too. Posters are only $10 and T-shirts a mere $20!