Summer Reading

For decades, summer reading and school year syllabi have included The Great Gatsby, and James Sheridan’s AP English Literature class at Houston’s YES Prep East End Secondary is no exception. This spring, however, his personal experience with the text will far eclipse anything his students could Google related to the novel, the film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, or the Tony-award winning Broadway musical.

“I designed this fellowship because I want The Great Gatsby‘s world to have a conversation with the 2024 world of my students,” James explained.  “I want them to feel the ways that the book and its often-doomed characters can connect with and reflect their own life experiences (and those of their families).”

Yes Prep East End Secondary is situated in the working-class East End neighborhood, in near-view of the city’s ship channel and industrial port — the busiest in the United States.  It is an area rich in history from the founding of Houston to a vital role in the Texas Revolution.  It is also crisscrossed with freight trains carrying goods from all over, often resulting in stopped trains.  Some people claim that more trains stop here than anywhere else in the country! However, only a few miles away from their neighborhood are, figuratively, our Houston versions of West and East Egg, containing very wealthy communities, downtown arenas for Houston’s professional basketball and baseball teams, and a world-class museum district and medical center. In other words, James’s students navigate a complicated landscape of working-class realities as well as stunning wealth. Just like Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby.

That landscape came to life in June, as James set off with his wife and two children to document the context and characters described in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel.

“Driving in through some dense traffic on a Tuesday morning, we recreated Nick and Gatsby’s famous drive into the city in Chapter 4, the drive featuring Gatsby’s tales of his life, his Montenegro medals, and Earl of Doncaster photo. Nick states, “Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money.” It is impossible to disagree with the transfixing nature of such an entrance to one of the greatest cities in the world! Many of the key scenes in the novel happen in New York City: Gatsby and Nick’s lunch with the gangster in Chapter 4 as well as the Chapter 7 Plaza Hotel showdown.”

During my fellowship, each day coincided with a chapter as best I could make it.  For Part 1, we drove the length of Long Island, passing The Hamptons only a few days after President Biden fundraised there and a few weeks after the latest celebrity drunk driving scandal.  At Montauk, where the bay meets the ocean, it was a perfect spot to reflect on the role of water in the novel and Nick’s final reflections on Gatsby and what it all meant.  Instead of a green light, there is a stunning lighthouse commissioned by George Washington.  Then, we toured the Gatsby-esque, Gatsby-era Oheka Castle , finding modern day concordances that would have delighted Gatsby!  (If having a Taylor Swift video filmed at your mansion is not the height of social cache, I don’t know what is!) 

Next, we explored Port Washington and Great Neck, models for the fictional East & West Egg, driving past glittering mansions that offered small glimpses of Manhasset Bay.  Included in our journey was a pilgrimage to the home that Scott and Zelda rented in 1922 where he started writing the novel.  Finally, we found a marvelous spot to get ice cream and watch the sunset over the water before driving over the Queensboro Bridge, just like Nick and Gatsby, into Manhattan before heading home.

• – Nick’s NYC arrival in Chapter 1 and Gatsby’s post-war wanderings, Chapter 9
• – Bootlegging and Baseball – Sites associated with the 1919 World Series fix, Chapter 4
• – Old Money and Power Structures, locations including the Plaza Hotel, Chapters 1, 6 and 7
• – How the Other Half Lives – The Tenement Museum and walking tours of neighborhoods, Chapter 1, 2, & 6, as well as exploring Ellis Island
• – Absent Voices – research of voices of color, women, and the working class who create the background texture of the novel, but slide by invisible to the reader
• – Glamour and Glitter – Seeing the current Broadway sensation, The Great Gatsby!

“Driving through Great Neck, Long Island, we saw the roads that Scott and Zelda undoubtedly drove down in the 1920’s, with gorgeous skylines peeking out from behind mansions and dense trees. There was even a Gatsby Lane in the Kings Point neighborhood, but true to form, it was a false front: created as a marketing tool, no doubt, and not authentic to the time period. The views across the bay are all private ones or in parks that require proof of residence, very exclusive. And stopping at a diner for dinner, we saw myriad Gatsby references and maps that show off the Eggs (Gatsby and Nick’s West Egg = Great Neck, Kings Point; Daisy and Tom’s East Egg = Port Washington, Manor Haven, Sands Point).”

With new artifacts and insights, James intends to create content using a student-friendly Instagram account as well as QR codes for students to access after reading each chapter. The Instagram account is already receiving comments from people who know the world and location of the Gatsby story, adding further insight and authenticity to a living, relevant study of the novel.  Ultimately, students will create videos and written reflections about essential questions and places in their own lives.

“I am grateful to Fund for Teachers for supporting this journey into the heart of the novel, the 1920’s, and all the modern-day concordances!” said James. “I feel a sharp sense of geography and place as well as numerous ways to link 2024 and 1922 because of this work…I will part with Fitzgerald’s closing sentence to the novel: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  As Fitzgerald wisely knew, the pull of the past is always compelling; it is always part of what makes us human.

James T. Sheridan is an AP English Literature instructor and Course Facilitator at YES Prep East End Secondary School in Houston, Texas. He was a 2000 Houston Teach For America Corps Member whose 24-year teaching career has taken him from Houston to Philadelphia and back. He has been honored as a 2012 Kinder Award Winner for Excellence in Teaching, a Finalist for the 2015 Fishman Prize for Excellence in Teaching, and a 2015 Teach For America Alumni Award Winner for Excellence in Teaching.