Does ‘The Great Gatsby,’ 100 this week, owe a creative debt to New England?

Send questions or suggestions to the Starting Point team at startingpoint@globe.com. If you’d like the newsletter sent to your inbox, sign up here.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” published a century ago this week, is a — and maybe the — quintessential American novel.

Maureen Corrigan, a “Gatsby” expert at Georgetown University, still recounts one of her grad students dubbing Fitzgerald’s novel “the Sistine Chapel of American literature.” When I interviewed Corrigan years ago, she told me that “it does that magical thing of saying something big about America, and saying it in gorgeous, unforgettable language.”

Yet more than an American novel, “Gatsby” is a story of New York. The eponymous millionaire’s luxe parties unfold at a Long Island estate. The novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, works as a bond salesman in Manhattan. Film adaptations are set against its skyline; think Leonardo DiCaprio, as Gatsby, speeding in a yellow Rolls-Royce beneath elevated subway tracks in Baz Luhrmann’s poppy 2013 version. The novel’s few direct mentions of New England include Carraway’s discussion of attending Yale and an incidental reference to Boston.

But what if “Gatsby” owes more to the region — specifically the seaside town of Westport, Conn. — than meets the eye? That’s the contention of a pair of filmmakers who made a documentary about Fitzgerald’s formative stay in Westport and its influence on “Gatsby.” To mark its centennial, today’s newsletter delves into the novel’s New England connection.

Changing times

When Fitzgerald arrived in Westport in May of 1920, both he and it were entering new eras. He was newly married and on honeymoon with Zelda, a vivacious 19-year-old Alabaman who later became a writer as well. Westport, meanwhile, was leaving its agricultural roots behind and becoming a more industrialized, suburban enclave that parades of wealthy New Yorkers, Bostonians, and other city dwellers took the train to visit. Artists like the Fitzgeralds, priced out of more established communities like Greenwich, came too.

At the time, Westport was practically lawless. The town’s police had little interest in enforcing Prohibition and bootleggers smuggling Canadian liquor criss-crossed Long Island Sound. The Fitzgeralds drank heavily at speakeasies, skinny dipped, and partied on the beach. “It was a bit like the Wild West,” said Robert Steven Williams, a Westport resident and one of the filmmakers behind “Gatsby in Connecticut: The Untold Story,” a 2020 documentary.

The evidence

The documentary Williams made with Richard Webb, a local Westport historian, unfolds like a kind of literary detective yarn. It lays out clues that suggest the Fitzgeralds’ single summer there heavily influenced “Gatsby.”

The physical evidence includes the cottage the couple rented adjacent to a millionaire’s mansion, much as Carraway lives in a modest bungalow near Gatsby’s mansion in the novel. There’s also a car crash Zelda got into in Westport that echoes the climactic scene in “Gatsby” (though in Zelda’s case nobody was killed).

Other evidence is indirect but compelling. The Fitzgeralds’ Westport stay may have been a high point in their turbulent marriage, much as “Gatsby” revolves around a tragic love story. The town also recurs in their other writings. “The Beautiful and Damned,” which Fitzgerald started drafting in Westport, takes place in a fictionalized version of the town. Zelda’s only novel references events from that summer. “I think what they did was they mined these early memories that they had for all their work,” Webb said.

Some Fitzgerald experts aren’t fully convinced. Corrigan, the Georgetown scholar who also appears in the documentary, has told The New York Times that “Gatsby” composites “at least three landscapes,” including Long Island, where Fitzgerald also lived, and his birthplace of St. Paul, Minn.

Even the filmmakers acknowledge that the inspiration was probably partial. The Fitzgeralds’ party-throwing millionaire neighbor may have been “the first kernel of an idea of Gatsby,” Williams said. But “it’s a composite, and why shouldn’t it be? It’s fiction.”

A literary legacy

In some ways, the debate over the novel’s origins is a scholarly and aesthetic exercise. But Webb and Williams’s film has sparked growing interest in the Fitzgeralds’ Westport summer and its relationship to “Gatsby,” restoring a certain pride of place to the town.

Webb hosts walking tours in Westport that point out locales the literary couple visited. Nicole Carpenter, assistant director of the town history museum, is helping plan a “Gatsby”-themed garden party next month to mark the novel’s 100th year. The documentary, she said, “did make that history much more well-known within the community.”

The desire to lay claim to a slice of “Gatsby” also speaks to the universality of the themes — hedonism, excess, self-invention — that have helped it endure.

Fitzgerald wrote the novel in the midst of the Roaring Twenties, years before the Great Depression and a century before our own unequal, economically anxious times. Yet “he was already seeing that the gap between the haves and have-nots is big and that the American dream isn’t attainable for everybody,” Williams said. “It’s as relevant today as it was a hundred years ago.”

🧩 6 Across: Located | 🌧️ 42º A weather rollercoaster

Boston and Massachusetts

• Promoted: Pierre Terjanian, a longtime Museum of Fine Arts curator, will be its next CEO.
• Dover case: A jury convicted a doctor of voluntary manslaughter for strangling his wife after she allegedly struck him; it cleared him of murder charges.
• Stand-up friends: When a longtime member of Boston’s comedy scene got cancer, his fellow comedians pitched in to help.

Trump administration

• Trump’s agenda: House Republicans narrowly adopted a framework to cut taxes after GOP leaders promised holdouts that the final bill will also cut at least $1.5 trillion in spending. Now the party has to decide what to cut. (Politico)
• Rulings: A judge let the administration require undocumented people to register with the government. (AP) Another judge blocked it from ending legal protections for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans in the US. (CBS)
• Trump vs. higher ed: The administration, which withheld $400 million in funds from Columbia University, wants to use a legal arrangement called a consent decree to force the school to change its policies. (WSJ)
• War of words: Trump allies have repeatedly criticized Boston, the latest liberal city to become a target of conservative ire.
• Medical mystery? Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s health secretary, said his department would work to determine what causes autism. Kennedy has pushed the false claim that childhood vaccinations cause it. (AP)
• Reporting for duty: A Globe journalist spent a week trying to buy only American-made products, which tariffs won’t hit. It wasn’t easy.
• Defunded: Massachusetts’ African American history museum will lose nearly half a million dollars in federal money. According to the museum’s president, the administration said it “no longer serves the interest of the United States.”
• Internal dissent: Dozens of Democratic town committees urged Massachusetts’ congressional delegation to oust Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader who helped pass a GOP spending bill last month.

The Nation and the World

• NYC crash: A tour helicopter broke apart and crashed into the Hudson River, killing a family of Spanish tourists. (Gothamist)
• Nightclub collapse: Days after the roof of a nightclub in the Dominican Republic caved in, the death toll reached 221. (AP)
• Prisoner swap: Russia freed a Russian-American ballerina it had detained for donating to a Ukrainian aid charity. In exchange, the US released a Russian-German man accused of violating US sanctions over Russia’s war in Ukraine. (NPR)

By Teresa Hanafin

🗓️ The Ticket: There’s a play about economic inequality (featuring squirrels) in Chelsea, an Easter Egg Hunt and Family Fun Day in Canton, and lots more to do this weekend.

⬛️ Dystopia returns: Fans of sci-fi TV rejoice: Netflix’s mind-bending “Black Mirror” has returned for its seventh season. (USA Today) Here are more TV shows and movies to stream this weekend.

😇 Nice kids: Many researchers dismiss birth order as a personality factor. But a large-scale study found that middle children are the most honest, humble, and agreeable. I vehemently disagree. (PsyPost)

💘 Blind date: Two voracious readers met at this week’s Dinner with Cupid. But will they have a storybook ending?

🏄🏻 He’s just LeBron: The basketball great is the first professional male athlete to have his likeness depicted in a Ken doll. Sublime! (AP)

🥕 Time to plant: Divide the perennials, plant cold-weather veggies and annuals, and fertilize the lawn. It’s gardening season again.

🎬 Film review: There really isn’t anything new in “A Nice Indian Boy,” critic Odie Henderson writes. But the performances and sharp writing make this funny and charming romance worth seeing.

⚖️ Heavy losses: Weight-loss drugs and an aging customer base are crashing WeightWatchers. It’s reportedly considering bankruptcy. (Fast Company)

🤡 Circus capital of the world: In Montréal, clowns are sexy and performances are larger than life.

🎁 Read this if you’re feeling sorry for yourself: A Texas man with cancer, given fewer than 18 months to live, decided to use the time he has left to do community service — in all 50 states. (Guardian)

Thanks for reading Starting Point.

This newsletter was edited by Jennifer Peter and produced by Diamond Naga Siu and Ryan Orlecki.

❓ Have a question for the team? Email us at startingpoint@globe.com.

✍🏼 If someone sent you this newsletter, you can sign up for your own copy.

📬 Delivered Monday through Friday.

Ian Prasad Philbrick can be reached at ian.philbrick@globe.com.