What Light Was — A New Novel Illuminates the Origins of Gatsby and the Dreamers Behind It
The Great Gatsby . . . 100 years old?
And yet, here we are, in 2025, commemorating the centennial of one of the most indelible novels in the American literary canon—a book that remains just as provocative, poignant and painfully relevant as when it first arrived in 1925.
Gatsby’s world was one of dazzling wealth, youthful rebellion and sharp social divisions. The novel’s characters are young, hungry and restless in a rapidly changing America—one enthralled with modernity but uneasy about its consequences. The jazz, the cars, the flapper dresses, and the roaring parties paint a vivid scene, but beneath the glitz lies a novel of haunting questions: Who gets to live the American Dream? What illusions sustain us? And what happens when they shatter?
Set in the summer of 1922, on Long Island, and in a surging New York City, Fitzgerald’s vision captures a country reckoning with immigration, racial anxiety, gender roles and class conflict. In this way, Gatsby’s era feels disturbingly familiar to ours. Tom Buchanan’s bigotry, that he invokes with white supremacist pseudo-science in Chapter One, was not fictional. His fears reflected real post-WWI tensions amid waves of immigration and the rise of the “new woman,” as exemplified by Jordan Baker, the novel’s cool and competent golfer.
The Great Gatsby is our clearest literary exploration of class. Fitzgerald’s mythic geography—from old-money East Egg to aspirational West Egg, past the Valley of Ashes—invites us to trace the boundaries and brutal consequences of ambition. Fitzgerald called Gatsby “a story of aspiration,” but aspiration, in Gatsby’s case, leads not to triumph but to tragedy.
Ironically, the novel we now revere was hardly embraced in Fitzgerald’s lifetime. By his death in 1940, The Great Gatsby was out of print, and the unsold copies laid languishing in warehouses. But time has honored it. Today, the novel is read in nearly every American high school, and as book bans rise, it remains under fire—not despite its greatness, but because of it. All that bootlegging, infidelity and biting critique of meritocracy can still make people nervous.
And yet, few works offer as moving a reflection on “man’s search for something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
Centennial celebrations are now taking place globally, from New York, to Nice, to Naples—an outcome that would have surely stunned Fitzgerald. But, if we want to do Gatsby justice in 2025, let’s skip the flapper costumes, and, instead, let’s revisit the luminous, melancholic beauty of the novel itself. After all, few works have better captured the flickering promise—and peril—of America.
Review for What Light Was — A New Novel Illuminates the Origins of Gatsby and the Dreamers Behind It:
In honor of the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, a groundbreaking new novel arrives to reframe our understanding of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the age he defined, and the haunted beauty of creative ambition. What Light Was is a resonant and lyrical portrait of the Fitzgeralds—Scott and Zelda—and the larger-than-life Romantic ideals that lit their way and undid them in equal measure.
As two local Chattanooga authors, Shawn Hays and Stephen Hays, have coauthored this novel that dramatizes the writing process and creative struggle of F. Scott Fitzgerald in the making of The Great Gatsby. Rather than focusing solely on historical biography, the novel explores the emotional, artistic, and psychological challenges Fitzgerald faced as he brought this American classic to life. It’s both a tribute to Fitzgerald’s legacy and a creative exploration of what it means to write a great work of literature.
Told through inventive vignettes, letters, journals, and imagined dialogues, What Light Was takes readers on an intimate journey through Fitzgerald’s Europe—France and Italy in particular—where he wrestled with the manuscript that would become his masterwork. These pages are populated not only with the Fitzgeralds' emotional highs and lows, but also with the echoing influence of British Romantic poets like Shelley, Keats and Byron, whose legacies Scott both admired and mirrored.
What Light Was is not simply biographical fiction—it is a novel of soulful bravado. A “kitchen sink drama” of literary life, it dramatizes Scott and Zelda’s collapsing marriage, their creative struggles, and their spiritual dislocations in the aftermath of World War I. The story vacillates between the forward motion of their travels and the backward gaze of their reflections, constructing a dual timeline that asks hard questions: Can genius survive domesticity? Can love survive ambition?
Throughout, the novel draws striking parallels between the 1820s, the 1920s and the 2020s—each decade defined by upheaval, reinvention, and yearning. By threading personal loss with broader cultural anxieties, What Light Was reminds us that the dreams of yesterday still burn through the present.
This novel is for anyone who has ever loved The Great Gatsby, or who has wondered at the cost of greatness, the loneliness of fame, and the redemptive, reckless beauty of writing as salvation. With its musical language and philosophical urgency, What Light Was is not only a tribute to Fitzgerald’s life and work—it is a quarrel for the soul of art in an age of distraction.
As Gatsby reaches his centennial, What Light Was offers readers a new lens: not just on the green light that lured Gatsby forward, but on the writer who imagined that light—and lived, briefly, by it.
What Light Was is available on Amazon.