From PRX.

This is Studio 360. I'm Kurt Anderson.

If you close your eyes, you can almost picture the scene.

It's the swankiest party ever.

By 7 o'clock, the orchestra has arrived.

No thin five-piece affair, but a whole pit full of oboes and trombones and saxophones

and viols and corneets and picolos and low and high drums. The house glows from the outside.

You know that party.

Maybe you've seen it in a movie sometime.

Maybe you've read it in a book.

The bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails

hermiate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter,

and laughter and casual innuendo.

Or maybe you've been there.

I made an attempt to find my host, but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts

stared at me in such an amazed way

and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table,

the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.

The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, but the party scenes in the book aren't the only things

that still feel familiar.

In fact, this is a book that's familiar all over the world.

A few years ago, I was in Tanzania, in Africa, on the edge of the Serengeti.

...