Finding The Great Gatsby in Louisville

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Places & Travel, Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You might think of The Great Gatsby as a classic New York City novel – but the events that set off the action of the story actually take place somewhere else. In Louisville, Kentucky. It’s where Daisy and Gatsby first meet, and where Daisy marries Gatsby’s rival, Tom Buchanan (boo, hiss!) In today’s episode, we track down the footsteps of author F. Scott Fitzgerald, who spent two tumultuous months of his life near Louisville while stationed at an Army camp during WWI. And we’ll try to find the places that might have inspired his most famous work… Plus: Track down Fitzgerald’s footsteps in Louisville and find events related to the 100th birthday of the Great Gatsby. This episode was produced in partnership with Louisville Tourism.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Let's start at a wedding.
0:05.0	We're in a hotel ballroom, a very fancy hotel ballroom.
0:09.0	It's June in Kentucky, and it's swelteringly hot.
0:14.0	Maybe the windows are cracked open, but it is really, really stuffy in here.
0:24.5	The bride at this wedding is a local socialite.
0:28.7	The groom is rich, rich, rich.
0:35.4	The night before the wedding, he gifted her a string of pearls worth $350,000.
0:42.3	By the way, the year is 1919, so that's $350,000. By the way, the year is 1919, so that's $350,000. The pomp and circumstance is in full swing.
0:50.3	This may be the fanciest wedding this hotel, called the Mulbach, has ever seen.
0:57.4	Champagne is flowing.
0:58.4	People are mingling.
1:00.0	They're fanning themselves.
1:02.0	In fact, it is so hot that somebody faints.
1:06.2	But other than that small detail, this wedding goes off without a hitch. This is a scene from the novel
1:17.0	The Great Gatsby, but it's not one of the big parties the book is famous for, those over-the-top
1:23.1	roaring 20s, big Hampton's Mansion shindigs.
1:32.7	This party, this wedding happens almost in between the lines of the text.
1:34.7	It's just glanced at.
1:39.3	But it sets off the action of the entire story.
1:43.5	This is the wedding of Tom and Daisy Buchanan.
1:47.1	It's the wedding that basically ruins the life of our hero, Jay Gatsby, because he loves Daisy. And he spends the rest of the novel just trying to win her back.
1:56.4	The Great Gatsby is often thought of as an iconic New York City novel, which it is.
	...

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