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The Great Gatsby and other BBC Radio readings

The F Scott Fitzgerald BBC Radio Collection

The collected BBC Radio 4 readings of novels, novellas and short stories by F Scott Fitzgerald

A collection of radio readings of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction – plus two bonus programmes 
 
Over the years the BBC has broadcast readings of many of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, novellas and short stories. This collection includes some of his most famous works alongside various lesser-known tales, including three ‘lost stories’ (first published in 2017 and with an introduction written by editor Anne Margaret Daniel). 
 
Contents and track listing: 
 Track 1-10 - The Great Gatsby - read by Sam Robards 
 Track 11 - The Diamond as Big as the Ritz - read by Garrick Hagon 
 Track 12-31 - Tender is the Night - read by Kenneth Haigh 
 Track 32-34 - Babylon Revisited - read by Stuart Milligan 
 Track 35-36 - The Sensible Thing - read by Stuart Milligan 
 Track 37 - Bernice Bobs Her Hair - read by Laurel Lefkow 
 Track 38 - Financing Finnegan - read by John Sharian 
 Track 39 - The Smilers - read by John Sharian 
 Track 40 - An Alcoholic Case - read by John Sharian 
 Track 41 - Three Hours Between Planes - read by John Sharian 
 Track 42 - Pat Hobby’s Secret - read by Ed Bishop 
 Track 43 - Pat Hobby: Teamed with Genius - read by Ed Bishop 
 Track 44 - Pat Hobby and Orson Welles - read by Ed Bishop 
 Track 45 - Pat Hobby: The Homes of the Stars - read by Ed Bishop 
 Track 46-47 - Thank You for the Light - read by Karen Bartke, with an introduction read by Laurel Lefkow 
 Track 48 - The Couple - read by Finn den Hertog 
 Track 49 - Salute to Lucy and Elsie - read by Stuart Milligan 
 
 Also included are The Great Gatsby Letters(Track 50), in which F. Scott Fitzgerald tells his editor about his hopes and fears for his new novel, and The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald(Track 51), featuring Ed Bishop and Sarah Keller as Fitzgerald and Zelda. 
 
Please note: some of the language in this recording reflects the era in which it was first broadcast.

The Beautiful and Damned

A captivating and glamorous tale of squandered talent that defined 'The Lost Generation' of 1920s New York

The Jazz Age chronicler's first great novel

No one has written more elegiacally about America than F. Scott Fitzgerald...a sense of lost time and the irretrievability of the past gave much of his work - indeed, his life - an ineradicable undertone of mourning

If Francis Scott Fitzgerald had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent him. Seldom has there been a character who personified, as well as chronicled, an age with such dexterity and verisimilitude

None was more beautiful, none more damned, than Fitzgerald himself

Anthony Patch and Gloria Gibson are the golden children of the Jazz Age. They marry and embark on a life of glittering parties, lavish expenditure and scandalous revelry. When the money dries up their marriage founders. In this wistful novel Fitzgerald portrays the decline of youthful promise with devastating clarity.

Tender is the Night

A heartbreaking American masterpiece of the 'Roaring Twenties' by the author of The Great Gatsby

For Fitzgerald desolation is a precondition of the lyrical. Hence the most distinctive impression of Tender: a beautiful novel about failure

It is one of those books that you read and feel a shift...the story is told so poetically and eloquently. It is one of those books that you read and think: if I could only remember that sentence - it is so beautiful

No one has written more elegiacally about America... Fitzgerald, like his revered Keats, was a compulsive nostalgic, locating happiness in the search for sensation rather than in its realisation; in the dream of desire, not in its fulfilment

In just a snatch of dialogue or a few lines of description, Fitzgerald can evoke the happy, troubled and perilous balance of a group of friends... He has an acute eye and ear for the nuances of character... an exquisitely crafted piece of fiction

**AS SEEN ON WRITE AROUND THE WORLD WITH RICHARD E GRANT** 
 
It is the French Riviera in the 1920s. Nicole and Dick Diver are a wealthy, elegant, magnetic couple. A coterie of admirers are drawn to them, none more so than the blooming young starlet Rosemary Hoyt. When Rosemary falls for Dick, the Diver's calculated perfection begins to crack. As dark truths emerge, Fitzgerald shows both the disintegration of a marriage and the failure of idealism. Tender is the Night is as sad as it is beautiful.

This Side Of Paradise

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, written when the author was twenty-four, appeared in 1920 and immediately established him as a leading literary figure in the brilliant and dangerous world of 1920s America. The novel tells the story of a spoilt child in search of happiness. Pampered as a child, wealthy, brilliant at school, Amory Blaine looks for the love of others but only finds himself. A short, sharp masterpiece with an intriguing religious undertow, this is also a touchingly autobiographical novel which reflects ominously on Fitzgerald's own future.

The Great Gatsby

A classic, perhaps the supreme American novel

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted "gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession," it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s. 
Young, handsome and fabulously rich, Jay Gatsby is the bright star of the Jazz Age, but as writer Nick Carraway is drawn into the decadent orbit of his Long Island mansion, where the party never seems to end, he finds himself faced by the mystery of Gatsby's origins and desires.

F Scott Fitzgerald

'In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars' 
 
The world and his mistress are at Jay Gatsby's party. But Gatsby stands apart from the crowd, isolated by a secret longing. In between sips of champagne his guests speculate about their mysterious host. Some say he's a bootlegger. Others swear he was a German spy during the war. They lean in and whisper 'he killed a man once'. Just where is Gatsby from and what is the obsession that drives him? 
 
VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.

F Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby

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