I took a break from daily prose to finish my preparations for the new semester, which started on Monday. Along with writing classes, I'm teaching an undergraduate seminar on "Passing in Fiction", with four novels from the the 1920s and 1930s that I have not taught before: Nella Larsen, "Passing" (1929), Fannie Hurst, "Imitation of Life" (1933), Jessie Redmon Fauset, "Plum Bun" (1928), and F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby" (1925). I have long linked "Passing" and "The Great Gatsby" as novels on "the American Dream", but Caryle Van Thompson's argument that Jay Gatsby is a mulatto passing as white led me to put this course together to finally teach them. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 18 September 2026)