In the last five years, I have had two students take exams with me on the subject of novels from the United States in the 1920s, with both lists including F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (1925) and Nella Larsen's "Passing" (1929). I had a number of vague hunches about the two novels that have led me to consider teaching them together in a course, but today, those hunches took concrete form with Wesley Lowery's recent article "Gatsby’s Secret", which presents the history of Carlyle V. Thompson's thesis, which he first published in 2000, that Fitzgerald's title character, like Clare Kendry in Larsen's novel, is a black person passing as white. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 May 2025)