It's 2022 now, and Jay Gatsby lived and died 100 years ago. I first read F.
Scott Fitzgerald's classic _The Great Gatsby_ in high school, right before the
2013 film with Leonardo DiCaprio came out. It was one of the few "school books"
that my friends and I were actually really into. It was fun having the film
trailers to help visualize what we were reading. As a car guy, one of the
attractions of the story was the time period and, more specifically, its cars.
The characters drive a variety of classics from the early teens and twenties.
Gatsby's car plays an important role in the plot (which I won't spoil but come
on, it's only been around longer than you or I have). But I find the car's
description and its recreation in film over the years to be wildly different and
fascinating. So let's take a closer look at Gatsby's ride.
This is what Fitzgerald has to say about Gatsby's car:
> I'd seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright with
> nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant
> hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of
> windshields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of
> glass in a sort of green leather conservatory we started to town.
> 'It was a yellow car,' he said, 'big yellow car. New... No, but the car passed
> me down the road, going faster'n forty. Going fifty, sixty.'
There's not much more to go on except the color is repeated a few times. What an
awesome description. And it's exactly what you'd expect from cars of the rich
and famous from the early to mid twenties: nickel plating, multiple windshields,
probably open-air, lots of accessory boxes, and Gatsby's trademark flamboyant
colors. And it's fast (your typical Model T Ford topped out at about 40-45 MPH).
