Celebrate 'Great Gatsby' Author at Fitzgerald Literary Fest

Celebrate the classic American novel “The Great Gatsby,” its author and literature this weekend at Rockville’s annual F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival.

Co-sponsored by the City of Rockville and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference, Inc., the event honors the works of Fitzgerald and those of prominent American literary artists; and supports aspiring writers and students interested in the literary arts.

The centerpiece of the Literary Festival is the presentation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature to a prominent American writer. The 2015 recipient is Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Ford, a Mississippi novelist and short story writer who in 1996 won the Pulitzer and the PEN/William Faulkner Award for “Independence Day.”

Find the full festival schedule here.

The day’s activities include a bus tour of Fitzgerald haunts in the city where he is buried; writing workshops for fiction and non-fiction writers; and literary discussions and panels designed for book lovers who are not themselves writers; along with a reading by Ford.

The Festival will be held Saturday, Oct. 10, at the Rockville Best Western Plus Hotel, 1251 W. Montgomery Ave., in partnership with the Writer’s Center in Bethesda and the Friends of the Library, Montgomery County.

On Friday evening, Oct. 9, the Writer’s Center will host “Readings in Tribute to Richard Ford,” in which writers Robert Olen Butler, Jeffrey Eugenides, Howard Norman, and Susan Richards Shreve will read from their work.