As an Irish immigrant in America, I find F. Scott Fitzgerald’s uneasiness about his Irish ethnicity illuminating, and it was central to my recent publication, Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History.Footnote ¹ My book traces the cultural and racial legacies of Irish presence in the Americas, from seventeenth-century transportees and eighteenth-century Presbyterian Scots Irish, to the Catholic poor who fled Ireland’s 1845–52 famine. Their afterlives are examined through diverse figures of Irish descent, from Andrew Jackson, Grace Kelly, and the Kennedys, to the Caribbean Irish Rihanna. Successive waves of the Irish were racialized as “not-quite-white” before “whitening” in multiple contexts: in the Caribbean, and on America’s frontiers, plantations, and eastern seaboard. In addition, I examine numerous Irish-connected writers, both Black and white, from Poe and James to Welty, Yerby, and, most especially, the Catholic Irish American Fitzgerald. The Irish brought violence and sectarianism from the disordered motherland, consequently becoming both colluders in and victims of oppression, a complexity replicated in Fitzgerald’s own patrilineal line and writing. Altogether, Fitzgerald’s Irishness is no mere happenstance, but central to his equivocations in depicting race.

The grappling with status and identity of Fitzgerald’s title character in The Great Gatsby (1925) reflects the author’s own ambivalence regarding his ancestry. Although I am most interested in Gatsby in relation to such questions, an awareness of the American racio-ethnic hierarchy suffuses all of Fitzgerald’s output. Keenly aware of the contested nature of Catholic Irish “whiteness” in his lifetime, in a 1933 missive to fellow Irish American author John O’Hara, Fitzgerald describes himself as “half black Irish.” This phrase signalled his cohort’s ambiguous placement within America’s complex of race, ethnicity, sectarianism, and class in an era in which the KKK still targeted Catholics. Fitzgerald toggled between the common Irish American aspiration to present as uncontestably white and querying the costs – to the Irish themselves and to others – of passing as WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). In 1927, Fitzgerald had referred to the ancestry that embarrassed him as being on his “potato-famine Irish” mother’s side alone. This is a carelessly incorrect phrase, since her family, who had left Ireland in 1842, could not possibly have been fleeing the 1845 catastrophe. At any rate, however, Fitzgerald associated his maternal ancestry with a stigmatized refugee wave. The question of his paternal line’s Irishness is yet more obscured.

Tenuously connected to the Maryland elite through his paternal grandfather’s marriage into the Anglo-American establishment Scott family, Fitzgerald overidentified with this one colonial-period English family line. However, Fitzgerald’s direct paternal line from Ireland can be traced back to late eighteenth-century Maryland, a fact neglected by critics and unincorporated into the author’s boasts regarding his deep roots in America. Fitzgerald’s father was raised in Maryland’s Montgomery County, a community in which, within living memory, even modest farming families were enslavers, a cultural milieu that contextualizes Edward Fitzgerald’s Confederate sympathies. (Indeed, and although they may not be direct ancestors of the celebrated novelist, the 1790 United States Census counts seven Montgomery County families named “Fitzgerald” or variants, some of whom held enslaved people.) Strikingly, Dick in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) is of eighteenth-century Irish settler colonial stock, a fact that has received no critical attention in an America that associates Irish ancestry solely with post-famine immigration.

In Fitzgerald’s fiction, the symbolic racialization caused by obscure origins or social decline is probed. Although Fitzgerald embraced contemporaneous Irish cultural nationalism and its “ethnic pride” boosting in his youth, a description in a 1917 letter to Edmund Wilson of being “Teutonic” on the outside but “Celt” within – Fitzgerald was fair-haired – suggests racial passing. Suppressed folk Catholicism haunts the ostensibly urbane and half-Irish Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise (1920): during a dissolute evening, Amory sees a strange man whose moccasins appear to conceal what are implied to be hooves. This is the devil of folklore, spotted at “sinful” card games or country dance halls in rural Catholic Ireland right into the 1950s. Fitzgerald’s story “Benediction” (published in the same year as Paradise) struggles with the suspicion that Irish American Catholicism was down-market and “off-white,” not just in comparison to the Protestantism that predominated at Princeton during the author’s years there, but even in comparison to Continental Catholicism.

Fitzgerald’s use of “Teutonic” in 1917 is only one of several code words for “uncontestably white” that his writing negotiates. In America, as Nell Irvin Painter has suggested, the terms “Saxon” or “Nordic” took hold with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English Traits (1856). That volume linked physical characteristics purportedly associated with Protestant Northern European ancestry (later labelled “WASP”) to moral, cultural, and political superiority. Emerson’s views naturalized white supremacy and dominated elite America’s fantasy of its origins and destiny for generations. Significantly, claims to “Nordic” ancestry excluded “off-white” non-Protestant Europeans as well as peoples of colour. It is no coincidence that English Traits was published in the wake of the destitute Catholic famine refugee influx with which Fitzgerlad associated his maternal line.

Fitzgerald’s 1922 novel The Beautiful and Damned tracks the deterioration of 1910s golden couple Anthony and Gloria Patch into disinheritance, pariah status, alcoholism, marital breakdown, and eventually racial demotion through the grafting on of “shanty” (slum) Irishness. At the outset, the couple is spectacularly white: Gloria is a “Nordic Ganymede,” and Anthony is the presumptive heir to a tycoon. However, an incident during Anthony’s World War I service marks a turning point in their fortunes. Returning to camp after curfew one night, he gives the false Gaelic Irish surname “Foley,” and subsequently becomes a shanty Irish stereotype: reduced in rank for the lie, he is ultimately found breaking curfew again in a drunken daze.

The differing social and racial meanings of brown skin, which depend on whether it is an inherent or temporary attribute, is particularly probed in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. Set in the Riviera as the new social practice of tanning skin to denote elite whiteness is being cemented, its repeated attention to the skin tones of both Black and white characters makes racial anxiety even more explicit than in Fitzgerald’s earlier novels. Dick names himself white (“Aryan”) when his social status is first threatened, and his use of racio-ethnic slurs referring to skin tone increases as that status declines, as Suzanne del Gizzo notes.

“Nordic,” a more circulated cognate of “Aryan” in America, particularly haunts The Great Gatsby, whose title character has been speculated to be Jewish or a light-skinned Black man “passing” as white (by Walter Benn Michaels and Carlyle van Thompson respectively). However, Gatsby’s ambiguity is ultimately rooted in Fitzgerald’s own racio-ethnic anxiety. Fitzgerald’s self-ascription as “Gael” in the same 1933 letter opens up not Irish but Gaelic (Scottish and Irish) identity in The Great Gatsby. In one of the novel’s most ambiguous moments, Tom Buchanan praises The Rise of the Coloured Empire, a fictional pseudoscientific book on the threat to the “white race.” “‘This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and –’ After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod.” In order to probe Buchanan’s pause regarding his wife’s ethno-racial status, we must return to her cousin Nick’s opening description of the specifics of his – and, we assume, her – Scottish ancestry.

Medieval Gaeldom spanned Ireland and Scotland’s Highlands and Western Isles, linking these regions culturally and linguistically. A further catastrophe that spanned the tattered remnants of this cultural zone was the potato blight that struck the Highlands in 1846 at about the same time as it did Ireland, the subsequent response to which was both coerced and voluntary emigration. The harshest of these displacements came in the 1840s and 1850s, at precisely the time Nick notes that a Carraway forebear leaves Scotland (1851). Thus one of the traumatic pasts into which characters in The Great Gatsby are “borne back ceaselessly” is that of famine-era Scotland. This pierces the assumption that cousins Nick and Daisy are the epitome of long-established privilege, and also muddies readings of the character of Gatsby alone as a working through of Fitzgerald’s anxiety regarding his background. Altogether, Carraway, of famine-era Scottish immigrant descent, better stands in for Fitzgerald than what turns out to be a title character of immigrant Lutheran German origin.

As someone who has recently published a book on race and Irishness that terminated with certain white Irish American responses to George Floyd, I am keenly aware that, in contrast to Fitzgerald’s lifetime, in contemporary America Irishness is sometimes put into the service of “white power” messaging. As such, it is urgent to uncover recognitions of past Irish “off-whiteness” in canonical Irish and Irish American writers of diverse racial, ethnic, and denominational origins. Considering contemporary Ireland’s racial heterogeneity, James Joyce’s creation of a Jewish Irishman in Ulysess (1922) was prophetic in asking whether Irish culture could create imaginative room for Irish citizens of minority identity. That novel was routinely referred to as the “Great Irish Novel” during its recent centenary year. For me, The Great Gatsby may be named the “Great Irish Diaspora Novel” because it, too, is concerned with the question of intersections of Irishness and race in the early twentieth century. The Great Gatsby audits a period in which Irish America was not as readily and uncomplicatedly “white” as it is in the lead-in to the novel’s centenary. In light of the loudness of Irish American conservative voices in fraught debates around race in America in recent years, 2025 may be an optimal time to remember that the Irish American Fitzgerald’s oeuvre repeatedly queries Irish whiteness.