When he first presented the idea to his students, they were skeptical, he says. Then they began to come around, or at least some of them did. "I told them, 'You're not here to agree with me, I'm just giving you another way to look at this text.' They get it because when you begin to add up all these connotative and denotative things, he's doing something very specific. He's setting up an analogy for Gatsby and blackness which we need to pay attention to. I think he is very caught up in the hysteria of the period around race."

In academia, reading a text in a new way is generally known as "problematizing" a text.

"It's the literary equivalent of the Rorschach blots. People just want to read into classics something original and new and totally divorced from the authors' intentions," says Charles Scribner III of Thompson's idea. His family's firm, Charles Scribner's Sons, was Fitzgerald's publisher. "I mean, it's ridiculous. There's nothing in Fitzgerald's documentation, in the drafts, in his letters back and forth to the editor, Max Perkins, that would give any credence to such an interpretation of 'The Great Gatsby.'"

Scribner, an editor at the Scribner imprint of Simon & Schuster, nevertheless sees an upside to the notion. "I suppose if it entices people to read this classic, it's all for the best. Look, this is bad history but it's not bad pedagogy. He can use the analogy to approach some of the themes of 'Gatsby' -- of the outsider trying to be an insider, of the self-invented man. But please don't claim that Fitzgerald intended this as the factual basis of his book."

Thompson remains unfazed by such criticism. "Bruccoli's career is invested in Gatsby being white. And a publisher is not a literary scholar," he says. "Toni Morrison laid the groundwork for this in 'Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.' She looks at Hemingway and Cather but not at Fitzgerald. People bring in new ideas. That is the way the world works."

Thompson situates the book within a racially charged historical context. He notes that "Gatsby" was published six years after the "bloody Red Hot Summer of 1919, when membership in the Ku Klux Klan -- a nativist group -- was at its peak ... In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act excluded immigrants of African descent from entry to the United States." He also identifies the correct title of the book that the character Tom Buchanan refers to as "'The Rise of the Colored Empires' by this man Goddard"; the actual text is "The Rising Tide of Color: Against White World-Supremacy," by eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, published in 1920.

But he doesn't cite the publisher. Which happens to be Fitzgerald's own Charles Scribner's Sons. When a reporter raises the point, Thompson says, "It's an interesting coincidence. Maybe it was a book they sent him."

But Fitzgerald knew he was a rebel author being published by a then-conservative house. It was something he got off on. And so the mention of the book, according to Bruccoli, "was an inside joke. He's teasing the people at Scribner. Here's Fitzgerald using their book to characterize his character as a fool, a dope, a man of limited intelligence. It was a way of Fitzgerald pulling the leg of his friends at 597 Fifth Ave."

Werner Sollors, a professor of Afro-American studies at Harvard University and author of "Neither Black Nor White Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature," reads Tom Buchanan's reasoning another way. "He sees himself 'standing alone on the last barrier of civilization' and philosophizes: 'Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they'll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white,'" Sollors says. "In the context of the way in which Tom Buchanan's own adherence to marital fidelity is portrayed, it would be difficult to view this as an authorial position on Fitzgerald's part. Buchanan's invoking of Lothrop Stoddard -- Walter Benn Michaels made the connection very emphatically in 'Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism' -- similarly casts a certain light on Tom himself."

Bruccoli has not read Thompson's paper, but asked whether the book could be considered a "passing narrative," which would place it alongside such works as "The House Behind the Cedars" by Charles Waddell Chesnutt and "The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man" by James Weldon Johnson, his answer is simple: "God no."

It was in 1997 that Thompson began his textual analysis of the book in earnest by turning to a concordance. There he discovered that the word "yellow" appears 22 times. He might have also noticed tallies of other colors -- gold (10), pink (6), green (17).

"It may get the chap tenure, and it may get him a promotion," says Bruccoli, who is Jefferies professor of English at the University of South Carolina. "Anybody in academia trying to get ahead deserves sympathy. It's a mug's game, an occupation in which the odds are against the people engaged in it. His idea is absurd, but I don't want to take the bread out of someone's mouth."

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