She served as a juror for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and as a member of the advisory panel of The American Heritage Dictionary and an advisor to the National Endowment of the Arts "Big Read" project.

[7] Corrigan investigates what makes F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby so captivating and influential, through "archives, high school classrooms, and even out onto the Long Island Sound, to explore the novel's hidden depths, a journey whose revelations include Gatsby's surprising debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its rocky path to recognition as a "classic," and its profound commentaries on the national themes of race, class, and gender.

"[8] Corrigan pinpoints restlessness as a quintessential American quality, one she perceives in Fitzgerald's knowing depiction of New York City, the great mecca for dreamers with its promise of freedom, new identities, success, and "unsentimental sex."

She explains why she considers The Great Gatsby to be "America's greatest novel about class" as well as the vanquishing of God and the worship of idols in the aftermath of World War I, the fantasy that one can truly reinvent one's self, the grandeur of longing, and the spell of illusion.

[10] The main focus of the book, however, is on the first extreme adventure tales, and Corrigan observes that narratives themed around female suffering are today breaking with a millennia-old tradition.