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The Great Gatsby is 100 years old this year, which feels right in a way. After all those years as a perennial mainstay of the American high school English curriculum, all those Gatsby-themed flapper parties, all those valiant but ham-fisted attempts to adapt it, we know the beats of it well: the parties, the glamour, the green lights, and the beautiful clothes. It might as well be a hundred.
On the other hand, there are parts of Gatsby that feel so fresh and modern that they could have been written yesterday. In our own moment, as the world’s richest man takes a hatchet to the federal government for sport, one of Gatsby’s most celebrated lines about the very wealthy feels resoundingly true: “They were careless people … They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
There’s something reassuring about knowing that Gatsby is the book we’ve chosen to put in classrooms and movie theaters, to make it one of those culture touchstones that everyone more or less knows at least a little.
But Gatsby did not become an immediate institution in American life, and we don’t know it as well as we think we do. Gatsby is a much more complicated book than its pop culture footprint suggests. It’s big enough to survive all those turgid high school essays about color symbolism and the American dream, all those drinking parties with girls in backwards headbands, all those mediocre movies and bad plays.
Here’s the story of how The Great Gatsby has endured — and why we keep misreading it.
How F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a masterpiece and became a legend
As laid out by Matthew J. Bruccoli in the definitive Fitzgerald biography, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, F. Scott Fitzgerald set out to fulfill his promise as one of the most promising novelists of his generation with The Great Gatsby in 1925.
His second book, 1922’s The Beautiful and Damned, had been considered a letdown. Readers agreed it was beautifully written, but felt nonetheless that it didn’t quite live up to the standard set in his acclaimed debut, This Side of Paradise. Critics began to wonder if Fitzgerald wasn’t a man “with a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.”
To write The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald drew upon his own experience as the rejected poor suitor to multiple rich girls. He was from a middle-class family, but the fancy boarding school education that led him to Princeton had him rubbing elbows with the wealthy.
In college Fitzgerald dated a society debutante, whose father warned him that “poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls.” When he courted his eventual wife Zelda, also a debutante from money, he was an unemployed and unpublished writer. Zelda refused to marry him until he had a source of income, and Fitzgerald responded by building his own legend as a handsome, romantic, hard-living celebrity novelist, gallivanting from party to party across New York City.
These events provide the loose skeleton of the plot of The Great Gatsby: Poor young James Gatz falls in love with the glamorous socialite Daisy, but doesn’t have enough money to marry her. Gatz spends the next five years pursuing various illicit money-making schemes until he is as wealthy as an emperor, transforming himself into the mythical figure of Jay Gatsby, a man he hopes will be rich and polished enough to win Daisy’s hand. What Gatsby doesn’t understand is that Daisy’s old-money breeding demands more than just vulgar, splashy wealth.
That last element of the story comes from Fitzgerald’s own ambivalence about wealth and what it did to people, and what he really thought about the old-money families he lived so closely beside.
“I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.”
“I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works,” Fitzgerald observed in 1938. He himself ran through his money as fast as he possibly could; he was well-paid for his work, but his debts piled higher and higher, and he kept having to write commercial short stories he thought were bad in order to maintain his extravagant lifestyle. Bruccoli reads Fitzgerald’s inability to manage his finances as an expression of his contempt for both money and those who had it: “If he could waste it,” Bruccoli writes, “then it didn’t own him.” If that was Fitzgerald’s thought, the idea didn’t exactly work out. “The inevitable result,” Bruccoli concludes, “was that he was in bondage to it after all because he had to earn the money he was squandering.”
Gatsby’s attitudes toward wealth are similarly ambivalent. Money is what generates Gatsby’s famous glitz and glamour, the parties full of jazz and cocktails and fireworks that sound so fun that people keep trying to replicate them a hundred years later. It is what makes Daisy, Gatsby’s lost love, so alluring: that her voice is “full of money.” Yet money is also what corrupts Daisy, what makes it possible for her to accidentally kill a poor woman and drive away from the accident without stopping. Money, in this novel, makes people careless.
Gatsby is a fraught, vexed book, all the more lovely because it is so ambivalent. When it came out in 1925, it was considered a masterpiece. T.S. Eliot called Gatsby “the first step American fiction has taken since Henry James.” It made Fitzgerald’s reputation.
It also arguably ruined his life. He spent the next nine years working to write a book that could be its equal, descending ever more inexorably into alcoholism as he did. He would publish two more novels — 1934’s Tender Is the Night and the posthumous The Love of the Last Tycoon in 1940 — but neither of them would be as celebrated as The Great Gatsby. As the Depression continued, Fitzgerald came to be dismissed as a relic of the boom time, a chronicler of the rich whose moment was long gone and whose continued alcoholism was all too apt a fate.
As Fitzgerald’s star faded, so too did Gatsby’s reputation. In the last month of his life, before he died in 1940 at the age of 44, Fitzgerald sold only seven copies of the book and made $13.13 in royalties.
Gatsby comes to the classroom
Like many great artists, Fitzgerald enjoyed a critical reappraisal almost as soon as he was dead. His publishers packaged the incomplete Love of the Last Tycoon with a reprint of The Great Gatsby, a canny move that reminded the literary world just how great Fitzgerald was at his best and primed the larger public to remember his name.
It took World War II for Gatsby to become an institution, when the US government began shipping small paperback editions of popular novels out to the troops for morale. Gatsby was one of the books chosen for the program, with 155,000 copies distributed across the armed services. Now, the book was not just well-regarded but also inescapable. It would take decades more, however, before Gatsby reached the place where most people meet it today: the classroom.
For a long time, American high school English classes didn’t teach much American literature. All the great stuff was by Europeans, the thinking went, and American literature was so simple and straightforward that it simply wasn’t worth teaching. The increased patriotism of World War II got more American novels into the classroom, but even then, they tended to be the authors of the so-called American Renaissance of the early 19th century: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau.
Over the course of the midcentury, however, American schools became invested in “new criticism,” a form of literary analysis that focuses on analyzing prose at the level of the sentence and the symbol rather than focusing on the social context in which a book was written. Schools also became more interested in giving their students books that felt newer and more relatable; perhaps even books written in the 20th century. The Great Gatsby presented itself as a solution to a number of these problems.
Gatsby is short and its sentences are straightforward and easy to read, making it less intimidating for teen readers than a brick like Moby-Dick. Its central theme is the inaccessibility of the American dream, which makes it nicely relevant to an American literature unit. And it is riddled with the kind of color symbolism that high school teachers love to point out: the green light that represents both lost love and money; the white dresses that suggest Daisy’s apparent purity; the looming blue eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, watching over everything like God in an advertisement. It is in many ways a perfect pedagogical text.
By 1993, The Great Gatsby was one of the top 10 most assigned books in high school English classes across the US, and it remains a mainstay of the high school curriculum.
Yet as time accumulates between us and Fitzgerald, his prose becomes harder for students to read, and some of the pure pleasures of Gatsby can disappear. It’s hard to graduate high school without having encountered Gatsby in some form or other, but if your sole focus as a student reader is on tracking every time the words red, white, and blue appear in the text, you might have less time to focus on the idea that wealth and class corrupt their owners. What students know most of all about The Great Gatsby now is that it certainly says something about the impossibility of the American dream, without necessarily knowing how scathing Fitzgerald’s treatment of that dream is — an ironic problem in our own era of broligarchs who love to move fast and break our things.
Seeing beyond Gatsby’s glitz
If many of us are missing the point of Gatsby when we sit in our English classrooms, most attempts to adapt the canonical book for the stage and screen also falter.
Most Gatsby adaptations — and in fact, much of our culture — is most interested in the part of the novel about partying in a flapper outfit: the glamour of the soirees, the kick of the cocktails, the silhouette of Gatsby in his tailored suits and Daisy dancing the Charleston with marceled curls. We tend to ignore what happens to Daisy and Gatsby after the glamour has been torn away from them, when they become shabby.
Since Gatsby entered the public domain in 2021, New York has hosted multiple theatrical adaptations. Both The Great Gatsby, a glitzy musical, and The Gatsby Experience, a Sleep-No-More-style immersive experience, played all of the love stories with a schmaltzy sentimentality that asks the audience to break its heart for not only Gatsby and Daisy but also for cynical, dubiously heterosexual Nick and Jordan. Then there’s Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which stages Gatsby as a hectic and hedonistic swirl of parties and violence.
Jack Clayton’s 1974 adaptation, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, comes closest to finding the balance, pitting dingy ’70s grays and a naturalistic camera against Redford at his most shiningly charismatic as Gatsby. Even Clayton, though, is defeated by the story’s sensational and highly symbolic ending, which defeats all attempts to shoot it straightforwardly.
The Gatsby adaptation that has moved me most, the one that is the best argument of Gatsby’s relevance, is the Elevator Repair Service Company’s Gatz, which played its final New York performance at the Public Theater last fall. Only Gatz seems to understand why we’ve kept reading Gatsby for so long, or at the very least, the best reason we have for continuing to read Gatsby for so long: because it is simply a very beautiful book.
Gatz strips away all of Gatsby’s spectacle. It takes place in an anonymous ’90s office with cigarette stains on the faux-wood paneling and cardboard bankers boxes littering the floor. One worker, unable to get his computer to boot up, happens upon an old copy of Gatsby stuffed in the back of a desk and begins to read.
It is more beautiful than pink linen suits, more beautiful than Lana Del Rey singing a sad song, more beautiful than a stage full of chorus girls in sequins and beads.
Over the course of the next eight hours, Gatz’s Nick reads the whole of Great Gatsby out loud, as his office brings the story to life around him. The desks get pushed together and pulled apart to become cars, tea tables, dance floors. Drunken revelers strew old paperwork around the place when they get rowdy. And Gatsby — well, Gatsby is as unglamorous as James Gatz was before he ever put on a white linen suit: a middle-aged middle manager with a bald spot in bad khakis.
Across this unprepossessing set, from these unassuming figures, Fitzgerald’s language rolls out in great golden tides, so beautiful as to overwhelm you. It is more beautiful than pink linen suits, more beautiful than Lana Del Rey singing a sad song, more beautiful than a stage full of chorus girls in sequins and beads. The gift Gatz gives you is simply to force you to sit still long enough for them to show you how beautiful The Great Gatsby is.
Gatsby has survived this long because of a series of accidents: because a paperback edition fit well into the pockets of soldiers during WWII, because it meshes nicely with the educational goals of the standard 11th-grade English syllabus, because it’s fun to film and stage all those Jazz Age party sequences. But Gatsby makes the best argument for its own continued relevance when we strip those circumstances and accidents away and allow the text, shining as bright as the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, to show us all what it can do.
