‘The Great Gatsby’ at One Hundred

This year’s hundredth anniversary of the publication The Great Gatsby has generated an avalanche of praise for what many consider to be a singular American classic. Before writing The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald had published two bestselling novels, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), and was heralded as the voice of his generation. Although some, such as T. S. Eliot, recognized the new novel’s importance, sales were disappointing, and Gatsby faded from the cultural landscape until it was reissued as a paperback and given to G.I.s during World War II. Attracting increasing critical attention, it became a staple in high-school English classes in the 1950s and ’60s. Holden Caulfield’s affection for, and identification with, Gatsby in The Catcher in the Rye (“I was crazy about The Great Gatsby. Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me.”) conferred an undeniable imprimatur on Fitzgerald’s mysterious protagonist. A million high-school and college essays have been written on the meaning of the beckoning green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s Long Island dock. Gatsby’s tragic fate became an allegory of the paradoxes of the American Dream, the romantic longing—“the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us”—that somehow propels our appetites and ambitions.