‘The Great Gatsby' is a classic. But a century ago, it flopped.

Washington Post

09-04-2025

F. Scott Fitzgerald would be flabbergasted to hear that on the 100th anniversary of its publication, 'The Great Gatsby' is being celebrated around the world. Fitzgerald knew that he had written a great novel, but at the time of his death in 1940 at the age of 44, he also knew that pretty much nobody was reading it.
Eight months before he died, Fitzgerald pleaded with his editor at Scribner's, the legendary Maxwell Perkins, to promote the book. 'Would a popular reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of its admirers — I can maybe pick one — make it a favorite with class rooms, profs, lovers of English prose — anybody,' he asked in a letter.
The resurrection of 'The Great Gatsby' began almost immediately after Fitzgerald's death, when influential literary friends like Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson and Dorothy Parker pushed for reissues of his work. Wilson, who had been a year ahead of Fitzgerald at Princeton, edited his friend's uncompleted fifth novel, 'The Last Tycoon,' which was published in 1941. World War II gave 'Gatsby' a huge boost, when 155,000 copies of the novel were published by the Armed Services Editions as pulp paperbacks. Designed to fit in service members' pockets, the books were distributed to soldiers and sailors serving overseas. After the war, the paperback revolution swept up 'Gatsby' (Bantam brought out an edition in 1946), and the novel was dramatized on early TV shows like CBS's 'Playhouse 90.' By the late 1960s, 'Gatsby' was well on its way to becoming required reading in high schools and colleges across the land, thus generating hundreds of thousands of essays on 'The Symbolism of the Green Light.'
For a man who famously declared that such things didn't exist, Fitzgerald and his novel have enjoyed one of the most miraculous of all second acts in American life.
It's one thing to trace how Gatsby was rescued from the dustbin of history; it's another to fathom the mystery of why. What did some G.I. who picked up 'The Great Gatsby' in 1945 see in the novel that most of the smarties who reviewed it in 1925 missed? 'F. Scott Fitzgerald's Latest a Dud' was the headline of the review in the New York World.
When my own book on Gatsby came out in 2014, I received a letter from one of those early second-wave readers, who identified himself as a 'young paratrooper in 1945.' The letter writer recalled that he first encountered Gatsby in an Armed Services Edition and, referring to the title character, said, 'I knew right away I was in the presence of a great man.' But why? What makes 'The Great Gatsby' — the novel and its main character — so great? Why does the story haunt so many of us readers, just as Gatsby himself haunts Nick Carraway?
For the sake of pithiness, I'll answer that Question-as-Big-as-the-Ritz with the help of two quotes: one from the Italian writer Italo Calvino; the other from a former graduate student of mine.
Here's how Calvino defined a classic: 'A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.' Yes, that's right: 'The Great Gatsby,' like all great art, is inexhaustible, bottomless, still talking to its time and to ours. The central events of the novel take place during the summer of 1922. The story is set on Long Island ('that slender riotous island') and in New York City, and the novel's restless excursions into the city make 'Gatsby' the first Great American Urban Novel. (In contrast, Huck and Ahab are out there on the wide-open waters of the Mississippi and the Briny Deep, respectively.)
And what a city New York was in 1922, when Fitzgerald patronized its bookstores, breakfast cafeterias and speakeasies. It was a center of modernity (skyscrapers! radio!) and a testing ground for democracy in its crowded streets. A second great wave of immigrants, largely from Europe, was being uneasily absorbed into the existing population, as were Black people internally migrating from Southern farmlands to Northern cities after World War I. 'The white race will be — will be utterly submerged,' huffs Tom Buchanan, Fitzgerald's embodiment of a dinner party eugenicist, who gives voice to the racist and nativist anxieties of the 1920s and anticipates those of our own time. Whether or not the promise of America is truly extended to everyone — think of those Valley of Ashes dwellers bypassed by the novel's fancy roadsters and commuter trains — is one of the animating and eternally relevant concerns of the novel.
I haven't forgotten that second quote, which captures the peculiar magic of 'The Great Gatsby.' Years ago, a graduate student who was reading it with me came into my office, sat down and declared: 'It's the Sistine Chapel of literature in 185 pages.' I locked eyes with him and asked, 'Can I quote you?' And I've been quoting him ever since. 'Gatsby' tells us that the American Dream is elusive — perhaps even a mirage — but it does so in language so gorgeous, it makes that dream irresistible.
Fitzgerald said the novel was about 'aspiration,' and he himself never stopped aspiring for perfection in its composition. Princeton's Firestone Library has Fitzgerald's copy of the first printing of the first edition. I've had the privilege of paging through it. Everywhere, Fitzgerald has made changes in pencil after the novel has already been published. Had he lived longer, he probably never would have stopped tweaking.
Fitzgerald's own literary aspiration produced a masterpiece; aspiration, 'The Great Gatsby' insists, is also the quality that distinguishes us as Americans. Listen to the enigmatic last words of novel, so resonant at this moment in our country, when our aspirations are both graceful and grotesque, elevated and avaricious:
'Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. … So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'
Gatsby is about reaching, striving, even though we know, inevitably, we'll fall short. No one has ever captured the yearning — not for who we are, but for who we want to be as Americans — in such a powerhouse amalgam of poetry, slang and oracular prose. We beat on and, thankfully, so does 'The Great Gatsby.'
Maureen Corrigan is the author of 'So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.' She is the book critic for 'Fresh Air' and an English professor at Georgetown University.