It’s ironic that, a hundred years after its publication, The Great Gatsby has become a cultural touchstone for reasons that F Scott Fitzgerald might not have entirely agreed with. Initially, however, most reviewers weren’t impressed. “F Scott Fitzgerald’s Latest a Dud”, proclaimed the New York World in 1925. Others echoed this sentiment: “We are quite convinced after reading The Great Gatsby that Mr Fitzgerald is not one of the great American writers of today.”
Though TS Eliot wrote to exclaim that the book was “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.” Fitzgerald went to his lonely death in 1940, believing that The Great Gatsby had failed to make an impact. Today, his exploration of the American Dream has a magnetic resonance, inspiring novels, movies and plays and shaping portrayals of the rich and famous.
The vision of the novel
Gatsby’s fortunes rose when the US military chose it as one of the titles to be distributed to soldiers during World War Two, in a special edition of more than 150,000 copies. Over the decades, it became a fixture in American classrooms, bookstores, and libraries. Readers grew to appreciate Fitzgerald’s vision of the novel, which he outlined in a letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins: “I want to write something new, something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.”
Film adaptations have played a key role in shaping modern perceptions of The Great Gatsby, particularly Jack Clayton’s 1974 version starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow and Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 style-over-substance rendition featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. Taking a cue from Gatsby on screen, and from the Jazz Age in general, fashion houses from Ralph Lauren to Prada have come up with Gatsby-inspired couture, and musicians from Jay-Z to Lana Del Rey have composed tracks dealing with wealth, luxury, and romance.
Taylor Swift, too, is reportedly a fan. “Feeling so Gatsby for that whole year,” she sings in “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things”, a track that starts with big parties, jumping into a pool from a balcony, and a sea of champagne. Restaurateurs, among others, have readily embraced these connotations of status. In India, for instance, you can walk into a Gatsby’s Bar in Mumbai, a Gatsby in Bengaluru, and a Gatsby Kitchen & Bar in New Delhi. Also on offer worldwide are Gatsby hair styling products, Gatsby chocolates and, oddly enough, a Gatsby open-source website generator.
The novel’s themes often get lost in the glitter. As Sarah Churchwell observes, impressions of Gatsby’s “extravagant spree” have clouded the book’s actual intent. Maxwell Perkins understood this well. In a letter to a disappointed reader, he explained that Fitzgerald was prompted to write the novel “by surveying the tragic situation of many people because of the utter confusion of ideals into which they have fallen, with the result that they cannot distinguish the good from the bad”. Materialism 1, idealism, 0.
Material enterprise vs moral achievement
Fitzgerald conceived Gatsby, Perkins wrote, as someone “who was following an evil course without being aware of it, and indeed was altogether a worshipper of wholly false gods”. He was “a deliberate law-breaker, who thought that the accumulation of vast wealth by any means at all was an admirable thing, and yet could have many fine qualities of character”. More American Nightmare than American Dream.
The novel is acute in its portrayal of class barriers. For critic Maureen Corrigan, an unabashed admirer, its central question is whether “all our frantic effort is noble or wasted – whether, in short, meritocracy really exists in America”. That apart, she points out that if you want to subject The Great Gatsby to a political purity test, it flunks: “Anti-Semitic? Check. Racist? Check. Nativist? Check.”
Feminist critiques also often highlight the novel's somewhat shallow depiction of women characters such as Daisy and Myrtle as objects of male desire, with limited agency. In a pleasing corrective, a recent theatrical adaptation from London’s Scar Theatre Company features the character of Jay Gatsby played by a woman, challenging the book’s gender dynamics.
For some readers, Fitzgerald’s lush prose – partly inspired by Keats, his favourite poet – can be overwhelming, especially in an era that sadly favours a so-called plain style. Despite such issues, The Great Gatsby remains relevant because it dissects, as Churchwell says, a society “that has confused material enterprise with moral achievement”.
It’s a story about the dark side of dreams and their impact on the lives of the ordinary, the beautiful, and the damned. People die, illusions are shattered, and in the end, as Fitzgerald famously puts it, careless people smash things up and retreat “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”. Uncomfortably close to the behaviour of many nowadays.
Many of the novel’s other elements remain topical. The views of character Tom Buchanan on race, for instance, echo those of the right wing on immigration and the so-called “great replacement”. Its depiction of status also raises a mirror to social media personas and influencer culture. As Christopher Hitchens observed, “Fitzgerald sardonically foreshadowed the epoch of self-generating celebrity with the same skill he employed capturing the tone of the non-event”. Staged content and appearance over authenticity are central aspects of both the novel and today’s world.
Perhaps what would have pleased Fitzgerald the most is how his novel has influenced other authors. For Rebecca Makkai, “it’s a perfect, beautiful book”, and there are distinct echoes of it in Amor Towles’s Rules of Civility. Others have used it as a source text: Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful retells the story from the perspective of Jordan Baker, adding a touch of sorcery; Jillian Cantor’s Beautiful Little Fools also offers perspectives from Jordan as well as other female characters; and Michael Farris Smith’s Nick is a prequel about the earlier life of narrator Nick Carraway.
The theme of the trappings of wealth and what it does to people resonates worldwide. Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians can be read as an Asian version of The Great Gatsby, with opulent parties and the dynamics of old and new moneyed classes. Haruki Murakami, who has translated The Great Gatsby into Japanese, writes about “its scenes so fully realized, its evocations of sentiment so delicate, its language so layered”, and Korean-American author Min Jin Lee turns to Gatsby because “it gives me the sober wisdom to imagine and revise my own American dream”.
Economists, too, have been inspired by Fitzgerald: the Gatsby Curve, formulated by CUNY professor Miles Corak, demonstrates how higher inequality tends to result in lower social mobility. For Corak, the time and place of The Great Gatsby are like our own, with growing inequality, sharp divisions of status, and “the thwarted and corrupted personal goals they foster”. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
