The News
The Great Gatsby’s 100th anniversary has sparked renewed reflection on what is considered one of the greatest American novels.
Described by Vox as “all the more lovely because it is so ambivalent,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic tale of Jazz Age decadence gained early popularity from “a series of accidents” — a pocket-size edition for WWII soldiers and, later, its patent suitability for high school syllabi.
But Gatsby shines, the Financial Times noted, in its critique of “unaccountable elites” who, Fitzgerald wrote, “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.”
A chronicle of decline, Gatsby is also “an elegy for a dream” that nonetheless endures — containing, therein, “an image of human hope as luminous and flickering as the green light itself.”