How “Gatsby” Became A Literary Institution

In the spring of 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald was worried about “The Great Gatsby.” It had been fifteen years since the novel was published, and the author had little to show for it. “My God I am a forgotten man,” Fitzgerald wrote to his wife, Zelda. “Gatsby had to be taken out of the Modern Library because it didn’t sell, which was a blow.” Two months later, in a letter to Maxwell Perkins, his longtime editor at Scribner’s, Fitzgerald wondered whether a cheap paperback reprint might “keep Gatsby in the public eye” and “make it a favorite with class rooms, profs, lovers of English prose—anybody.” Still, his hopes were dim. “Or is the book unpopular?” he asked Perkins. “Has it had its chance?” Seven months later, Fitzgerald was dead. “Gatsby,” it turned out, was not.

In the century since its début, in April, 1925, “Gatsby” has been adapted for film at least five times; mounted on the stage, with and without musical numbers; and even turned into a video game, in the style of Super Mario Bros. As early as the nineteen-fifties, Scribner’s was selling more than thirty thousand copies each year, and by the end of the sixties that figure was closer to half a million. By some estimates, the total worldwide sales of the novel are now upward of thirty million copies. How did “Gatsby” grow so great, and why has it endured so long?

The answer is high-school English. More than any literary prize or celebrity book club, the school syllabus shapes American reading. This year alone, roughly seventeen million students will take their seats in a high-school-English classroom, and a great many of them will be sitting down to a copy of “The Great Gatsby.” For decades, Fitzgerald’s novel has been among the most frequently assigned texts in American secondary schools, and reading it—or, at least, pretending to have read it—has become a national rite of passage. But “Gatsby” ’s place in the high-school canon was hardly inevitable, its path to the classroom winding at best.

After Fitzgerald’s death, a wave of eulogies applauded the author, and at least a couple of them hailed his Jazz Age novel as a classic. But, though Fitzgerald’s death was good for “Gatsby,” what really made the difference was the Second World War. Beginning in 1942, a campaign was launched to equip American servicemen with essential “weapons in the war of ideas”—cheap paperback novels. The Council on Books in Wartime, a nonprofit made up of publishers, critics, booksellers, and librarians, worked to combat boredom and boost morale by distributing more than a hundred and twenty million books to U.S. troops overseas. The Armed Services Editions were tailored to fit inside a uniform pocket, with reinforced paper meant to last for at least six readings. In 1945, American soldiers were sent a hundred and fifty-five thousand copies of “The Great Gatsby,” making the novel a hit at last.

A few years later, in a teen-ager’s account of his older brother’s wartime service and taste in reading, “Gatsby” was cited as a particular favorite and “one he’s so crazy about.” The fictional teen was Holden Caulfield, the narrator of J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye.” Compared with what he’s reading in English class (“I’m not too crazy about Romeo and Juliet. . . . I mean I like them, but—I don’t know. They get pretty annoying sometimes”), Fitzgerald’s novel is far more enjoyable (“Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me.”).

Salinger’s novel came out in 1951, the year that scholars have cited as the zenith of the so-called Fitzgerald revival. That was the year that Arthur Mizener’s “The Far Side of Paradise,” the first biography of Fitzgerald, was published, both marking and encouraging a renewed interest in the author. In an effort to capitalize on “Gatsby” ’s newfound popularity, Scribner’s published a Student’s Edition of the novel in 1957. It was so successful that, four years later, the publisher followed it up with an expanded School Edition, which included a foreword, a study guide, and discussion questions written by Albert K. Ridout, a high-school English teacher in Pelham, New York.

Around the same time, the novel was taught in a course called Man’s Moral Progress at Westfield High School, in New Jersey. Soon after, it was listed as a favorite book by junior-year students in Salem, Massachusetts, and discussed in the pages of English Journal, the official publication of the National Council of Teachers of English. In 1964, Clifton K. Hillegass—the Cliff of CliffsNotes—offered students a fifty-page summary of the novel’s plot and major themes, all for the price of a dollar. The Mizener biography may have marked the revival of Fitzgerald, but with the publication of the CliffsNotes, as the author wrote of Gatsby and Daisy’s first kiss, “the incarnation was complete.”

These first Notes encouraged students to focus less on the book’s modernist style than on its social criticism. The guide describes Tom Buchanan, Gatsby’s rival in love and the novel’s main villain, as a white supremacist, “disturbed by the thought of a possible shift in the established economic and social order.” “But things are changing,” the study guide asserts, “although not perhaps as rapidly and radically as alarmist Tom may think.” This, it seems, was a matter of interpretation. When a new edition of the CliffsNotes was published, two years later, in 1966 (another sign of the novel’s ascendance in American secondary schools), Tom’s fear that “the white race will be . . . utterly submerged” was reinterpreted as an “understandable concern for preserving the social status quo.”

“Gatsby” ’s mid-century rise to required reading was not just an issue of historical or political relevance. It was also a matter of method. Education scholars often narrate the development of high-school-English pedagogy as a clash between two competing schools of thought. On one side is the “student-centered” approach typified by the education professor Louise M. Rosenblatt and her 1938 book, “Literature as Exploration,” which emphasized the resonances between the work and each reader’s individual experience. On the other is a “text-centered” approach known as New Criticism, associated with the literary critics Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, and their textbook “Understanding Fiction.”

Brooks and Warren’s mode of reading fundamentally transformed the study of literature at high schools and universities alike. Rather than encourage students to make meaningful connections between the lives of fictional characters and their own, the New Critics taught them to search for structure, symbolism, and theme. This changed not only how students were asked to read but what books they were assigned. A symbol-laden novel like “Gatsby” offered an ideal opportunity for teen-age readers to practice the New Critics’ signature techniques. (That the book also came in at less than two hundred pages didn’t hurt.) As much as Fitzgerald’s tale of booze and reckless driving captured the nineteen-twenties, it was also the perfect vehicle for the critical and pedagogical fashions of the mid-century.

The 1966 CliffsNotes testifies to New Criticism’s growing prominence in the high-school classroom. The “valley of ashes,” the “eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg,” and, yes, “the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock” become newly important, rich symbols “invested with meanings that go beyond the concerns of plot and characterization, standing for the main ideas of the novel and . . . a general criticism of American culture.” Perhaps this is how you, too, were taught to read the book, culminating in a five-paragraph essay on the significance of the green light or Gatsby’s many-colored shirts.

The New Critics’ approach to understanding fiction has dominated the secondary-school English curriculum for decades. Still, what education scholars have called “the hegemony of New Criticism” is not absolute. As one educator lamented, in a 1968 issue of English Journal, “We are teachers of English, not puzzle solvers.” Many teachers continue to favor Rosenblatt’s approach, and seek to show how a novel about being borne back ceaselessly into the past has something to say about the present.

According to a national survey of teachers, by the end of the nineteen-eighties, “Gatsby” was required reading in more than half of the nation’s public schools, edging out “Animal Farm” and coming in just behind “Hamlet.” “What does the novel say about materialism?” asks a South Carolina teacher in a 1989 lesson plan on “Gatsby.” “What, if any, are the similarities between the 1920s and the 1980s?” According to Andrew Newman, an English professor who has studied the teaching of “Gatsby” during this period, there are quite a few. Between Reaganomics and Robin Leach’s “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” “for students in the 1980s,” Newman writes, “an unbridgeable distance between modest roots and extreme wealth was on constant, garish display.”

For Jody Weverka, who began teaching the novel in the mid-eighties, at San Ramon Valley High School, one of the best ways to get her eleventh graders interested in “Gatsby” was to show them a videotape of a more contemporary magnate. Before discussing the callousness at the heart of Tom and Daisy’s marriage, the class watched an ABC News interview with Donald Trump and Marla Maples, his wife at the time. “They were careless people,” Fitzgerald writes. “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.”

This would make for a great passage to dissect in the Advanced Placement program’s English Literature exam, which first cited “Gatsby” in its essay prompts in 1982 and has not stopped since. That year, a hundred and forty thousand students took part in one of the program’s many exams. In 2024, its English exams alone were administered to nearly a million students, a third of A.P.’s total enrollment. For the past fifteen years, the most popular A.P. English program has been English Language and Composition, which advises teachers to focus on “short nonfiction pieces” and draw on novels like “Gatsby” “only if they were composed to accomplish a rhetorical purpose.”

At the same time, in an effort to promote “college and career readiness,” the Common Core State Standards Initiative, launched in 2010 and currently implemented in forty-one states, recommends that students mainly read “informational texts” (nonfiction, journalism, speeches) rather than literary ones. Though recent efforts on the part of state legislatures and activist groups like Moms for Liberty to ban books in schools have received far greater attention, the A.P. curriculum and the Common Core have done much more to shape what students are—and are not—reading.

For more than seven decades, high-school teachers have used “The Great Gatsby” to investigate the American Dream and its current state of health, to introduce students to literary techniques and the power of close attention, and to stress the importance of finding a designated driver. In Nevada, students have written letters to Daisy and staged a coroner’s inquest for Myrtle. In Florida, one class published the Green Light Gazette, a fictional newspaper that drew on real historical sources. In California and Nebraska, students threw lavish parties in flapper garb, with soda for champagne. In Texas, they put Tom on trial. When I taught eleventh-grade English, in suburban Massachusetts, my class held a funeral for Gatsby. Each student read a brief eulogy and then placed an object representing the man in a shoebox that we never figured out how to bury.

“My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence,” Fitzgerald wrote, in 1920. “An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters for ever afterward.” In this, he was wildly successful. High-school English didn’t make “Gatsby” great, but it has certainly kept it so. The question is whether the novel can survive for another hundred years. ♦