On 10 April 1925, the day The Great Gatsby was published, F Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Max Perkins, his editor, asking that great care be taken promoting his novel about modern carelessness. “Be sure and keep all such trite phrases as ‘Surely the book of the spring!’ out of the advertising,” he directed. A far more fastidious writer than his reputation suggests, Fitzgerald was withering about clichés, his letters peppered with objections to inherited phrases and ideas. Despite his best efforts, however, his most acclaimed novel arrives a century after its publication encrusted with them: the American Dream, the Roaring Twenties, Gatsby’s green light, hot jazz and cold gin, feathered flappers dancing the Charleston, a book that’s all one extravagant spree.
If Fitzgerald would have been delighted to know that Gatsby would one day be acclaimed as an American masterpiece, he would probably find our hackneyed ideas about it disappointing. “I want to write something new,” Fitzgerald famously told Perkins when he started thinking about Gatsby, “something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.” Most readers readily appreciate that Gatsby is extraordinary, beautiful and simple, while many scholars have mapped Gatsby’s modernism to show how new it was. Its intricate patterns can be harder to discern, however – especially beneath a century of accumulated cliché. Gatsby has not been set in amber, which might at least have reflected its rich and lambent peculiarity, so much as shrink-wrapped in plastic and slapped with stock labels.
Gatsby was Fitzgerald’s third novel. He was 28 when it was first published. It is also his shortest book, which is crucial to its genius: the compacted language accelerates its force. As he settled into work on the manuscript, Fitzgerald told Perkins that he intended to produce “the very best I’m capable of in it or even as I feel sometimes, something better than I’m capable of”. That paradox shaped the novel, a story about aspiration as the measure of the human soul. If Robert Browning described Heaven as the desire to reach beyond our grasp, Fitzgerald went further, implying that aspiration can remake us, that our capability can be surpassed – and that the measure of art is how far it transcends the limits of its creator. For Fitzgerald, that meant releasing his mysterious genius for language and taking it somewhere dazzling and profound. Nick Carraway opens the novel by noting that the revelations of the young men he knows, or “the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic”: hackneyed and banal. If clichés are limited thoughts expressed in plagiaristic terms, Gatsby constantly pushes beyond them, stylistically and thematically.
When he finished Gatsby, Fitzgerald knew what he had accomplished, believing it was “about the best American novel ever written”. Many readers concur with that assessment, but not about what makes this story of adulterous love – and dreams, disillusionment, and power – among the super-rich in jazz-age New York so extraordinary. There are many theories about what makes Gatsby so great, and its ability to keep producing different reasons is part of the answer.
In our culture’s collective memory, greatly influenced by Hollywood, Gatsby embodies the Roaring Twenties, and everyone wants to join the party. There are in fact only three party scenes in the novel, the first of which is frankly sordid. Of the other two, one sparkles with glamour; the other is so disappointing that Gatsby abruptly ends the festivities. Our familiar images of lavish bacchanals in palatial homes, of chorus girls and jazz orchestras and champagne glasses the size of finger bowls, infinitely defer the ending, as if the party went on forever. But Gatsby’s parties come crashing down after a mere six chapters, while its troubling hero winds up shot dead in a swimming pool. Very little ends well in the novel everyone thinks made the era sound like so much fun.
Before he leaves Long Island at the story’s end, Nick finds an obscene word scrawled on the steps of Gatsby’s house – a word he erases. Just as this may suggest Nick’s tendency to idealise the story he tells, our collective memory of Gatsby has tended to also relieve itself of troubling details about the moral of the story. But Fitzgerald recognised the story America tells itself is a fable, one that requires a moral. In Gatsby, Fitzgerald returns the question of morals to the story of America, and turns a fable into a modernist masterpiece.
From the autumn of 1922 to the spring of 1924, Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, lived in Great Neck, some 20 miles east of Manhattan, on Long Island. Increasingly colonised by the newly rich of show-business New York, villages such as Great Neck were changing the tone of the “slender riotous island” where the energy of rising America clashed with the old monied elite in villages like Manhasset to the east. Fitzgerald came to see in 1920s Long Island a parable about modern America. Gatsby’s West Egg and East Egg indicate his dual symbolic and satiric intentions: if these places are originary in some way, they are still in “a very rudimentary state of life” and faintly ludicrous.
Between Manhattan and West Egg, where Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway live, spreads the “valley of ashes,” “a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air”. Fitzgerald’s valley of ashes tips its hat to TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, but it was also a feature of New York at the time. The Ash Dumps were mountainous piles of ash up to 90ft high, a malodorous stretch of swampland in which coal ash, cinders, garbage, and human waste had been dumped. Lone figures wandered the desolate heaps searching for treasure or anything they could sell – a perfect image of a nation squandering its promise in search of a buck.
Most of the novel’s memorable details function in the same way, as realistic features of New York in 1922, and as symbols that fuse social satire with the novel’s metaphysical meanings. Gatsby is peppered with familiar symbols: the valley of ashes, the green light, the eyes of Dr Eckleburg that are mistaken for the eyes of God. It’s a novel that understands how signs can expand our capacity for thought. Gatsby’s green light has become one of the most famous images in literature, standing for Gatsby’s envy of the Buchanans’ world and his desire to attain it. It suggests his and his nation’s aspirationalism, their faith in renewal, in the fresh hope of starting over – and their drive for the colour of American money.
Its first readers did not see in The Great Gatsby a classic treatise on “the American Dream”, not least because the phrase “American Dream” would not be popularised as an idiom until the 1930s. But they did recognise its black satire of a decadent, hollowed age.
[See also: Why Gatsby was not so great]

Gatsby’s original audience had good reasons to see in it only a hyper-local novel about a small segment of New York society at a specific moment. They lacked distance, recognising all too clearly its familiar details. One critic wrote that it “is not necessarily a novel of wide appeal… I don’t even know whether it is fully intelligible to anyone who has not had glimpses of the kind of life it depicts.” Its particularity made it seem impossible for universal meanings to emerge. But we should pause before congratulating ourselves on our discernment, for if our distance from the reality behind the novel makes it easier for us to see its artistry, it has equally led to widespread misreadings of its realistic details.
Nick tells us that he kept a timetable of the summer of Gatsby’s parties dated “July 5, 1922” and that the events he is narrating ended the previous autumn – so he is writing in 1923 about events that stretch back to 1917. However, many of our ideas about the world of Gatsby derive from well after its publication. We have inherited banal revelations expressed in plagiaristic terms: they arose partly from carelessness, but also from seeing what we hoped to see, rather than what was there – exactly the fatal mistake Jay Gatsby makes.
For example, there is not a single flapper dancing the Charleston, a word that never appears in Gatsby. (It reached its peak in popularity post-publication, in 1926.) The woman at Gatsby’s party who dances on the canvas platform is probably doing the shimmy, and her dress of “trembling opal” would not have been short, spangled or pleated. In the summer of 1922, hems were variable but high fashion dictated a length from mid-calf to the ankle. The party in Myrtle’s apartment takes place “a few days before the 4th of July,” after which Nick ends up reading the New York Tribune as he waits for a train home. If he was reading the 2 July 1922 edition, he may have seen the fashion section advising elegant women to adopt the “Charm of Studied Simplicity” for their 4 July outfits, with long column dresses in crepe or chiffon with hemlines at the ankle.
When Nick enters the Buchanans’ salon as the novel begins, he is arrested by the sight of Daisy and Jordan Baker stirred by the breeze from an open window: “They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.” Long dresses of chiffon would flutter in a breeze; short, boxy skirts, which came into vogue at the end of the decade, would not.
Hollywood routinely helps itself to any details from the 1920s that let it gesture toward the jazz age. Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film adaptation of Gatsby features Prada dresses in silhouettes that were not worn until around 1928. This may sound like pedantic quibbling – what’s six years in Hollywood time? But, socially and culturally, the 1920s ended in a very different place from where they began: the styles of 1922 were far closer to those of 1919 than to those of 1929.
Luhrmann’s Broadway is thronged with yellow taxis – but New York taxis were not uniformly yellow in the early 1920s. There were also red taxis, blue taxis, checkered taxis, and by the summer of 1923, lavender taxis, like the one Myrtle Wilson selects after letting four others pass by. Lavender taxis were known for being expensive and could seem pretentious, an impression heightened by their violent colour scheme: “cerise and lavender taxis with red and green checkers”. A night out in Prohibition New York, it was said, “begins in a bierstube [beer hall] and ends in a purple taxi”. Myrtle Wilson, with her violent affectations and social climbing, would naturally choose a lavender taxi.
These deadening clichés distort our view of Gatsby in important ways. They keep us from registering how rich and strange and alien its world is: the New York of Gatsby lures us in because it is a surreal and surprising city, without a trite yellow cab in sight – but a lavender one is waiting for those who care to notice. All these carefully chosen details also suggest a world beyond the merely mimetic – what John Updike once called the ability of language to be “worked into a supernatural, supermimetic bliss”. The reason everyone who reads Gatsby wants to join the fun has far less to do with our ideas of what a jazz-age party looked like than with the vital strangeness of Fitzgerald’s writing. The lavender taxi is hyper-realistic, but it is also surrealistic, capturing the phantasmagorical qualities of Gatsby’s New York.
Fitzgerald’s fidelity to physical reality and its metaphysical surreality is what makes reading Gatsby so uncanny: it transports us to the edge of reality without leaving it behind. It is a novel about our dreams of transcending reality. Fifth Avenue is so “warm and soft, almost pastoral” that Nick “wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner”. It’s a New York in which Nick believes anything can happen, including Gatsby himself.
A nightingale sings in the Buchanans’ garden, but nightingales aren’t native to America. Daisy quips that it must have come over on an ocean liner, but it seems more likely that the nightingale flew in from the pages of John Keats, Fitzgerald’s favourite poet; his “Ode to a Nightingale” would give him the title of his next novel, Tender Is the Night. The nightingale suggests that beauty in Gatsby matters more than realism. The mystical properties of language mean that anything is possible. A flock of sheep might cross Fifth Avenue; a nightingale can sail to America on an ocean liner.
[See also: Anthony Burgess’s Napoleon complex]
Our capacity to transform the world sits at Gatsby’s heart and runs through its capillaries, phrase by phrase, as Fitzgerald shows that he can indeed make anything happen with language. Gatsby is a tour de force of literary synaesthesia, the interchange of sensory perceptions. Critics frequently note the use of synaesthesia in Gatsby (“yellow cocktail music” being the famed example), but few elaborate why it matters. Synaesthesia changes our perception: it increases the world’s potential.
An opening description whizzes cinematically across the grounds of the Buchanan estate, where lawns jump and gardens burn. The yellow cocktail music floats past triumphant hat-boxes and humming lights out into the Sound, which is a body of water and ambient noise, music and conversation and the growing “echolalia of the garden”. One woman appears by her husband “like an angry diamond”, another is a “scarcely human orchid”. Odours in Gatsby can be sparkling or frothy or pale gold. Clamour becomes time at “roaring noon.”
The verbal exuberance of Gatsby belies its exacting prose. The gilded, art deco opera of Fitzgerald’s language is risky, in danger of becoming as kitschy as Gatsby’s pink suit. In one or two places, he may tip over the line. But, for the most part, Fitzgerald’s prose is a kind of experiment in restrained extravagance, nearly paradoxical in its ability to be simultaneously excessive and withholding, romantic and judgmental. Its effect depends on the contrast between the modern jazz of its setting and the formal romanticism of Fitzgerald’s style: all of its energy comes from the high tension between the two. That resistant pull is how Fitzgerald achieves the novel’s tautness, its finely tuned elegiac satire.
For all its specificity, Fitzgerald ruthlessly stripped Gatsby of any jazz-age slang that might have dated it – there are no bee’s knees or cat’s pajamas. He was using Keats to write jazz, not the other way around; the controlled, conservative style followed logically. Nick’s formal narration reflects his moral fastidiousness, his declaration that, after the carelessness of New York, he wants the world to be standing at “moral attention” forever. Gatsby recognises the joys of intemperance but it comes down on the side of moral vigilance.
Many of our most recycled, plagiaristic observations about Gatsby miss the point, failing to read between the lines. For example, it is often noted that Benjamin Franklin’s schedule for self-improvement provides Gatsby with a manual for upward social mobility, that he is a representative American who buys into the nation’s founding dreams. But Jimmy Gatz’s plan focuses on physical activity and hard work, omitting the spiritual dimension of Franklin’s schedule, who asked himself every morning, “What good shall I do this day?” Franklin centred morality as well as industry, and Fitzgerald expected his audience to recognise what was missing. The Great Gatsby renders a society that has confused material enterprise with moral achievement. Gatsby, like the country he embodies, forgets that he should be trying not just to be great, but to do good.
After Gatsby is sacrificed to Tom and Daisy’s carelessness, Nick wanders out to the shore and offers his valedictory to Gatsby and to the promise of America, imagining the first Europeans landing there to settle: “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” Many people misremember this, but in a way that is telling, substituting Puritan pilgrims in Massachusetts for the Dutch settlers of New York whom Nick actually imagines. The shift from spiritualism to mercantilism is the point: America has lost faith with its spiritual ideal and built a new world that is material, without being real, as it has lost its capacity for idealism and wonder. If the novel’s great sin is carelessness, Fitzgerald’s elegy for Gatsby becomes his requiem for the utopian dreams of the nation that succumbed to it.
“The Cambridge Centennial Edition of The Great Gatsby”, with an introduction by Sarah Churchwell, is published by Cambridge University Press on 28 January. Sarah Churchwell will be discussing “The Great Gatsby” at the Cambridge Literary Festival on 26 April
The Cambridge Centennial Edition of The Great Gatsby
F Scott Fitzgerald
Cambridge University Press, 278pp, £20
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[See also: Elsa Morante’s wild, compelling fiction]
This article appears in the 22 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Messiah Complex