Within the spring of 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald was nervous about “The Nice Gatsby.” It had been fifteen years for the reason that novel was printed, and the writer had little to point out for it. “My God I’m a forgotten man,” Fitzgerald wrote to his spouse, Zelda. “Gatsby needed to be taken out of the Fashionable Library as a result of it didn’t promote, which was a blow.” Two months later, in a letter to Maxwell Perkins, his longtime editor at Scribner’s, Fitzgerald questioned whether or not an affordable paperback reprint would possibly “maintain Gatsby within the public eye” and “make it a favourite with class rooms, profs, lovers of English prose—anyone.” Nonetheless, his hopes have been dim. “Or is the e-book unpopular?” he requested Perkins. “Has it had its probability?” Seven months later, Fitzgerald was useless. “Gatsby,” it turned out, was not.

Within the century since its début, in April, 1925, “Gatsby” has been tailored for movie at the least 5 occasions; mounted on the stage, with and with out musical numbers; and even become a online game, within the fashion of Tremendous Mario Bros. As early because the nineteen-fifties, Scribner’s was promoting greater than thirty thousand copies every year, and by the tip of the sixties that determine was nearer to half 1,000,000. By some estimates, the entire worldwide gross sales of the novel at the moment are upward of thirty million copies. How did “Gatsby” develop so nice, and why has it endured so lengthy?

The reply is high-school English. Greater than any literary prize or movie star e-book membership, the varsity syllabus shapes American studying. This 12 months alone, roughly seventeen million college students will take their seats in a high-school-English classroom, and an amazing lots of them will likely be sitting all the way down to a replica of “The Nice Gatsby.” For many years, Fitzgerald’s novel has been among the many most incessantly assigned texts in American secondary colleges, and studying it—or, at the least, pretending to have learn it—has grow to be a nationwide ceremony of passage. However “Gatsby” ’s place within the high-school canon was hardly inevitable, its path to the classroom winding at finest.

After Fitzgerald’s loss of life, a wave of eulogies applauded the writer, and at the least a few them hailed his Jazz Age novel as a basic. However, although Fitzgerald’s loss of life was good for “Gatsby,” what actually made the distinction was the Second World Struggle. Starting in 1942, a marketing campaign was launched to equip American servicemen with important “weapons within the battle of concepts”—low cost paperback novels. The Council on Books in Wartime, a nonprofit made up of publishers, critics, booksellers, and librarians, labored to fight boredom and enhance morale by distributing greater than 100 and twenty million books to U.S. troops abroad. The Armed Providers Editions have been tailor-made to suit inside a uniform pocket, with strengthened paper meant to final for at the least six readings. In 1945, American troopers have been despatched 100 and fifty-five thousand copies of “The Nice Gatsby,” making the novel a success eventually.

Just a few years later, in a teen-ager’s account of his older brother’s wartime service and style in studying, “Gatsby” was cited as a specific favourite and “one he’s so loopy about.” The fictional teen was Holden Caulfield, the narrator of J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher within the Rye.” In contrast with what he’s studying in English class (“I’m not too loopy about Romeo and Juliet. . . . I imply I like them, however—I don’t know. They get fairly annoying typically”), Fitzgerald’s novel is much extra pleasurable (“Previous Gatsby. Previous sport. That killed me.”).

Salinger’s novel got here out in 1951, the 12 months that students have cited because the zenith of the so-called Fitzgerald revival. That was the 12 months that Arthur Mizener’s “The Far Aspect of Paradise,” the primary biography of Fitzgerald, was printed, each marking and inspiring a renewed curiosity within the writer. In an effort to capitalize on “Gatsby” ’s newfound reputation, Scribner’s printed a Pupil’s Version of the novel in 1957. It was so profitable that, 4 years later, the writer adopted it up with an expanded College Version, which included a foreword, a examine information, and dialogue questions written by Albert Okay. Ridout, a high-school English trainer in Pelham, New York.

Across the similar time, the novel was taught in a course known as Man’s Ethical Progress at Westfield Excessive College, in New Jersey. Quickly after, it was listed as a favourite e-book by junior-year college students in Salem, Massachusetts, and mentioned within the pages of English Journal, the official publication of the Nationwide Council of Academics of English. In 1964, Clifton Okay. Hillegass—the Cliff of CliffsNotes—supplied college students a fifty-page abstract of the novel’s plot and main themes, all for the worth of a greenback. The Mizener biography could have marked the revival of Fitzgerald, however with the publication of the CliffsNotes, because the writer wrote of Gatsby and Daisy’s first kiss, “the incarnation was full.”

These first Notes inspired college students to focus much less on the e-book’s modernist fashion than on its social criticism. The information describes Tom Buchanan, Gatsby’s rival in love and the novel’s predominant villain, as a white supremacist, “disturbed by the considered a doable shift within the established financial and social order.” “However issues are altering,” the examine information asserts, “though not maybe as quickly and radically as alarmist Tom might imagine.” This, it appears, was a matter of interpretation. When a brand new version of the CliffsNotes was printed, two years later, in 1966 (one other signal of the novel’s ascendance in American secondary colleges), Tom’s concern that “the white race will likely be . . . totally submerged” was reinterpreted as an “comprehensible concern for preserving the social established order.”

“Gatsby” ’s mid-century rise to required studying was not simply a difficulty of historic or political relevance. It was additionally a matter of methodology. Training students usually narrate the event of high-school-English pedagogy as a conflict between two competing colleges of thought. On one aspect is the “student-centered” strategy typified by the training professor Louise M. Rosenblatt and her 1938 e-book, “Literature as Exploration,” which emphasised the resonances between the work and every reader’s particular person expertise. On the opposite is a “text-centered” strategy referred to as New Criticism, related to the literary critics Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, and their textbook “Understanding Fiction.”

Brooks and Warren’s mode of studying essentially remodeled the examine of literature at excessive colleges and universities alike. Quite than encourage college students to make significant connections between the lives of fictional characters and their very own, the New Critics taught them to seek for construction, symbolism, and theme. This modified not solely how college students have been requested to learn however what books they have been assigned. A logo-laden novel like “Gatsby” supplied an excellent alternative for teen-age readers to apply the New Critics’ signature strategies. (That the e-book additionally got here in at lower than 200 pages didn’t harm.) As a lot as Fitzgerald’s story of booze and reckless driving captured the nineteen-twenties, it was additionally the right car for the essential and pedagogical fashions of the mid-century.

The 1966 CliffsNotes testifies to New Criticism’s rising prominence within the high-school classroom. The “valley of ashes,” the “eyes of Physician T. J. Eckleburg,” and, sure, “the inexperienced gentle on the finish of Daisy’s dock” grow to be newly essential, wealthy symbols “invested with meanings that transcend the issues of plot and characterization, standing for the primary concepts of the novel and . . . a common criticism of American tradition.” Maybe that is the way you, too, have been taught to learn the e-book, culminating in a five-paragraph essay on the importance of the inexperienced gentle or Gatsby’s many-colored shirts.

The New Critics’ strategy to understanding fiction has dominated the secondary-school English curriculum for many years. Nonetheless, what training students have known as “the hegemony of New Criticism” isn’t absolute. As one educator lamented, in a 1968 subject of English Journal, “We’re lecturers of English, not puzzle solvers.” Many lecturers proceed to favor Rosenblatt’s strategy, and search to point out how a novel about being borne again ceaselessly into the previous has one thing to say in regards to the current.

In accordance with a nationwide survey of lecturers, by the tip of the nineteen-eighties, “Gatsby” was required studying in additional than half of the nation’s public colleges, edging out “Animal Farm” and coming in simply behind “Hamlet.” “What does the novel say about materialism?” asks a South Carolina trainer in a 1989 lesson plan on “Gatsby.” “What, if any, are the similarities between the Twenties and the Eighties?” In accordance with Andrew Newman, an English professor who has studied the instructing of “Gatsby” throughout this era, there are fairly a couple of. Between Reaganomics and Robin Leach’s “Life of the Wealthy and Well-known,” “for college students within the Eighties,” Newman writes, “an unbridgeable distance between modest roots and excessive wealth was on fixed, garish show.”

For Jody Weverka, who started instructing the novel within the mid-eighties, at San Ramon Valley Excessive College, among the finest methods to get her eleventh graders concerned with “Gatsby” was to point out them a videotape of a extra up to date magnate. Earlier than discussing the callousness on the coronary heart of Tom and Daisy’s marriage, the category watched an ABC Information interview with Donald Trump and Marla Maples, his spouse on the time. “They have been careless individuals,” Fitzgerald writes. “They smashed up issues and creatures after which retreated again into their cash or their huge carelessness or no matter it was that saved them collectively, and let different individuals clear up the mess they’d made.”

This may make for an amazing passage to dissect within the Superior Placement program’s English Literature examination, which first cited “Gatsby” in its essay prompts in 1982 and has not stopped since. That 12 months, 100 and forty thousand college students took half in one of many program’s many exams. In 2024, its English exams alone have been administered to just about 1,000,000 college students, a 3rd of A.P.’s whole enrollment. For the previous fifteen years, the preferred A.P. English program has been English Language and Composition, which advises lecturers to deal with “quick nonfiction items” and draw on novels like “Gatsby” “provided that they have been composed to perform a rhetorical function.”

On the similar time, in an effort to advertise “school and profession readiness,” the Widespread Core State Requirements Initiative, launched in 2010 and at the moment carried out in forty-one states, recommends that college students primarily learn “informational texts” (nonfiction, journalism, speeches) fairly than literary ones. Although latest efforts on the a part of state legislatures and activist teams like Mothers for Liberty to ban books in colleges have acquired far better consideration, the A.P. curriculum and the Widespread Core have finished far more to form what college students are—and should not—studying.

For greater than seven a long time, high-school lecturers have used “The Nice Gatsby” to analyze the American Dream and its present state of well being, to introduce college students to literary strategies and the facility of shut consideration, and to emphasize the significance of discovering a chosen driver. In Nevada, college students have written letters to Daisy and staged a coroner’s inquest for Myrtle. In Florida, one class printed the Inexperienced Gentle Gazette, a fictional newspaper that drew on actual historic sources. In California and Nebraska, college students threw lavish events in flapper garb, with soda for champagne. In Texas, they put Tom on trial. After I taught eleventh-grade English, in suburban Massachusetts, my class held a funeral for Gatsby. Every pupil learn a quick eulogy after which positioned an object representing the person in a shoebox that we by no means found out how you can bury.

“My entire principle of writing I can sum up in a single sentence,” Fitzgerald wrote, in 1920. “An writer ought to put in writing for the youth of his personal era, the critics of the subsequent, and the schoolmasters for ever afterward.” On this, he was wildly profitable. Excessive-school English didn’t make “Gatsby” nice, nevertheless it has actually saved it so. The query is whether or not the novel can survive for an additional hundred years. ♦