The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Published by Penguin Modern Classics, £7-99
Reviewed by Scott Jones
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us”.
A hundred years ago, the world was introduced to Jay Gatsby, the ‘green light’ and a commentary on the so-called American Dream – the idea that everyone has an equal chance to ‘make it’ in the US and achieve success. Gatsby was the titular character in F Scott Fitgerald’s iconic work, The Great Gatsby, often crowned the ‘Great American Novel’ – its meaning still poured over by academics and schoolchildren alike, and its representation of the roaring twenties and the Jazz Age regularly celebrated in art.
Gatsby tells the story of Jay Gatsby, veteran of the first world war, who by the early 1920s has left his poor background behind and amassed a huge fortune from bootlegging and organised crime during prohibition, creating a new larger than life image. The inspiration was real-life, one-time neighbour of Fitzgerald, Max Gerlach. Gatsby buys a luxury property on Long Island, New York near to Daisy, the girl he was infatuated with when younger but whose voice was “full of money” and spurned him when he was poor. He now hopes he can woo her with his newfound wealth and extravagant parties.
The novel’s over-riding theme is class, money and the myth of the American Dream. In fact, its legacy in this regard is such that when he was president, Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser used what he called ‘The Great Gatsby Curve’ to illustrate inequality and social mobility.
Its film representations probably misunderstand this somewhat with their focus mainly on the parties and trappings of the roaring twenties. But there are actually only three parties in the novel, and while one sounds fantastic, another ends miserably. Baz Luhrmann’s visually attractive 2013 adaptation shows classic yellow New York taxis and flappers dancing the Charleston, things which occurred or gained popularity after the novel’s publication. Fitzgerald himself consciously refused to use any jazz-age slang that would have dated it: there are no ‘bee’s knees’ or ‘cat’s pyjamas’. The fun of the film doesn’t last very long in the novel, with Gatsby shot dead and floating in his swimming pool after only six chapters.
Despite ‘achieving the American Dream’ Gatsby fails in his bid to be with Daisy, who stays with her ‘old money’ husband Tom Buchanan, and he was only even able to be part of their world through corrupt means. The novel is inspired in part by an event in Fitzgerald’s youth, when he fell in love in his hometown with a rich girl, Ginerva King, whose father told him that “poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls”.
Between 1922 and 1924, Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda lived in New York on Long Island which was increasingly becoming home to the newly rich, and villages like his home in Great Neck clashed with the old monied elite nearby. In Gatsby, Fitzgerald criticises the wealthy and upper class – both old and new money – depicting the rich and their capitalist system as having lost any sense of purpose and use, hurtling towards disaster, presaging the 1929 Wall Street Crash and depression that was to come.
He depicts the brutal treatment of the poor and working class using characters like George Wilson and Myrtle and her sad treatment by the wealthy, describing the rich in the form of Tom and Daisy as “careless people who smashed up people and things and then retreated into their vast carelessness and money”. The richest characters like Tom and Daisy, but also those who attend Gatsby’s parties, are the most unpleasant in the novel, but no one comes out of it well, including poor people who Fitzgerald could be criticised for portraying in a stereotypical way. But it is implied that it is impossible to rise above the class that you are born into – unless you do it by ‘cheating’ the system like Gatsby.
The novel and its themes reflect well the society in which it was set. The year before the novel’s publication, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky pointed out that “the national income of the United States is two and a half times greater than the combined national incomes of Britain, France, Germany and Japan”, showing the immense wealth in the US at the time. Like today, in the 1930s the US also moved against its capitalist rivals with tariffs and protectionism. Trotsky also argued that the US was creating limits “with certain restricted sections of the world market allotted to it” in relation to exports.
But while the economy had grown massively, this only heightened the huge gap between rich and poor, with a third of all income earned by just 5% of people at the top of society. At the same time 60% of Americans lived just below the poverty line.
Black Americans were particularly hard hit; segregation in the south kept them in poverty, but even those who moved north to work were often said to be the ‘last to be hired and the first to be fired’. In the novel, Tom Buchanan is portrayed as being racist and fearful of integration.
Poverty and struggle are best illustrated in The Great Gatsby in the dystopian portrayal of the ‘Valley of Ashes’ where men “move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air”. These dumps were mountainous, stinking piles of ash up to 90 foot high, that actually existed in New York at the time and is now Flushing Meadows, where coal ash, cinders, rubbish and human waste were dumped and the desperate searched in hope of finding anything of use or value.
However, only a few years before The Great Gatsby came out, the US, in the wake of the first world war and the Russian revolution in 1917, had witnessed a militant strike wave and the first so-called ‘Red Scare’. Socialist labour organisers like Bill Haywood in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union were to the fore, there was a general strike in Seattle in 1919 and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, when coalminers fought strike-breakers in the country’s largest armed uprising since the American Civil War. Politically, socialist Eugene Debs polled almost a million votes in the 1920 presidential election, and the country’s first communist parties were formed.
The novel is set in the summer of 1922 and we’re told that the party in Myrtle’s apartment takes place “a few days before the 4 July”. In that case the copy of the New York Tribune that it’s said the book’s narrator Nick Carraway is reading while waiting for the train at Penn Station had, alongside the reports of another homerun for baseball player Babe Ruth, a front page headline about the huge rail strike that was taking place in New York, which probably delayed his train too.
By 1925 though, state repression and the role of more conservative trade union leaders, like those who supported the war, led to a weakening of the trade union movement, meaning workers’ wages did not keep pace with prices. For example, even in construction, which saw a boom with skyscrapers like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building being started during the decade in New York itself, there was only a 4% increase in builders’ pay during the 1920s. Those who did spend money, did so using cheap credit, which left many in debt.
Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby about a world turned upside down by the war and revolutionary upheavals. In particular, he wrote about the disillusionment that accompanied many young men as they returned from the war. He spent time in Paris, a contemporary of Gertrude Stein, who coined the term ‘the lost generation’ to describe these “men and women adrift in a chaotic hell”. Another of this generation was an American contemporary in Paris, probably Fitzgerald’s closest literary friend, Ernest Hemingway, whose 1920s novels featured similar themes. The name of Nick Carraway is even a composite of the first name of Hemingway’s war veteran hero Nick Adams and a surname similar to Hemingway himself.
But whereas Hemingway turned to the new period of the 1930s and wrote about the plight of the American working class during the depression in To Have and Have Not, and travelled to Spain to support the socialist forces fighting fascism in the Spanish civil war – writing a novel about it – Fitzgerald was forgotten about. Despite writing probably his best novel Tender is the Night in 1934, given it was about his time in the south of France, he was seen as a relic of the hedonistic roaring twenties and out of the touch. He sank into poverty and sold only forty copies of his books in the last year of his life in 1940, when he died at the age of just 44.
Fitzgerald then was slightly ahead of his time, and he did consider himself on the left politically. He was known to have read Marx, and in a letter to his daughter Scottie ahead of her going to college he wrote: “You will notice there is a strongly organised left-wing movement there… I do not want you to set yourself against this movement. I am a known left-wing sympathiser and would be proud if you were”.
The novel became popular again during the second world war when it was one of a number of books distributed free of charge to US soldiers overseas. One of those soldiers was JD Salinger, whose protagonist in his novel Catcher in the Rye states his love for The Great Gatsby.
The Great Gatsby retains its message and relevance to today. The huge inequality in the US and around the world hasn’t gone away and the rich are no different either. In fact, the US is back to the 1920s levels of wealth disparity of the world of Jay Gatsby. Until very recently US stock markets were booming, but real hourly pay has fallen for two years running. And now Donald Trump, a Tom Buchanan-like character, is in the Oval Office and is only accelerating the disorder and disparity. But the US has also seen the largest number of strikes in recent times since the 1980s, meaning more and more are again seeing through the American Dream. The answer of course is fighting for an alternative – socialism.
The Great Gatsby is also still worth reading in 2025 because it’s a great novel. From its striking cover onwards, it evokes anger and laughter, and with its mysterious characters, evocative scenes and lovely writing style and use of language, is a recommended and enjoyable read on its 100th birthday. Maybe with a gin rickey or mint julep in hand too.
