The Great Gatsby at 100: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Class Consciousness Masterpiece |
Original cover art for the Great Gatsby by Francis Cugat, 1927.
“The idea that we’re the greatest people in the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous. Wait until this wave of prosperity is over! Wait ten or fifteen years! Wait until the next war in the Pacific, or against some European combination!”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1927
Surely Donald Trump wasn’t thinking of The Great Gatsby when he said he wanted to Make America Great again, though Gatsby is a great novel and its major character is as fake as anything about Fox news and the president himself. No major 20th century American writer, not Theodore Dreiser, nor John Dos Passos was more conscious of the friction between social classes than F. Scott Fitzgerald. No novel of the 1920s is more class conscious than The Great Gatsby, and no writer was more aware of the loss of American greatness than Fitzgerald. Had the novel been published with the title that the author preferred, Under the Red, White and Blue, readers might have sensed that America is the main character in the novel.
Two years after the novel was published, Fitzgerald told a reporter, “The idea that we’re the greatest people in the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous. Wait until this wave of prosperity is over! Wait ten or fifteen years! Wait until the next war in the Pacific, or against some European combination!”
The Great Gatsby might have provided a kind of morality tale for a society that was cracking up. The once spectacular continent is decimated, trees cut down to make way for houses, rivers polluted, and innocence corrupted— all that and more is spelled out in the pages of the novel. But when the stock market crashed in ’29 and the Depression of the 1930s hit families hard, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the great Jazz Age novelist, fell out of favor with the literati and the populi.
After all, he wrote about members of the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat and not about the........