How “The Great Gatsby” took over high school

Summary

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 de...