Apr 12, 2025 4 min read

Every summer for more than I can recall, I’ve read, or reread, two books, both by F. Scott Fitzgerald. One is the novel he was working on at the time of his death in 1940, at the age of 44 – “The Last Tycoon,” or more properly, “The Love of the Last Tycoon, A Western.”

The other is “The Great Gatsby.”

If you happened to read “The Great Gatsby” this year you will be doing so on its 100th anniversary. Published on April 10, 1925, Gatsby is “a classic work, perhaps a national scripture,” according to literary biographer James L.W. West.

The novel’s themes and motif are quintessentially American.

At its publication, Fitzgerald was just shy of his 30th birthday, married to the glamorous, troubled Zelda, with a young daughter, who one day far into the future would have engraved on her father’s tombstone the evocative last words of “The Great Gatsby”: “Now we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

The novelist is buried in the quiet graveyard of St. Mary’s Church in Rockville, Maryland, a three-hour drive from Western Pennsylvania. The grave is near the Rockville Metro stop on the way into D.C. It’s easily accessible.

But I digress.

In less than 50,000 words, according to West, an emeritus professor of English at Penn State, Fitzgerald “gives through the poetry of his language, a glimpse of the human condition that is both timeless and universal.”

The critic, A.O. Scott, recently summed up the book this way: Fitzgerald’s “slender volume [is] about a mysterious lovelorn millionaire living and dying in a Long Island mansion.”

Scott, writing in the New York Times, pointed out Gatsby has had four movie treatments, the first in 1926. The latest celluloid Gatsby appeared in 2013 and starred Leonardo DiCaprio. Alan Ladd and Robert Redford have both played the title role.

In addition, there have been two musicals, an opera, at least one play, prequels, sequels, and spoofs – by South Park in 2000, by Family Guy in 2016, and by The Simpsons in 2017. J. Peterman in “Seinfeld,” reimagined the bra as outerwear in Gatsby-like terms. George Costanza told Jerry he missed their Gatsbyian lives, forgetting, or likely never knowing, that their small Manhattan apartments bore not the slightest resemblance to Jay Gatsby’s opulent digs on the coast of Long Island Sound.

Lunch at Monk’s is not the same as a jazzy all-night party at the Gatsby mansion. The burning red light of the Kenny Rogers restaurant sign outside Kramer’s apartment is nothing compared to the haunting glimmer of green at the end of Daisy’s dock.

Is this obscure enough for you? Good, for the novel is obscure. Its mysteries are why every reading brings new discoveries.

Whether for the first time or 30th, the writing you encounter in Gatsby is gorgeous. From the description of Tom Buchanan’s “cruel body” to the author’s evocation of “the dark fields of the republic” rolling on “under the night,” Fitzgerald’s prose is “pitch-perfect,” in West’s words written for a brand-new annotated Library of America edition of the novel.

“Those who went no farther than Chicago would gather in old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening,” begins a favorite passage. Reading this narrative even on warm summer nights chills the bones and thrills the senses. Fitzgerald, a Minnesotan by birth, describes “the winter night and the real snow, our snow” and “the dim lights of small Wisconsin [train] stations” and “the sharp wild brace” of air “as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules.”

Tom Buchanan and his wife, Daisy, Gatsby’s lost love and obsession, are luridly wealthy, and more. “They were careless people,” Fitzgerald tells us. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Though principally a novelist, Fitzgerald was also a historian, an American historian, at that. At Gatsby’s conclusion, he invokes the explorers’ wonder of experiencing “the old island” and the “fresh, green breast of the New World” for the first time, and “the trees that had … pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent.”

All of this and baseball, too. Fitzgerald’s deleted passage of Gatsby and gang attending a Cubs-Giants game at New York’s Polo Grounds is reproduced in the 1991 edition of “The Great Gatsby” published by Cambridge University Press.

“The Great Gatsby” at 100, it’s quite a book.

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.