The Great Gatsby is a novel of manners in which no one minds their manners, narrated by a man who claims to reserve judgment as he constantly casts it. A tale of East Coast decadence populated entirely by Midwestern transplants. A book too slender to sell well when it was first published, a hundred years ago, on April 10, 1925, yet whose brevity helped secure a posthumous canonization, initially among soldiers during World War II, thanks to the Council on Books in Wartime, and then by close readers, screenwriters, and high school students, who still buy half a million copies every year on instruction from their teachers. Perhaps more than any other contender for the title of Great American Novel, it has enjoyed an enduring post-literary afterlife. Adapted for stage and screen within a year of publication, the name ‘Gatsby’ today conjures the image of a white-suited Leonardo DiCaprio, distinguished portrayer of American con men and the star of Baz Luhrmann’s flamboyant 2013 art-deco-cum-hip-hop adaptation.
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