One hundred years ago this year, the most perfect novel of the twentieth century was published. When its author died fifteen years later, it had sold less than forty thousand copies. F Scott Fitzgerald left this world believing that his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby was a flop. But here we are in the book's centennial year, with a Broadway musical adaptation about to start in London.
Getting swept up in the glittering nostalgia of Jazz Age glamour,(which by the way has nothing to do with jazz) is easy. The champagne flows, the dresses shimmer, and Gatsby’s mansion echoes with the laughter and chatter of never ending parties. Over the past hundred years, that’s the image that’s stuck. But that’s only the surface. Fitzgerald’s real message runs far deeper, and it’s far darker. At its heart, pulses a damning critique of privilege, of carelessness dressed up as charm; of a dream that promises everything and delivers nothing. The parties are dazzling, yes, but soon fizzle and empty when everyone leaves the wreckage at dawn. All that’s left is a question that thuds like a hangover about who we really are and why we are doing what we do.
Daisy and Tom Buchanan are the clearest examples of this carelessness floating through life cushioned by wealth, leaving damage in their wake without consequence. Retreating into their money whenever things get too real, shielded by privilege from any accountability. Even Gatsby, for all his ambition, is chasing an illusion: a dream rooted in reinvention, status, and the impossible idea that with wealth and respectability, the past can be rewritten. A century later, that dissonance is still pounding a familiar, albeit short form algorithm rhythm. Filtered shiny versions of success, the measure of worth equated to wealth and appearance. Live streaming those with power as they trample those without. The Great Gatsby endures not because it flatters the American Dream, but because it exposes the San Andreas Fault in its foundation.
A hundred years on, The Great Gatsby still holds a mirror up to a world obsessed with winning and driven by inequality. It’s a slim novel with a heavy message, one that asks us to look beyond the shimmer and consider those who get left behind. As we mark its centenary, it’s worth celebrating not just the brilliance of Fitzgerald’s prose, but his warning. Because the dream he writes about isn’t just Gatsby’s. It’s one we’re all still reckoning with.
