The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald’s third novel, published in 1925 and set on Long Island in the summer of 1922. Nick Carraway narrates the story of his neighbour Jay Gatsby, who has assembled a fortune of uncertain origin and a house full of strangers for the single purpose of winning back a woman who married someone else. It sold modestly in Fitzgerald’s lifetime and became a fixture of the American curriculum after his death.

Context: First published 1925. 192 pages in the linked Penguin edition. Lexile 1010. Filed under Fiction. It earns its place in a citizen-forming reading list as the standard American text on the gap between inherited money and made money, and on what happens to a man who mistakes a person for the proof that he has arrived.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the curriculum this came from; a 468-title reading list published in December 2025 by the Substack writer Dissident Teacher, of which Kyle is carding only the Ages 13-99+ band.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald — the author, who already runs through Kyle’s corpus by way of the “two opposed ideas” line from “The Crack-Up”.
• American Dream — the idea the novel is most often assigned to interrogate.
• Wealth
• Literature