The Great Gatsby

Where I heard about it

• Dissident Teacher — on A Library to Build Great Americans, the Substack writer’s 468-title curriculum (December 2025), in the Ages 13–99+ band under Fiction, Lexile 1010.
• On Patrick Collison’s Bookshelf — Patrick Collison’s catalog of the physical books he owns (unflagged). Saved in Kyle’s April 19th, 2020 Roam daily note.

About this edition

Fitzgerald’s third novel, set on Long Island in the summer of 1922 and narrated by Gatsby’s neighbour Nick Carraway. It sold modestly in Fitzgerald’s lifetime and became a fixture of the American curriculum after his death. It earns its place on a citizen-forming reading list for what it shows happening to a man who mistakes a person for the proof that he has arrived. 192 pages in the linked Penguin edition.

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