Thirty-six years after its appearance 1 would say with confidence, then, that Gatsby has not only outlived its period and its author, but that it is one of the books that will endure.Īny new consideration must now, if this is so, be concerned with it as a work which belongs not only to American but to world literature not only to the immediate soil from which it sprang (prohibition, big business, gangsters, jazz, uprootedness, and the rest) but to the tragic predicament of humanity as a whole. Amazing enough, one reflects each time, that so short a work should contain so much, and its impact remain so fresh. My own first reading of Gatsby is an experience I still recall vividly, and it has remained for me one of the few novels in any language ( Tender Is the Night is another) for which the appetite regularly and pleasurably returns. Since then the novel has attracted praise from a great many discriminating critics on both sides of the Atlantic, and the deep interest of first generation readers has been shared by others coming at a later time, and from different backgrounds. Eliot found himself as moved and interested by The Great Gatsby as he had been by any novel for a very long time.
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