The Great Gatsby and the American dream. In the New York Times earlier this year, Paul Krugman wrote of an economic effect called "The Great Gatsby curve," a graph that measures fiscal inequality against social mobility and shows that America's marked economic inequality means it has correlatively low social mobility.
In one sense this hardly seems newsworthy, but it is telling that even economists think that F Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece offers the most resonant (and economical) shorthand for the problems of social mobility, economic inequality and class antagonism that we face today. Nietzsche – whose Genealogy of Morals Fitzgerald greatly admired – called the transformation of class resentment into a moral system "ressentiment"; in America, it is increasingly called the failure of the American dream, a failure now mapped by the "Gatsby curve". "How would you place them? " she exclaimed. "Great ladies, bourgeoises, adventuresses - they are all the same. Suddenly she pointed to an American girl going into the water: The new Great Gatsbys: Why F. Scott Fitzgerald's book is as relevant now as in the Twenties.
By Philip Norman Published: 00:49 GMT, 16 June 2012 | Updated: 02:00 GMT, 16 June 2012 During his 1920s heyday, F.
Scott Fitzgerald enjoyed fame and glamour comparable with any modern rock star. And, as with so many rock stars, the myths that have collected around him obscure the more fascinating — and tragic — reality. Fitzgerald is remembered as the epitome of what he himself dubbed ‘the Jazz Age’, when America reacted against stringent Prohibition laws with a decade-long drinking orgy; the original ‘It’ girls danced the Charleston on the roofs of taxi cabs; and mobsters such as Al Capone machine-gunned each other in the streets. It all took place amid a boom-bust economic cycle — very much like our own — which culminated in the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
Glamour: Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan in the latest big screen version of the Great Gatsby, directed by Baz Luhrmann Today, Gatsby is an American classic, up there with Moby-Dick and Tom Sawyer. Real life tragedy: F. Jay McInerney: why Gatsby is so great. The Great Gatsby seems to be enjoying a moment, what with the success of the New York production of Gatz, opening in London (described by America's leading theatre critic Ben Brantley as "The most remarkable achievement in theatre not only of this year but also of this decade"), and the release later this year of Baz Luhrman's $120m film version.
The book was little noticed on your side of the Atlantic on its initial publication. Collins, which had published the English editions of F Scott Fitzgerald's first two novels, rejected it outright, and the Chatto and Windus edition failed to arouse much enthusiasm, critical or commercial, when it was published in London in 1926. To be fair, the novel hadn't been a smash hit in the States the year before, selling less than his two previous novels and falling well short of the expectations of Fitzgerald and his publisher, despite some very good reviews. At that time, Gatsby seemed like the relic of an age most wanted to forget.