Now, a Literary Moment...

When published in 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald'S novel The Great Gatsby was not a commercial success. There was little audience for a moral tale about the decadent class of the jazz age. Yet this lyrical book has since come to epitomize the promise and pitfalls in seeking the American Dream.

Book Critic Maureen Corrigan.

Maureen Corrigan: ? we can understand Gatsby as being an over the top dreamer and I can still admire him as, as this epitome of some of the best of what we admire in the American character, that it is, that you can understand contradictions about people and that a novel that gives you a character who contains contradictions is, is really, a great achievement. That's part of the test of a great novel, does it keep teaching you things.

Maureen Corrigan on Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

This Literary Moment was created by the National Endowment for the Arts.