There’s hardly a high school English classroom across the United States that doesn’t dedicate some time to examining F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and for good reason. Heralded as an American literary classic, Gatsby is a stark examination of class, gender, and racial disparities within the context of the Roaring 20s. There is so much we can learn from this book, though many of us who encountered it during our adolescence amidst college applications and droll extracurricular activities have taken it for granted. And having just celebrated its hundredth anniversary, the Great American Novel has more than cemented its place in the nation’s culture—it’s defined and foreshadowed its resonance in our current historical standpoint.

In many ways, the 20s of today’s America have been not unlike the 20s of the previous century—extravagant, bold, full of opportunity and renewed vigor, until they no longer were. Fitzgerald moves beyond the promise of the Modern Age and portrays the 1920s as an era of decaying social and moral values, evidenced by his characters’ overarching cynicism, insatiable greed, and nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. And in today’s society, Gatsby continues to be a faithful representation of America not in spite of its age, but because of it. 

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“The American Dream was born from an incorruptible ambition, a hope for the future and the belief that anything can be accomplished through hard work and determination. Throughout the passage of time, this impeccably idealized notion has become a salient cornerstone of the United States, while, in its turn, has been constantly challenged by the tragic reality of inequality and disillusionment that generation after generation has faced.” Those were the sentences I opened my AP English Language midterm essay on Gatsby with back in 2018. Yeah, they’re kind of wordy and pretentious, right? You could almost argue that little, if anything at all, has changed since. Much like I’m doing now, I was writing this thinkpiece, then an analysis essay, under the context of the Trump Administration, with the defeat of a female presidential candidate, impending threats to immigrants and marginalized communities nationwide, and the disillusionment in “meritocracy” all still fresh in my malleable mind. Seven years since then, Trump celebrates his hundredth day in office for his second term just as Gatsby celebrates a century of its induction into the American literary canon, a century of being written about and examined by countless readers under a shifting, complicated national history. 

To be fair, my seventeen-year-old self’s understanding of Fitzgerald’s best-known work, though not completely unsubstantial, was nowhere as robust as it should have been to pick apart the nuances and tackle all the themes of this novel. Maybe it still isn’t. But apparently, neither is the understanding of the pressure groups that initiated 72% of the demands to censor books like The Great Gatsby in school and public libraries. Fitzgerald’s classic, in fact, is the top book with attempted bans due to depictions of “extramarital affairs [and] sexual references” as well as “vulgar language” and “excessive drinking” (never mind the current administration’s murky and vulgar sexual abuse history). Even more interesting is seeing these calls from censorship come at a time of record disinformation and illiteracy in the United States, and where anything that may question American nationalism and exceptionalism is heavily scrutinized and even punished. While Gatsby, like many other works that have made it into the Banned & Challenged Books list, may seem inoffensive enough, there’s something about it that some of the concerned citizens calling for book bans just can’t stand, and I suspect it largely has to do with Fitzgerald peeling away the veneer of patriotism and criticizing the falsehood of success through a meritocracy that is so prominently embedded into American culture.

As an immigrant, the grandeur and tragedy of Gatsby was uniquely captivating to me. After all, who are the hopefuls perceived to find the American Dream the most alluring, if not outsiders to the country? Luckily, Tom Buchanan—the “boorish, bullying embodiment of white, male, Old-Money privilege,” as Fresh Air’s Maureen Corrigan puts it—is quick to spew eugenicist and anti-immigrant talking points within mere sentences of his introduction as a character, rambling about the imminent displacement of the white race and the dismantling of civilization that would follow. But as much of a crude caricature of xenophobic sentiment as Buchanan may have appeared to be to a younger version of me, his personality is a faithful reflection of not only American fears of displacement in the context of the mass immigration movement of the 1920s, but of these same concerns in present-day 2025. You’ve likely encountered headlines about deportations (with names like Mahmoud Khalil and Kilmar Obrego Garcia coming to mind) and Trump’s actions against immigration. Well, similar policies were being enacted a century ago as Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby—for instance, the Immigration Act of 1924 formalized a national origins quota to limit the number of immigrants that were able to enter the United States, completely excluding Asian immigrants, adding literacy tests, and selecting based on foreign population numbers.

It’s fascinating to see an American author feature immigration as an important-enough political talking point to have his characters briefly mention it within the text. But immigrants lusting after the American Dream and threatening the white racial makeup of high New York society were by no means Fitzgerald’s main thematic emphasis when writing The Great Gatsby. I’d even venture to say immigrants like myself were not his primary or intended audience, either; in fact, Fitzgerald purports that the biggest chasers and upholders of this illusion of the American Dream are American-born citizens themselves. 

To various degrees, there is an air of dissatisfaction expressed by all of the characters we meet through Nick Carraway’s narration, and particularly by the wealthy and beautiful young socialites who navigate a new era of decadence and promise by avoiding their realities in order to chase illusions. Daisy and Tom Buchanan, for example, follow traditional gender roles and try to put up appearances despite living in a loveless and unfulfilling marriage—Daisy as a conventional wife and young mother under Tom’s forceful and cruel masculinity and dominance. Jordan Baker, the fascinating feminist picture of a Jazz Age “modern woman,” confesses to Nick to having cheated her way into golfing stardom and social prominence. Our narrator soon learns that nobody actually is who they claim to be, and the blinding glitz and glamor of a 1920s upstate New York welcoming an age of prosperity and innovation is little more than a product of dog-eat-dog smoke and mirrors.

Jay Gatsby himself is not exempt from this desire to live a fantasy, and if anything, he’s the most affected by the consequences of his own fabrications. But there is always a fondness for him from the narrator, who reflects on the protagonist retrospectively: “Just why these inventions were a source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North Dakota, isn’t easy to say. James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career… So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end” (Gatsby 104). You can’t help but feel sympathy for the titular character, a hopeless romantic at heart, when seeing how his intricate self-reinvention, this creation of a “character” that he built from a desire to return to a time past, is all for naught in the end. Despite how hard he strives to divorce himself from his troubled past by cosplaying a life of wealth and status, and how ardently he reaches for the green light at Daisy’s dock, his greatest desires will always remain just out of his grasp. But that’s exactly the point—the allure and fantasy of fulfilling the elusive American Dream will always be just that, a fantasy, a mirage; something always just out of reach to keep us pushing ourselves to try to achieve this unattainable goal. 

There’s no way that Fitzgerald could have predicted either the acclaim and impact of the Great Gatsby on American literature and culture, OR the repetition of history as the very socioeconomic and political conversations that inspired him to write Gatsby are refreshed for a new set of citizens over a century later. But his work and ours is far from over. Those who refuse to learn and reflect on history are doomed to repeat it. So how about we pick up a book and start reflecting, yeah?