The Great Gatsby and the Modernist American Century
F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925, at the start of the American century. What does this loved novel of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ reveal about the cultural sources of American power in today’s world?
This book recommendation is part of my World History Tour of World Powers series. It is week nine of my tour of the USA, when I look at culture and a classic from literary modernism’s greatest year, 1925. The full program is attached.
On Wednesday, in my deep dive, I will explore how American cultural power rose and then waned over the remainder of the American century. Is American cultural hegemony over?
Readers may want to check my profiles of the American winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature in the Nobel Archive including the first five winners from the USA: Sinclair Lewis (1930), Eugene O’Neill (1936), Pearl Buck (1938), William Faulkner (1949), and that expatriate American concealed in Anglican manners, Tom (T.S.) Eliot (1948).
The Lasting Love of the Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby routinely tops the Anglo-American lists of the best novels of 1925, which The Guardian celebrated as “literary modernism’s greatest year.”
The appeal of the story is however not its modernist style. Its experimentation is light touch within the modernist tradition. It appeals to a consumer market, but does not demand from its readers the strict attention to high cultural allusion and daring experimentation of European modernist literature. It is a much easier read than the European modernists, such as Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, Virginia Woolf or James Joyce.
The Great Gatsby appeals as a coming-of-age story of the American Century. It is celebrated as the ‘quintessential American novel’ of the Jazz Age, the USA’s adolescent party before assuming the responsibilities of the American century.
By the 1920s the modern world had been born all around the world, but the world was also in crisis. The USA shared many cultural experiences with, and was influenced by, other great powers of Europe, Russia, China and India, the other great civilisation states on our world tour. F. Scott Fitzgerald himself lived as an émigré in Paris in the 1920s, where all these cultures of the world lived in a cosmopolitan hothouse of mutual exchange.
But there were sharp differences too. Wars, civil wars, massacres like Amritsar, economic catastrophes like the German hyperinflation, and colonial imperial repression blighted those other great powers. The USA suffered too, but not as much. The USA in the 1920s surged with its newfound status as the world’s leading industrial and financial power. The stock market soared. Rural Americans migrated to cities and suburbs to staff the new economy. The consumer age began across the world, but most conspicuously in America. Many households purchased their first automobiles, radios, and household appliances on newly available consumer credit.
These newly enriched consumers from all social groups crashed against the constraints of inherited American culture. The USA’s Protestant cultural legacy and Progressive era social reform led to the prohibition of alcohol in 1919. This created a culture and economy of crime, illicit consumption and class hypocrisy, dramatised in The Great Gatsby. The USA’s racial segregation legacy bestowed a greater gift. Jazz emerged as an international musical culture of liberation from the old world, as popular in Berlin and Shanghai as it was in Chicago. Women campaigned for suffrage, implemented birth control, read the works of European and Russian feminists, donned new fashions, and claimed new freedoms.
The social order seemed fluid. Everything was possible. All that was solid seemed to melt into air. But this was the glimmer magic of the modern age. The Great Gatsby points to the tragedies to be read between the lines of that age of American adolescence. Its legacy lasts because it foretells the crash to come.
“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
The Story of The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate and World War I veteran who moves to Long Island, New York, to work in the bond business. Nick rents a small house in West Egg, a wealthy area populated by the nouveau riche, next to the extravagant mansion of Jay Gatsby, a millionaire who hosts lavish parties.
Across the bay in East Egg, the more established elite reside, including Nick’s cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her wealthy, arrogant husband, Tom. Nick reconnects with Daisy and meets her friend, Jordan Baker, a cynical professional golfer, who reveals that Tom is having an affair with Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a mechanic in the impoverished "valley of ashes" between West Egg and New York City.
Nick is eventually invited to one of Gatsby’s parties, and meets the great man himself. Gatsby, it turns out, has been fixated on Nick because of his connection to Daisy. Gatsby and Daisy had been in love five years earlier, but their relationship ended when Gatsby went to war and Daisy married Tom. Gatsby, born James Gatz to a poor family, reinvented himself as a wealthy man through dubious means, including bootlegging alcohol, all to win Daisy back.
Gatsby asks Nick to arrange a reunion with Daisy, and the two rekindle their romance. Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy is tied to his idealized vision of her and his belief that he can recreate the past. However, Daisy is torn between her lingering feelings for Gatsby and her comfortable life with Tom. During a tense confrontation at the Plaza Hotel in New York, Gatsby demands that Daisy renounce her love for Tom, but she cannot bring herself to do so. Tom exposes Gatsby’s criminal activities, shattering Daisy’s illusions about him.
On the drive back to Long Island, Daisy, driving Gatsby’s car, accidentally hits and kills Myrtle Wilson, who had run into the street after a fight with Tom. Gatsby takes the blame to protect Daisy. Myrtle’s husband, George, devastated and misled by Tom, believes Gatsby is both Myrtle’s lover and her killer. He shoots Gatsby in his mansion pool before taking his own life.
Nick is left to arrange Gatsby’s funeral, but few attend, highlighting the emptiness of Gatsby’s wealth and the superficiality of his social circle. Disillusioned, Nick severs ties with Jordan and returns disillusioned to the Midwest. The novel ends with Nick’s meditation on the dreams of America’s New World and its Modern Promise.
And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
(F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, pp. 187-188)
But the dream dissipated in the “dark fields of the republic.” Still, America believed that the prize would not elude the hunter forever; that the frontier culture could outrun history. Fitzgerald, like a true modernist, saw the past was the stronger runner.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
(Final sentence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 188)
The Lost Generation of American Modernism
The Great Gatsby expressed rival modernist visions. While European (including Russian) modernism explored the limits of high culture with depth, shock and radical questioning, American modernism oriented itself around consumer spectacle, popular fashion and material display. Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain, in which, from memory, the only American characters are Mexican. Wallace Stevens, who published Harmonium in 1923, wrote “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”
In ways, F. Scott Fitzgerald lived out this rivalry in his own mind. His novel critiqued the hollow materialism of American culture, even if it is loved for its depiction of the flappers, fashions, free drinking and dances of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald himself fled this shallow America to live as an expatriate in Paris. He joined a large group of American expatriates in Europe, particularly in Paris. For an alcoholic American like Fitzgerald, the weak franc, cultural freedom, and escape from Prohibition in Paris were irresistible. Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein were among them, but so too were many businessmen and wealthy tourists. Hemingway would call the group of writers, artists, and intellectuals, the “Lost Generation.”
The Europeans were both repelled and attracted by these expatriates and American modernism. But they could not fail to notice. The aviator Charles Lindbergh was one of many symbols of the “high courage and dash of young America.”
“That energy – so obvious in the cultural artifacts, forms, and personalities that America exported, whether they were Hollywood’s epics or slapstick comedies; ragtime, jazz, or the Charleston; bobbed, cigarette-smoking, gin-swilling flappers; exotic sensualists like Josephine Baker; or hard-living expatriates like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald – that unrelenting and unrepentant energy was unavoidable. It was loud and brash. Most moderns were enchanted.”
Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: the Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (1989), p. 268
The 1920s marked the beginning of America's cultural dethronement of the Old World. It appropriated Paris to the Western frontier of Greater Europe and called it ‘Western Civilization’. It corresponded with economic and geopolitical realities, and the emergence of the American hegemony project, as I discussed here. The Nobel Prize Committee marked the dates in which the popular modern culture of America overwhelmed the leading modernist culture of Germany. In 1929 Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Another German (Heinrich Böll) would not win until 1972. In 1930 Sinclair Lewis, the popular novelist, became the first American to win the prize. In the four decades until Böll’s prize, USA writers won the Nobel Prize seven times.
After the war, a new generation of émigré European and German intellectuals, including Thomas Mann, would renew American belief in its cultural ascendancy. This astonishing generation included many of the defining intellectuals of the twentieth century, including Hannah Arendt, who I discussed with Samantha Rose Hill (Hannah Arendt’s Vision of Freedom | Walter Benjamin's Poetry of History). They experienced America as a salvation. They found refuge in a republic shielded from the worst of war. It would lead Hannah Arendt to believe that:
“It has become rather obvious that Western civilization has its last chance of survival in an Atlantic community.”
Arendt, On Revolution, quoted in my post, Atlantic Romantics: How America forgot its Greater European Past 5 February 2025
But, as I will explore in my deep dive on Wednesday, F. Scott Fitzgerald may have seen the American future more clearly in his bitter return to the Old World.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
(F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 188)
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Great article. I always saw the book as a critique of the American dream in that the elite WASPs, who are clearly painted as total nutcases by Fitzgerald, will never accept any one outside of their own into their club, no matter how rich or refined they are. For all its bombast as the new free world, the US is just a mirrored class system of England and its founding fathers. Nick, the narrator is an outsider too, like Fitzgerald, and as an Irish American, Fitzgerald was well aware of how the English elites had taken over the US. Great book.