In the spring of 1940, it was F. Scott Fitzgerald is concerned about “”Great Gatsby“Fifteen years have passed since the publication of the novel, and the author has only a little.Gatsby The modern library had to be removed because it did not sell, which was a blow. ”Two months later, in a letter to MaxWell Perkins, his long editor in Scribner’s, Fitzgerald asked whether cheap re -printing“ might keep ”keeping Gatsby In the public eye, “and” make it favorite with the classrooms, the professor, and lovers of English prose – anyone. “However, his hopes were dark It is a non -popular book? “Perkins asked king Her chance? “Seven months later, Fitzgerald died.
In the century a tank, in April 1925, “Gatsby” was adapted to the film at least five times; Installed on the stage, with and without musical numbers; Until it turned into a video game, in the style of Super Mario BROS early in the fifties, Scribner was selling more than thirty thousand copies each year, and by the end of the 1960s this number was closer to half a million. With some estimates, total sales around the world have now become more than thirty copies. How did “Gatsby” greatly derive, and why have long been exposed?
The answer is the English school in high school. More than any literary award or celebrity books club, the school curriculum is the American reading. This year alone, approximately seventeen million students will occupy their seats in high school semester, and many of them will sit into a copy of “The Great Gatsby”. For decades, Fitzgerald’s novel was among the most frequent texts in American secondary schools, or at least, pretending to be read – has become a national ritual. But the place of “Gatsby” in Sharia in high school was inevitable, and its way to the classroom was at best.
After the death of Fitzgerald, a wave of literature praised, and at least two of them praised his novel in the jazz era as a classic. However, although Fitzgerald’s death was good for “Gatsby”, what caused the difference was the Second World War. Beginning in 1942, a campaign to equip American soldiers was launched with “weapons in the war of ideas” – normal cover novels. The War Books Council worked, a non -profit institution consisting of publishers, critics, book sellers and library secretaries, to combat boredom and enhance morale by distributing more than a hundred and twenty books to American forces abroad. Armed services versions are designed to suit them inside a unified pocket, with augmented paper that aims to continue for at least six readings. In 1945, American soldiers were sent one hundred and fifty -five thousand copies of “The Great Gatsby”, making the novel at the end.
A few years later, in a teenager to serve his older brother in wartime and his taste in reading, “Gatsby” was cited as a specific favorite and “one is very crazy”. The fictional teenager Holden Colfield, JD Salinger “”The mask in the rye“Compared to what he reads in the English language chapter (“ I am not very crazy from Romeo and Juliet … I mean I love them, but I do not know. They are sometimes annoying. ”
Salinger’s novel appeared in 1951, the year that scientists cited as Zenith of the so -called Fitzgerald Revival. That was the year in which Arthur Mizner did.The other side of heaven“The first biography of Vitzgerald, it was published, both distinguished and encouraged the renewed interest in the author. In an attempt to take advantage of the popular” Gatsby “, the Scribner’s Scribner’s ATTLED ADITION was published from the novel in 1957. English school teacher in Bilham’s high school, New York.
Almost at the same time, the novel was taught in a course called the moral progress of a man at Westfield High School, in New Jersey. Soon after, it was listed as a preferred book of preparatory year students in Salem, Massachusetts, and was discussed in pages English magazineThe official publication of the National Council for English language teachers. In 1964, Clifton K. Hillegass- Cliffsnotes-reduced a fifty-page summary of the conspiracy of the novel and the main topics, all at the dollar price. The biography of Mizener may have been distinguished by the revival of Fitzgerald, but with the publication of Cliffsnotes, as the author wrote about the first Gatsby and Daisy kiss, “the incarnation was completed.”
These first notes of students encouraged less focus on the modern style of the book than his social criticism. The guide Tom Bouchanan, a Gatsby competitor in love and the main villain of the novel, as a white superiority, describes “annoyed by the idea of a potential transformation in the fixed economic and social system.” “But things are changing,” the study guide confirms, “Although it may not be as much as it is of turmoil and taste, Tom might think.” This, apparently, was the issue of interpretation. When a new edition of Cliffsnots was published, two years later, in 1966 (another sign of the rise of the novel in American high schools), Tom’s fear that “the white sex will be … completely immersed” was re -interpreted as “a concept anxious concern to preserve the social situation.”
Gatsby’s height in the middle of the century to the required reading was not just a matter of historical or political connection. It was also a method of method. Education scientists often tell the development of the science of teaching principles in high school and English as a struggle between two competitions of competing thought. On the one hand, there is a “focus on the student” approach by the education professor Louise M. Rosenblatt and her book of 1938, “Literature as explorationWho emphasized the ringing between work and the individual experience of each reader. On the other hand, there is a “axis of the text” known as the new criticism, associated with Cleanth Brokes and Robert Penn Warren, and their school book.Funish understanding“
About the method of reading in Brox and Varne mainly studying literature in high schools and universities alike. Instead of encouraging students to establish meaningful contacts between the life and knowledge of fictional characters, new critics taught them to search for the temple, symbolism and the subject. This has changed not only how students were asked to read but what books were appointed. A symbol full of “Gatsby” presented an ideal opportunity for teenage readers to practice new critics signature techniques. (This book also came in less than two hundred pages that was not hurt.
The 1966 Cliffsnots is attested to the importance of the growing new cash in the high school. “Wadi Al -Ramad”, “the eyes of Dr. Tj Euckleburg”, and yes, “green light at the end of the Daisy Pord” becoming newly rich symbols “I invested with meanings that go beyond conspiracy and description concerns, and to stand on the main ideas of the novel. Maybe you were taught, as you learned to read the book, and reached its climax in an article of five paragraphs about the importance of green light or many Ghatby shirts Colorful.
The new critics approach dominated the imagination of the English school curriculum for decades. However, what education scientists called “the dominance of new criticism” is not absolute. As a teacher, in the 1968 issue of English magazine“We are teachers of English, not sweet puzzles.” Many teachers continue to prefer Rosenblatt approach, and they seek to show how a novel about retreating from it without stopping in the past has what he says about the present.
According to a national survey of teachers, by the end of the 1980s, “Gatsby” was required to read in more than half of the public schools in the country, stalled.Animal farm“Just” comes “only”village“What does the novel say about materialism?” South Carolina teacher asks in a 1989 study plan about “Gatsby”. “What are the similarities between the twenties and eighties, if any?”
For Judy Wiferca, who started teaching the novel in the mid -1980s, at San Ramon Valley Secondary School, it was one of the best ways to get the eleventh grade students interested in “Gatsby” is to show a video of more than a contemporary pole. Before discussing bars in the heart of Tom and Dizy’s marriage, saw the chapter an interview with ABC News with Donald Trump and Marla Maples, his wife at the time. “They were neglected people,” Fitzgerald writes. “They destroyed things and creatures and then retreated to their money or their wide neglect, or whatever the matter that kept them together, and allowing others to clean the chaos they did.”
This would make a great passage for his anatomy in the English literature exam for the advanced placement program, which was first martyred as “Gatsby” in his article in 1982 and has not stopped since then. That year, one hundred and forty thousand students participated in one of the many program exams. In 2024, her exams were administered in English alone for about a million students, a third of the total registration in AP. Over the past fifteen years, the most popular AP English program was the English language and its composition, which advises teachers to focus on “short stories” and extracting on novels such as “GATSBY” “only if it consists of achieving a speech purpose.
At the same time, in an attempt to enhance “total and job preparation”, the state’s basic standards initiative, which was launched in 2010, was currently implemented in forty -one states, that students mainly read “media texts” (fiction, journalism, speeches) instead of literature. Despite the recent efforts by the legislative bodies of the state and active groups such as Mothers for freedom Bishops in schools have received much more attention, and the AP and Common Core curriculum have made much more than that to form what students are – not – reading.
For more than seven decades, “The Great Gatsby” used to investigate the American dream and the current health condition, to introduce students to literary technologies and the strength of close attention, and to emphasize the importance of finding a custom driver. In Nevada, the students wrote letters to Daisy and formed an investigation into Mertel. In Florida, I published one chapter Green newspaper for lightA fictional newspaper based on real historical sources. In California and Nebraska, the students gave luxury concerts in the costume of the fin, with soda to the champagne. In Texas, they put Tom on the trial. When I taught the English language from the eleventh grade, on the outskirts of Massachusetts, a funeral for Gatsby. Each student read a brief praise and then put an object representing the man in a shoe box that we have never discovered how to burial.
“My full theory of writing I can summarize in one sentence. In this, it was very successful. English in high school did not make” Gatsby “great, but it definitely kept it. The question is whether the novel can survive for another hundred years. ♦
