“The Great Gatsby” is a novel that, in the authoritative Oxford list “The Top Hundred Books of the Century,” placing ahead of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” took second place—losing only to Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
Jazz is the key word that can “open” the essence and meaning of the novel. America, 1925—the time of “Prohibition” and gangster “showdowns,” the time of fabulous parties organized by “new Americans” against the backdrop of widespread poverty. With this very novel, Fitzgerald “created” the generation that would later be called “the Lost Generation.”