As ‘Gatsby’ Turns 100, Looking Back at Great American Novels

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” first published in 1925, is one of the nation’s greatest novels. Here’s a selection of the Journal’s Masterpiece columns on it and other singularly American works that stand among the best.

‘The Age of Innocence,’ by Edith Wharton

When a New York Times reviewer announced Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” in 1920, he hailed its critique of the outdated values of 1870s New York high society: “Mrs. Wharton is all for the new,” he wrote, “and against the old.”

Reading Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel today, we might tend to agree. Her protagonist, Newland Archer, married to a wife he no longer loves, falls for the exotic Countess Ellen Olenska, a woman estranged from her despicable Polish husband. Bound on every side by unspoken rules, and under the watchful eyes of the clans of New York’s elite “Four Hundred,” these lovers edge closer to consummating their forbidden desire. But at the novel’s denouement, they are thwarted when their families send Ellen back to Europe and Archer’s wife reveals that she is pregnant with their first child. Faced with this fact, the hero gives up his dreams of a better life for the sake of the one he has. It feels like a tragedy: Love capitulates to duty, and personal desire falls to the pressure of social norms.

‘All the King’s Men,’ by Robert Penn Warren

Half a lifetime ago, I read Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” and thought it just breathtakingly wonderful, so much so that I spent money I didn’t have to buy the 1946 first edition in a fine dust jacket. Last week I decided to reread it, partly because the book is widely viewed as our finest novel about American politics. How, I wondered, does this Pulitzer Prize winner look in the tumultuous present?

Short answer: It’s still amazing.

‘The Bridge of San Luis Rey,’ by Thornton Wilder

“The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” Thornton Wilder’s 1927 novel about the cruelties of fate and the redemptive power of love, still resonates with renewed urgency.

As novelist Russell Banks notes in his introduction to a 2004 edition of the book, “We are the only species that does not know its own nature naturally and with each new generation has to be shown it anew,” adding that, “It is interesting, therefore, and possibly useful to consider this novel in the long and (at the time of this writing) still darkening shadow of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.”

‘A Confederacy of Dunces,’ by John Kennedy Toole

As another commencement season arrives this month, spilling hundreds of thousands of new graduates into the employment market, perhaps we should give each of them a copy of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces,” a comic and cautionary lesson in how not to get a job.

Written in the 1960s, but not published until 1980, “Confederacy” serves up an unlikely antihero in Ignatius Reilly, a 30-year-old living with his mother in blue-collar New Orleans. Ignatius, a medieval scholar with a master’s degree, missed a chance at a university job because he arrived for the interview without a necktie, opting for a lumber jacket instead. An odd mix of snob and slob, Ignatius mourns the loss of civility, yet sports a green hunting cap, plaid flannel shirt and “voluminous tweed trousers.” His hobbies include hating contemporary cinema, writing screeds against The Enlightenment and belching. He speaks like Mr. Belvedere but looks like Oliver Hardy. Imagine Felix Ungar caught in Oscar Madison’s body and you’ll get the picture.

‘The Friends of Eddie Coyle,’ by George V. Higgins

“Ever hear bones breaking?” asked the stocky man. “Just like a man snapping a shingle.” The stocky man was Eddie Fingers, a sobriquet he’d earned, along with a shattered hand, by making trouble for the wrong people. His real name was Coyle. He was the most famous character of the crime novelist George V. Higgins, though one would have been well-advised not to call Higgins a crime novelist to his face. He was a novelist, end of story. It simply happened that, as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, the Boston demimonde was what Higgins knew best.

‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ by John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” published in 1939, begins with a colossal description of dust: “The dawn came, but no day . . . . Houses were shut tight and cloth wedged around doors and windows, but the dust came in so thinly that it could not be seen in the air, and it settled like pollen on the chairs and tables, on the dishes.” This is a book about how the natural environment seals human destiny, even while fathoming human character as has rarely been done in literature.

‘The Great Gatsby,’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The Great Gatsby,” published 100 years ago, is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most perfectly realized work of art. It reveals a new and confident mastery of his material, a fascinating if sensational plot, deeply interesting characters, a silken style that conveys nuances of mood and feeling, and a Keatsian ability to evoke a romantic atmosphere. Fitzgerald portrays the theme of corrupted idealism and satirizes attractive but vacuous people who “played polo and were rich together.”

‘The House of the Seven Gables,’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne

When Herman Melville read “The House of the Seven Gables” in April 1851, he wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne a letter in his ebullient prose. “With great enjoyment we spent almost an hour in each separate gable,” he gushed; “it has robbed us of a day, and made us a present of a whole year of thoughtfulness.” Melville, who would publish “Moby-Dick” later that year, praised the novel’s mood and Hawthorne’s tragic imagination, and demanded a visit from his friend: “Walk down one of these mornings and see me. No nonsense; come.”

‘Ironweed,’ by William Kennedy

William Kennedy, intoxicated both by James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and by his own father’s memories of Albany, N.Y., once resolved to write an “Albany fantasy” that would “reconstitute the city’s past.” To his notes he appended an ultimatum: “Commit a decade to the creation of this book.” Anyone who has hatched and abandoned a project of such a scope will have reason to smile. Yet, by writing novel after novel of “average size,” he accomplished his goal with his celebrated Albany Cycle. “Ironweed,” the third book in the cycle, is not only a crucial part of his magnum opus but also a work of genius that stands alone, defiantly, on its own two chilblained feet.

‘Mrs. Bridge,’ by Evan S. Connell

It is the lot of certain exceptional novels to be underread and underappreciated. But for assorted reasons—perhaps they’re the frequent choice of book groups with the-road-less-taken tastes; perhaps they’re the beneficiary of grassroots evangelizing—some of these books get a second chance and a second act. They’re reappraised, rhapsodized over, sometimes reissued in a 20th- or 25th-anniversary edition with a sleek new cover and a foreword written by an admirer of the author.

One shining example is “Mrs. Bridge” (1959), a character study, by turns satirical, compassionate and sorrowful, of an upper-middle-class clubwoman and Kansas City, Mo., transplant in the years just before World War II. Its author, Evan S. Connell (1924-2013), a Kansas City native probably best known for “Son of the Morning Star,” his 1984 nonfiction account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, often said that Mrs. Bridge was modeled on his mother.

‘My Ántonia,’ by Willa Cather

‘I simply don’t care a damn what happens in Nebraska,” ranted a New York critic, “no matter who writes about it.”

Or so Willa Cather claimed. In the long leisure of the grave, the alleged scoffer may ponder how it is that a century after its September 1918 publication, Cather’s “My Ántonia,” its every page rooted in Nebraska, remains very much alive and in print—while he is neither.

‘The Sun Also Rises,’ by Ernest Hemingway

Even those who revere Ernest Hemingway’s debut novel should admit that the author was something of a scoundrel to write it. “The Sun Also Rises,” published in 1926, turned Hemingway into a literary star overnight. It also played with the reputations of several of his real-life acquaintances who appear in the book as thinly disguised versions of themselves.