In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald was sick, suffering from the effects of alcoholism, unable to pay his debts, and seemingly incapable of writing new work. The Great Gatsby, now considered one of the greatest American novels, had sold poorly even when it was first published in 1925, and by the late 1930s readers dismissed the book as a relic of that roaring decade that came crashing down with the stock market in 1929. Who would want to read a story about the wild parties and illicit affairs of the rich and privileged while slogging through the Great Depression?
Three years later, after attempting to restart his career as a Hollywood screenwriter (he supplied some unused lines for Gone with the Wind), he died in his mistress’ apartment of a heart attack. His final royalty check, an unlucky $13.13, turned out to be all from his own purchases.
The same year that Fitzgerald, suffering his own personal depression, chased the dream of success to Hollywood in 1937, acclaimed photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White took the photograph below for Life magazine showing flood victims in Louisville lining up for relief. The image became an iconic depiction of the contrast between the idealized promise of the “American Way” and the much starker reality for many Americans.
Bourke-White’s image depicts the tension between billboard’s boasts of prosperity over a line of people in need, the promise of the American Dream and the crushing reality of American inequities. While the billboard celebrates the nation’s standard of living, around 20% of Americans were out of a job during a mid-Depression economic downturn. And the specter of racial segregation haunts the image. The grinning white family in their car hover menacingly over the line-up, smiling carelessly, oblivious to the suffering beneath them. The prosperity of the family compared to the obvious need of the men and women in line for food highlights the hollowness of the slogans surrounding them. The promise of wealth expressed by the image of the white family in the billboard was withheld, by law or by custom, from the African Americans standing beneath it. For them, as for millions of other Americans struggling through the Depression, the American Dream, that promise of endless prosperity for anyone willing to simply reach out and take it, seemed cruelly just out of reach. In fact, Bourke-White’s photograph offers the bleak possibility that there actually is no way like the American way. The dream is simply that – a dream.
Fitzgerald pursued that dream of success his whole life. He gained literary celebrity in the early 1920s, and he and his wife Zelda lived recklessly and extravagantly, attending drunken parties with the rich and famous. He recreated this world in The Great Gatsby, drawing directly from his own experience, and intuition of where all this thoughtless consumption would lead.
Beneath all the wild parties, fast cars, and secret affairs the novel is known for, Fitzgerald warned of this future through the story of a man recklessly chasing the American dream of prosperity, dangerously believing in the promise that if you just work hard enough all things are possible. The novel tells us from the beginning that a foul dust floats in the wake of this dream, the American Dream.
We know this. Others suffer for the fulfillment of our desires. When we relentlessly pursue the next thing to consume, we can’t escape the harm we inflict on others in the wake of our pursuit. We participate in systems that amplify inequalities like the one Bourke-White exposes in her photograph. We drive fast cars, wear fast fashion, eat fast food, drawn to the allure and glamor of the American Way, and hope others are ready to bear the costs.
Begin reading the novel knowing that there are contradictions between the beauty of the dreams we strive to fulfill, and the ugliness required to get what we want. Like the narrator of the novel, we can find Gatsby both gorgeous for his capacity to hope, and have scorn for everything he stands for. As Fitzgerald wrote while suffering his crack-up in the late 1930s, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise” (The Crack-Up, 1936). This novel continues to be read because we recognize in Gatsby our own desire to achieve our dreams at any cost, fearing the time the cost of our pursuits will come due, seeing the coming crack-up yet determined to make things otherwise.
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