In 1816, John Keats wrote in his poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” that when he encountered George Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, it filled him with limitless excitement. As he put it, “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken.” It is, unfortunately, more likely that when a high school student is presented with a copy of a similarly lauded literary masterpiece, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, they will not share Keats’s sense of giddy thrill but will instead complain. 

The Great Gatsby is possibly the great American novel. And, although blessedly short at a mere 180 pages, it carries the usual imprimatur of classic literature regularly assigned as homework, namely that it’s boring. Many teenagers have yawned through their studies of Fitzgerald’s novel, unimpressed by its jazz age setting, brilliant evocation of romantic and sexual obsession, and the luxurious richness of its prose.