"The Great Gatsby" at 87

The Great Gatsby's original jacket

The Great Gatsby was published 87 years ago today. While few brought out a cake, noisemakers, and party hats to celebrate the day, the book doesn't need any hoopla. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel has a name recognition few American books possess. The work is something students read in high school or college (or what more and more Americans now fatuously call "university"). I read it when I was a teenager, and the experience was akin to eating "something that was good for you."

Ironically, Gatsby was not the author's first choice for the title of his novel about East Egg and West Egg. Fitzgerald wanted to call his book Trimalchio, allegedly after a character from Petronius' Satyricon. Fortunately, a calmer head, in the form of the great editor Maxwell Perkins, prevailed, and suggested a contemporary, recognizably American title.

Unquestionably, The Great Gatsby is an American book, even though Fitzgerald wrote much of it while he was living in Europe. His generation cared about writing in ways our current generation is devoted to self-promotion. Although autobiographical elements have, over the years, been associated with Gatsby, Fitzgerald did not write a thinly disguised memoir. He was too good a writer and far more intellectually ambitious than that.