information:extraction, stylistic:style_transfer, structural:scholar_edition, structural:reformatting
Critical reevaluation

It has been the greatest credo in my life that I would rather be an artist than a careerist. I would rather impress my image upon the soul of a people.... I would as soon be as anonymous as Rimbaud if I could feel that I had accomplished that purpose.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald in a letter to H. L. Mencken, 1934

At the time of his death, Fitzgerald believed that his life was a failure and his work was forgotten. The few critics who were familiar with his work regarded him as a failed alcoholic—the embodiment of Jazz Age decadence. In an obituary in The Nation magazine, Margaret Marshall dismissed Fitzgerald as a Jazz Age scribe "who did not fulfill his early promise—his was a fair-weather talent which was not adequate to the stormy age into which it happened, ironically, to emerge." His New York Times obituary deemed his work forever tied to an era "when gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession". In retrospective reviews that followed after his death, literary critics such as Peter Quennell dismissed his magnum opus The Great Gatsby as merely a nostalgic period piece with "the sadness and the remote jauntiness of a Gershwin tune".

Surveying these posthumous attacks, John Dos Passos opined that many literary critics in popular newspapers lacked the basic discernment about the art of writing. "The strange thing about the articles that came out about Fitzgerald's death," Dos Passos later recalled, "was that the writers seemed to feel that they didn't need to read his books; all they needed for a license to shovel them into the ashcan was to label them as having been written in such and such a period now past."

Within one year after his death, Edmund Wilson completed Fitzgerald's unfinished fifth novel The Last Tycoon using the author's extensive notes, and he included The Great Gatsby within the edition, sparking new interest and discussion among critics. Amid World War II, The Great Gatsby gained further popularity when the Council on Books in Wartime distributed free Armed Services Edition copies to American soldiers serving overseas. The Red Cross distributed the novel to prisoners in Japanese and German POW camps. By 1945, over 123,000 copies of The Great Gatsby had been distributed among U.S. troops. By 1960—thirty-five years after the novel's original publication—the book was selling 100,000 copies per year. This renewed interest led The New York Times editorialist Arthur Mizener to proclaim the novel a masterwork of American literature.

By the 21st century, The Great Gatsby had sold millions of copies, and the novel is required reading in many high school and college classes. Despite its publication nearly a century ago, the work continues to be cited by scholars as relevant to understanding contemporary America. According to Professor John Kuehl of New York University: "If you want to know about Spain, you read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. If you want to know about the South, you read Faulkner. If you want to know what America's like, you read The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald is the quintessential American writer."