As an undergraduate, I was an English major, so it was a real treat for me to have the chance to reread one the classics of American literature, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby this spring. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the novel’s publishing. My essay to mark the occasion recently appeared in Law & Liberty, and you can check it out here. The occasion prompted me to dig up another essay I wrote several years ago about “Benediction,” one of Fitzgerald’s few stories with an explicitly Catholic theme (check it out here).
As much as any other book, I think, Gatsby can stake a claim to be the Great American Novel, in part because the novel itself grapples with the question of what it really means to be “great.” Equally important, it wrestles with the nature of the American character. It is an elegantly slim novel but, as I realized while writing and rewriting my reflection on it and still feeling like I couldn’t quite do it justice, it is taut with beauty, irony, and subtle meaning.
Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 