What is the Enduring Appeal of The Great Gatsby?

That's the question recently posed by Intelligent Life.

From the article...

First published in 1925, “The Great Gatsby” has never lost its allure. Last year “Gatz”, a six-and-a-half-hour stage adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, was a sell-out hit at New York’s Public Theatre. Everyone is now buzzing about Baz Luhrmann’s screen remake of “Gatsby”, now being filmed in Australia with Leonardo di Caprio in the title role that was once Robert Redford’s (pictured above). A musical adaptation of the novel is set to premiere on September 30th at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in Manhattan. Professor friends of mine tell me that no American work of literature excites their students so much as Fitzgerald’s rueful romantic taxonomy of American dreams and fantasies.

The lasting power and beauty of “Gatsby” is rooted in the story’s mix of illusions and self-delusion. Jay Gatsby lives in fabulous wealth in a magnificent mansion on Long Island. He throws glamorous, exclusive parties and excites admiration and envy. Yet his wealth is the product of some shady bootlegging. Gatsby swans about in a stainless white suit, yet his glow is tarnished by his foolish obsession with Daisy, the shallow, callous wife of brutish Tom Buchanan. His rise to riches would seem to illustrate the chimerical proportions of the American dream, yet he dies—brutally, senselessly—at the hands of a garage mechanic, who mistakes Gatsby for his wife’s murderer and so shoots him in his swimming pool. Such mercurial luck and weird violence is the unexpected underside of the American promise.