How ‘Gatsby’ Went From A Moldering Flop To A Great American Novel

When book critic Maureen Corrigan first read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in high school, she was unimpressed.

“Not a lot happens in Gatsby,” Corrigan tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “It’s not a plot-driven novel and I also thought, ‘Eh, it’s another novel about rich people.’ And I grew up in a blue-collar community.”

She also couldn’t relate, she says, because it doesn’t feature any likeable female characters.

“In fact, that’s one of the reasons why Fitzgerald thought it didn’t sell well in 1925,” Corrigan says, “because there are no likeable female characters and women drive the fiction market.”

But today Corrigan considers The Great Gatsby to be the greatest American novel — and it’s the novel she loves more than any other. She’s written a new book about it called So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.

Full piece:
http://www.npr.org/2014/09/08/346346588/how-gatsby-went-from-a-moldering-flop-to-a-great-american-novel