Dreams in Decay: The Enduring Allure of The Great Gatsby

There are books that feel like they were written in a single, gasping breath—compressed with longing, regret, and the shimmer of things just out of reach. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, first published in 1925 and famously ignored in its own time, is one such book. Fewer than 200 pages long, it is a novel obsessed with the illusion of grandeur and the ache that follows its inevitable collapse. Nearly a century later, that ache still resonates—haunting and beautiful, like the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. The story, as told through the reserved and increasingly disillusioned…