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What gives a book its longevity??

In the long run what gives a book its longevity is the young people who read it. Emerson says something to the effect that every book, no matter how famous, must appear for judgment before each succeeding generation. If only one generation of young readers fails to appreciate that book, it can mean the end of the book's longevity. Young readers have continued to like F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby for generation after generation. This is simpatico because he deserves to be remembered. He was a genius. His life was tragic, and his books all seem haunted by tragedy.


The Great Gatsby is almost a hundred years old. What is it about this book that appeals to one generation after the next? The writing, of course, is beautiful. Fitzgerald writes like a poet, and the poet he most resembles is John Keats. He writes about love, and young people are especially interested in that subject, which probably explains why the novel is assigned in so many high school and college English classes. Probably most importantly, Fitzgerald writes about all the suffering that goes on among young people while they are having such a wonderful time. He brings the Jazz Age back to life, with its music and dancing which were so different and yet so much the same as today's. The Great Gatsby makes contemporary young readers identify with the young people of an extinct era. It brings to mind James Joyce's beautiful sentence in his novel Ulysses, describing the souvenirs Stephen Dedalus finds in his mother trunk after her death.



Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.


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