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When F. Scott Fitzgerald suffered his fatal heart attack in 1940, the New York Times, then, as now, a bellwether for the literary sentiments of the US professional classes, summed up his career by echoing H. L. Mencken's searing take on The Great Gatsby in 1925: "This story [Gatsby] is obviously unimportant."1Despite his early literary fame, then, the Fitzgerald mania that engulfed the US cultural scene in the wake of World War II was anything but inevitable. Rescued from obscurity largely through the rise of New Criticism, but also via active government intervention, The Great Gatsby was a best seller throughout the 1950s and 1960s while Fitzgerald competed against the likes of Henry James and Edith Wharton to be crowned the best American author of the time.2So complete and swift was The Great Gatsby's ascent to the status of Great American Novel that by 1950 Lionel Trilling in The Liberal Imagination could claim that Gatsby "stand[s] for America itself."3The historical context at mid-century, though, makes this rise puzzling: why, at the moment that the United States had established itself as a democratic superpower, did US readers curl up with this particular American tragedy, one that culminates in defeat, displacement, and loss?
While the bulk of academic criticism of the novel has seen it as a window into 1920s US society, turning from a focus on Gatsby's initial publication in 1925 to its first years as a best seller in the late 1940s provides one way to understand the links between the novel's canonization and its ongoing appeal in the second half of the twentieth century. Reading The Great Gatsby as Cold War readers did raises alternative questions about the novel and its relation to US culture. If, as scholars such as Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Wolfgang Iser, and Janice Radway, among others, contend, textual meanings are constantly remade in different times and for different audiences, there is no reason to privilege the moment of origin over the moment of reception. Such a temporal shift provides new insight into Gatsby's complex utopianism as suggested by postwar critics' use of the term "American Dream" and the role this utopianism played in the novel's aesthetic...