F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was a literary hit but a commercial dud when first published in the 1920s and the author unfortunately did not live long enough to see his book revived and taken up to the summit of literary Mount Olympus in the 1940s. Indeed, a serious contender for the “Great American Novel,” it landed at #2 on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 greatest 20th-century English-language novels just after Joyce’s Ulysses. Aside from being a brilliant novel, it also spawned multiple adaptations including three films: first with Alan Ladd, and then Robert Redford, and most recently Leonardo Di Caprio in the title role. T.S. Eliot wrote to Fitzgerald about the book: “it has interested and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for a number of years…In fact it seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.”