"Among the Whisperings and the Champagne and the Stars"

Today is the ninety-third anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby. It's been 93 years since Jimmy Gatz sailed with Dan Cody, 93 years since Jay Gatsby reached for the light across the bay, since Daisy Buchanan cried into beautiful shirts, since Myrtle Wilson loved another man so hard it killed both her and her husband.

It's been ninety-three years. Most of the babies that were born on the day this book was published have lived out their lives. Scott Fitzgerald has been dead for almost eighty years, his wife Zelda for seventy, and Scottie, their daughter, more than thirty. So why, after all this time, do we still read The Great Gatsby in classrooms? What could high school students living almost an entire century after the characters in this novel possibly have in common with them? To put it simply: a lot.

The Great Gatsby is filled with beautiful language, epic loves, shattering heartbreaks, emotional turmoil. If you want to find any one of those things? Step into the life of a teenager. Anywhere. At any moment in time. These kids that read Gatsby in high school classrooms, hate hard and love even harder. Emotion runs their lives; they're consumed by it. Much like the characters in Gatsby.

Jay Gatsby is desperate...and in love. With a girl. With an idea. With a time that felt better, safer, brighter. Who hasn't felt like that? Who hasn't been in love with something, or someone? Everyone wants to fix what they feel to be shortcomings, to show themselves as better...to win.

Daisy Buchanan is selfish, she is defeated, she is beautiful, fickle, empowered, weak. This girl is a character that is built to be hated. She let money and power and men run her life. And somehow we can see our enemies, our friends, ourselves in her. We find in Daisy Buchanan all of the bitter pieces of the people we love anyway.

Nick Carraway is a fiercely loyal friend. He loves and admires Gatsby, and while on some level he realizes that Gatsby has many faults, he can't truly believe in them. He puts Jay on a pedestal, and doesn't everyone have that person? That person you can just love and love no matter what.

There are parts of life, of literature, and of language, that are timeless. The loves and the heartbreaks, the dreams and the shortcomings of the characters that drank and danced through the jazz age, are mirrored today in the kids and teachers and scholars that crack open Gatsby's spine and drown in that world, that isn't really like theirs...but is.

If the word "classic" could describe any timeless piece of art best, I believe that piece of art to be The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: "You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say." I cannot even begin to express how grateful I am, how lucky we are, that Gatsby was said. Happy Anniversary, Old Sport. It's been an honor to teach, to read, to experience a story so worth writing.