Celebrating its centenary on April 10 2025, The Great Gatsby endures as the defining portrait of Jazz Age extravagance and glamour — a shimmering vision of energy, affluence and possibility. Away from the brightness, however, lies a world where dreams wither beneath corruption and malice.
Observing the deepening faultlines in American society in the early 1920s, F Scott Fitzgerald guessed right: he foresaw tragedy in the country’s impulse towards grandiosity and self-destruction in its reckless dishonesty. While Gatsby doesn’t predict the Trumpian politics of 2025 in any literal sense, it perfectly captures the society that would embrace such politics a century later. The novel’s prescience lies not in foretelling specific events but in diagnosing a culture where power enjoys impunity and cruelty rubs out its traces — a society run by careless people.
The careless people in The Great Gatsby are Tom and Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy couple living on Long Island. Daisy rekindles an affair with Jay Gatsby, her former lover, but when her husband Tom, arrogant and chronically unfaithful, confronts them, she retreats into her marriage. Driving Gatsby’s car afterwards, Daisy accidentally kills Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson, in a hit-and-run, after which Tom and Daisy flee, abandoning Gatsby to his ruin.