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How “The Great Gatsby” took over high school

The classroom staple turns a hundred.

In the century since its début, in April, 1925, “Gatsby” has been adapted for film at least five times; mounted on the stage, with and without musical numbers; and even turned into a video game, in the style of Super Mario Bros. As early as the nineteen-fifties, Scribner’s was selling more than thirty thousand copies each year, and by the end of the sixties that figure was closer to half a million. It was so successful that, four years later, the publisher followed it up with an expanded School Edition, which included a foreword, a study guide, and discussion questions written by Albert K. Ridout, a high-school English teacher in Pelham, New York. The “valley of ashes,” the “eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg,” and, yes, “the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock” become newly important, rich symbols “invested with meanings that go beyond the concerns of plot and characterization, standing for the main ideas of the novel and .

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