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The Great Gatsby
"The Great Gatsby," published by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925, follows the mysterious, wealthy Jay Gatsby's obsessive pursuit of Daisy Buchanan against the backdrop of Jazz Age excess and moral emptiness on Long Island, narrated by Gatsby's neighbor Nick Carraway. The novel sold modestly during Fitzgerald's own lifetime and was considered a relative commercial disappointment at the time of his death in 1940, before a dramatic critical and popular reassessment during and after World War II established it as a defining work of American literature. Its precise, controlled prose and its critique of the American Dream's hollowness beneath Jazz Age glamour became a fixture of American high school and college curricula, and the novel's ending line — about boats beating "against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" — is among the most frequently quoted closing lines in American fiction. The Great Gatsby's combination of its dramatic posthumous critical rehabilitation and its enduring critique of American ambition has made it one of the most significant American novels ever published.
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Moby-Dick
"Moby-Dick," published by Herman Melville in 1851, follows the obsessive Captain Ahab's pursuit of the white whale that maimed him, narrated by the sailor Ishmael aboard the whaling ship Pequod, blending adventure narrative with extended digressions on whaling, philosophy, and religion. The novel was a commercial failure and received largely negative reviews upon its initial publication, and Melville died in 1891 believing himself to be a largely forgotten writer, decades before a major critical revival in the 1920s established the book as a cornerstone of American literature. Its opening line, "Call me Ishmael," became one of the most recognized first lines in American fiction, and the novel's ambitious blending of adventure story, philosophical meditation, and encyclopedic detail about the whaling industry made it a frequent subject of literary scholarship examining its unconventional structure. Moby-Dick's combination of its dramatic critical rehabilitation decades after Melville's death and its ambitious, genre-defying structure has made it one of the most significant novels in American literary history.
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