When F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was published 90 years ago, bowing in on April 10, 1925, it did not take the reading world by storm. Critics were hostile or indifferent, chiding Fitzgerald for vulgarity, triviality, and jealousy over the fortunes of his social betters. Fitzgerald’s friend Edmund Wilson had his doubts, calling the too often drunk Fitzgerald a “sloppy boor” and his book an appropriately sloppy mess. Even Fitzgerald wondered if he should have written his book less as drama and more as satire, as fit his original title, Trimalchio in West Egg—Trimalchio being the wealthy Roman who funded some spectacularly bad behavior commemorated in Petronius’ Satyricon 19 centuries earlier.

Worse for Fitzgerald, as his editor, Max Perkins, sadly reported, was that the novel refused to budge from the bookstore shelves. It sat and sat, taking an uncommonly long time in those readerly days to sell out of its first run, and it seemed destined to be forgotten.

Fitzgerald died in 1940. America went to war—and, perhaps improbably, Gatsby was reissued in a paperback edition distributed to the armed forces. After the war, it started to appear on curricula, and it began to sell—and sell, and sell, reportedly moving more than half a million copies each year to date.

Gatsby has received critical re-evaluation as well. Long gone are the accusations of vulgarity and the subsequent dismissal of the book as an exaggerated period piece. In this new gilded age, it looks, if anything, like an understatement, supplanted by the likes of American Psycho and Bonfire of the Vanities. Gatsby—or Gatz, as we learn—uses an illicit fortune to buy both people and distance from them. People in turn attach to him like leeches, even though he refuses to let them know too much of who he is. Those drunken idlers spend their own fortunes away on yachts and horses, above the law and a step ahead of it precisely because they’re so rich. Until, that is, they commit one crime too many....

I think of Gatsby as quintessentially American, impossible to have come from elsewhere, and it’s a book I always have in my bag when I travel abroad as a reminder of what I’ve left, for good and ill. It’s widely reckoned as one of the greatest American novels ever written, if not the great American novel. Moreover, it repays what has been dubbed “centireading,” that is, readi ng a book a hundred times for maximal immersion. (The practice owes to the actor Anthony Hopkins, who has said that he reads a script a hundred times before committing a line to film.) Like all the best books, The Great Gatsby reveals something new on each reading. It remains influential enough, too, that last year it spawned a couple of well-received books, one of which, Sarah Churchwell’s Careless People, earned a Kirkus star as one of the best books of literary history to have appeared in recent memory.

Dorothy Parker, said Wilson, went to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Hollywood funeral in 1940, looked at his body in the casket, and, echoing Gatsby’s Nick Carroway, muttered, “The poor son-of-a-bitch.” True enough—but he gave us an unforgettable and, yes, great book.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.