Yes, The Great Gatsby Is Banned!

Jay Gatsby throws lavish parties at his West Egg mansion, all in hopes of recapturing the attention of Daisy Buchanan, who lives across the bay. Nick Carraway, the narrator, gets pulled into Gatsby’s orbit and watches the whole doomed enterprise collapse over the course of a single summer. F. Scott Fitzgerald published it in 1925 to mixed reviews and modest sales. It didn’t become a canonical American novel until after his death.

The most significant challenge came in 1987, when the Baptist College of Charleston, South Carolina objected to “language and sexual references.” That same year, Florida’s Bay County School District challenged it. Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene schools raised concerns in 2008. The most notable recent ban came in 2020, when Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District voted to remove Gatsby along with four other classics from the high school curriculum, citing sexual references and language. Community backlash was swift, and the decision drew national attention.

Why You Should Read This

Gatsby is 180 pages and every sentence carries weight. Fitzgerald wrote about money the way only someone who’d both had it and lost it could: with precision and longing and disgust all at once. The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock is probably the most famous symbol in American literature, and it earns every ounce of that reputation.

The book is about wanting something so badly you build your entire life around it, and then discovering that the thing you wanted doesn’t exist and probably never did. That’s not just Gatsby’s story. It’s the American story, the gap between the promise and the delivery. Fitzgerald nailed it in 1925 and it hasn’t stopped being true. If a 100-year-old novel still makes people uncomfortable enough to ban, it’s probably touching a nerve worth examining.