The Great Gatsby

The most studied short novel in the English language, The Great Gatsby packs its verdict on the American Dream into just 47,094 words — a precision that amplifies rather than limits its force. F. Scott Fitzgerald published it in 1925 to commercial failure: only 20,000 copies sold in his lifetime. The revival was military: after Fitzgerald died in 1940, the U.S. Army distributed 155,000 copies to soldiers in World War II, and the novel never went out of print again. Today it sells approximately 500,000 copies per year and is the most commonly assigned novel in American high school education — a portrait of the Jazz Age so exact that it gave the culture the phrase 'the American Dream.' It is 30% shorter than the average novel on this list, yet has outsold each of them annually since 2000.