The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel sold only 20,000 copies in his lifetime and was declared a commercial failure. After Fitzgerald died in 1940, the U.S. Army distributed 155,000 copies to soldiers during World War II, and the book 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. Its 47,094 words constitute the most studied short novel in the English language — a portrait of the Jazz Age so precise it invented the cultural concept of the "American Dream."