In America, we are taught that canonical literature foregrounds the experiences of white people. Read: To its earliest reviewers, Gatsby was anything but great I was a 20-year-old English major, concentrating in African American literature at a historically Black college, and I still needed that permission.

In it, Carlyle Van Thompson, a professor of African American and American literature at Medgar Evers College, argues that Fitzgerald “guilefully characterizes Jay Gatsby as a ‘pale’ Black individual who passes for white.” I read this sentence twice, feeling like I had finally been granted license to enter the novel, to see myself in it, to make my way through the prose and develop my own interpretations. I turned to the secondary literature and found a chapter that offered an unexpected perspective on Gatsby’s race in a 2004 book titled The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination. If the race of an American character is not specified, we assume the character is white.

If I hoped to pass my upper-level literature course, I needed to find a way in. (One of my high-school teachers read Roots aloud to us for 45 minutes each class period-we made it through all 888 pages.) Stymied by the structure and language of Gatsby, I couldn’t get a handle on the characters either. Like my students, I hadn’t been prepared by my public education for such a text. Fitzgerald’s coupling of lyrical passages with a minimalist plot, full of fits and starts, proved too great a challenge for me.

I, too, had struggled with Gatsby when I first read the book-and I had been a junior in college. More advanced readings, I realized, would have to be tabled. Eventually, one brave soul would raise a hand. “Surely,” I’d say with as much enthusiasm as possible, “you think this part is funny!” And I’d launch into a reading of Nick Carraway’s opening narration: “Frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon.” Silence. Any appeal I made to the sheer pleasures of the text fell flat. The teenagers in my classroom-all children of color living in an impoverished rural community in South Florida, many of them first-generation Americans whose parents had come from Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, or Guatemala-simply did not understand a majority of the words on the page. I succeeded, only to be deflated: My students fought Gatsby from the beginning.

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For ios instal The Great Gatsby