The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald compressed an entire civilization's tragedy into 180 pages. The dream, the corruption, the green light. Its prose is the most imitated in American literature; its position as the most-assigned novel in American high schools and colleges has held for decades. Modern Library ranked it second.
"I hate every character in it. I hate the supposedly brilliant prose." The milder camp lands on "a good book, though it is so ridiculously overrated." The cast is the sticking point, rich people unhappy about riches, observed by a narrator too passive to matter, and "the overall shallowness of the characters frustrated me" is the polite version. Daisy barely exists on the page; one reader notes "things that came out of her mouth were things that she cried," sobbed, or laughed, an absence where the object of two men's ruin should stand. One famous review is a single line. At least it is short.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
