In December 1940, a few days before Christmas, an obituary was printed in the New York Times with the headline: ‘Scott Fitzgerald, Author, Dies at 44.’ Though Fitzgerald was once considered the most exciting writer of his generation, the article described how ‘the promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled,’ thanks to struggles with drink, depression and writers’ block. One paragraph described The Great Gatsby as ‘the best of his books’, yet in the year of the author’s death, it sold a grand total of seven copies.

That novel had been published 15 years earlier. Its initial reception was mixed, with critics calling the prose sparkling, the plot improbable, and the result ‘a literary lemon meringue’. Fitzgerald’s first two books had been bestsellers, but Gatsby was much less popular. With the arrival of the Great Depression, the novel became a period piece, as the Roaring Twenties it conjured disappeared into the distant past.

A few months after that New York Times obituary, something remarkable happened. Gatsby still had a loyal following among writers, and in 1942 it was placed on a list of books to send to US troops serving in the Second World War. Over the next three years, some 155,000 copies of the novel were distributed, proving popular among soldiers in Europe. Then, once the war was over, a rush of scholarly articles, critical reappraisals, and well-received biographies helped to revive Fitzgerald’s reputation. By 1960 the novel was selling 100,000 copies a year; by the 1980s it was appearing on the US high school syllabus; come the year 2000 it was regularly ranked among the greatest novels ever written.

The fact that the novel’s reputation was revived by soldiers deployed overseas is no coincidence. After all, Fitzgerald wrote most of The Great Gatsby while living in Europe among American expats. True, the first outline was produced in June 1922, when renting a home in a fashionable village on Long Island, where he moved with his wife Zelda after the birth of their child. The following year he wrote 18,000 words, inspired by a neighbour named Max Gerlach, a military hero who threw lavish parties and never wore the same shirt twice. According to Zelda, Gerlach ‘was said to be General Pershing’s nephew and in trouble over bootlegging’. But Fitzgerald abandoned that draft after 18,000 words, and it was not until April 1924 that he began working on the book in earnest.

This coincided with the family’s decision to sail for Europe, where they remained on and off for the next seven years. Living in Rome and then the French Riviera, Fitzgerald quickly completed his novel, submitting the text to his editor Max Perkins by October. He spent another four months on revisions, and on 10 April 1925 The Great Gatsby was published. One crucial change between the ’23 and ’24 versions was the decision to write in the first person. Fitzgerald left Princeton to serve in the First World War but was never sent to Europe; his narrator Nick Carraway, however, has recently returned from the fighting. The first time he speaks with Gatsby – another former soldier – they discuss ‘wet, grey little villages in France’. Then, when Gatsby wants to win Nick’s trust, he produces a military medal awarded by Montenegro ‘for valour extraordinary’. Little wonder the novel appealed to homesick GIs.

Souvenirs of Europe appear in every chapter – in some cases on every page. Nick introduces himself by mentioning his family’s sham ancestry from the Dukes of Buccleuch. Gatsby’s house is styled like some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, its library filled with books, and the shelves of English oak ‘probably transported complete from some ruin overseas’. Tom and Daisy’s own summer house is designed in the Georgian Colonial style, with a nightingale on the lawn ‘come over on the Cunard or White Star Line’. Gatsby’s parties are filled with earnest young Englishmen trying to impress prosperous Americans, while the guests repeat rumours that Gatsby himself is a German spy, or else the nephew of Kaiser Wilhelm.

Nick describes his story as an encounter between the values of the East Coast and the Midwest: characters from the upright, polite American interior, ‘unadaptable’ to the amoral glamour of their fashionable coastal cousins. Critics have also argued that the book plays out a confrontation between the old money of East Egg – Anglicised names, manners, and tastes – with the nouveau riche brashness assembling in West Egg, embodied by a wealthy nobody hosting parties full of Broadway stars. However, there’s an even deeper collision at the heart of the novel: between Europe and America, the old world and the new.

Fitzgerald borrowed his title from the French novelist Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, but his plot has more in common with Balzac’s Le Père Goriot. This is the story of a young man recently arrived in Paris, who learns that his enigmatic neighbour made a fortune selling vermicelli during a famine, a fortune that was then spent hiding his past and launching his two daughters into society. Balzac’s novel attempted to expose the squalor behind the glittering façade of the Parisian beau monde: ‘The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been discovered, because it was properly executed.’ Sure enough, when that neighbour dies towards the end of the novel, nobody attends his funeral.

The Great Gatsby is likewise – to use another Balzac title – a story of lost illusions. The old-world Buchanans get away with their crimes, but Gatsby – that innocent emblem of the new world – ends up dying for his. For all the hope America offered to the immigrants arriving from Europe, Gatsby learns that the traditional hierarchies of that continent have also crossed the Atlantic. The United States may have been built on a dream, yet mistaking the dream for reality is fatal. In this way, a slender satire of East Coast society, idling away their summer months, becomes a symbol of an entire nation’s aspirations. Fitzgerald’s novel not only explains America to itself, but also explains the nation to the rest of the world.

That message – about how much of the old world endures in the new – is still true to this today. In fact, when you look at America’s pious believers, its political clans, its industrial fortunes and philanthropic legacies, you glimpse the 19h-century Europe that the original Gatzes, Buchanans and Carraways were trying to escape. This also explains why the novel has grown more popular over the last century, and why, in an age of rising inequality and economic disaffection, its story still resonates. However, the stubborn hope Gatsby symbolises has also endured, and as long as the promise of America remains alive in the national and international imagination, readers will keep returning to Fitzgerald’s novel. They will read again those final paragraphs, where Nick walks down to the shore near Gatsby’s house, and as the buildings melt away in the moonlight, he becomes ‘aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes. A fresh green breast of the new world… face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder’.