Why is the Great Gatsby so popular?

As one of the most important books in American literature, it captures a fascinating and lively time in American history. The Roaring Twenties (a.k.a. the Jazz Age) was a time of great, mind-bending change. The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, is set in New York City and Long Island during the Prohibition era (remember, the Prohibition era was a time in which alcohol was illegal, no matter how old you were – yowsa).
Author F. Scott Fitzgerald associated this moment in American history – the Jazz Age – with materialism ("I want things! Lots of things!") and immorality. Materialism and immortality were the name of the game for many of the newly wealthy of the post-World War I era. The novel's star is Jay Gatsby, a young, rich man in love with a society girl from his past. A girl who, as it happens, is married to someone else. Do we smell a Twilight-esque love triangle approaching? We do indeed.
And that's not the only reason why Gatsby still feels fresh today. The novel's very title has become a kind of buzzword for periods of excess and fake luxury. The economic collapse of 2008 brought back, to many, distant and unwelcome memories of the stock market crash of 1929, casting the boom times of the 1990s and early 2000s as the modern-day analogue of the Roaring Twenties. In the 1920s it had been a bubble in stocks that brought easy prosperity, while in our own time the bubble had been in the housing market.
In both cases, though, unsustainable boom times led to devastating crashes with profound cultural consequences. In the 1920s and the 2000s, easy money meant that many people could begin to dream of living out their days like Jay Gatsby, with life as just one grand party in a seersucker suit. But as that vision of easy luxury crashed and burned (in both 1929 and 2008), newfound hard times required a redefinition of the American Dream.Gatsby tackles the American Dream, as well as issues of wealth and class, materialism, and marital infidelity.
And while Gatsby is a work of fiction, the story has many similarities to Fitzgerald's real-life experiences. Gulp. Fitzgerald's personal history is mirrored in the characters of Jay Gatsby and narrator Nick Carraway. Nick is both mesmerized and disgusted by Gatsby's extravagant lifestyle, which is similar to how Fitzgerald claimed to feel about the "Jazz Age" excesses that he himself adopted. As an Ivy League educated, middle-class Midwesterner, Fitzgerald (like Nick) saw through the shallow materialism of the era. But (like Gatsby) Fitzgerald came back from World War I and fell in love with a wealthy southern socialite – Zelda Sayre.
The Great Gatsby is swaddled in Fitzgerald's simultaneous embrace of and disdain for 1920s luxury. Since Fitzgerald did indeed partake in the Jazz Age's high life of decadence, it's not surprising that the details of the setting and characters make The Great Gatsby a sort of time capsule preserving this particular time in American history. Gatsby is taught all over the world partly because it's a history lesson and novel all rolled into one delicious lettuce wrap of intrigue. Mmmmm…intrigue. You may find that when many people refer to the "Jazz Age" or the "Roaring Twenties," they automatically associate it with Gatsby, and vice versa.