Gatsby

If badness is related to perceived greatness, then I offer The Great Gatsby (1925) as the worst novel in American literature. I haven't read it for many years, since the only time I used it in a Modern American Fiction class, but I remember it as incredibly smug about its relationship to the traditional realistic novel. While Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and others were taking chances, F. Scott Fitzgerald was manipulating conventions to create a book that would be "charming." One could blame Nick the narrator, but I think Fitzgerald is responsible. I turned to Tender Is the Night (1934), usually considered a bad book, to give students a Fitzgerald with more aesthetic courage and, for all that novel's sentimentality, more profundity about money and marriage.