An English Curriculum that Freshmen Might Read

First edition jacket art

A fellow worker pointed at my t-shirt and smiled. “The Great Gatsby! That’s the only book I actually finished reading in high school English.” We were working the assembly line, and I’d shown up wearing a t-shirt featuring Francis Cugat’s iconic dust-jacket painting for The Great Gatsby. Our assembly line team had a whole range of education levels, from high-school dropouts to postgraduates who’d never found a job.

I’d heard people admit they didn’t read before. As a former college adjunct, I heard a panoply of excuses for long-term aversion to reading, which mostly boiled down to: I never learned to appreciate it as a child, and now that I'm grown, it’s too difficult to develop the habit. But this broke the pattern, because the person didn’t highlight his non-reading, he spotlighted the one book which penetrated his armor.

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has become one of those books, like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which we simply expect high schoolers to read. Someone possessing an American diploma should understand allusions to this handful of celebrity books. Yet as my co-worker pointed out, not everyone reads every “great” book. Whether from overwork, or unfamiliarity with dated language, or just plain disinterest, many students skim or skip books altogether.

My co-worker couldn’t finish most “great” books because English was his second language. Most important literature was written in language that, to his limited English, looked looping, ornate, and Yoda-like. The Great Gatsby, by contrast, was plainspoken, notwithstanding its luxurious milieu, and didn’t demand a dictionary to parse ordinary sentences. My co-worker could concisely describe his relationship with that novel, and reading in general, and eventually felt free to ask how to improve his reading goingforward.

Yet he also made me reconsider how we choose our literary canon. In Freshman English, I remember being assigned Homer’s Odessey, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Important words, definitely, but not works which most freshmen are prepared to savvy, not even highly literate ones who already enjoy reading. These works left students climbing the walls, desperate for validation that we weren’t stupid for failing to understand.

First edition jacket art

F. Scott Fitzgerald stands in an unusual position within the literary canon. Though famous now for his novels, he made his early living publishing for glossy magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker, which were read then by mass audiences. After the 1929 stock market crash made Fitzgerald’s hymns to nouveau riche excess seem tasteless, he relocated to Hollywood and became a script doctor. He wrote, that is, for mass audiences, in vernacular English, with an eye toward images.

You know who else wrote for mass audiences with image-friendly prose? Dashiell Hammett. His classic The Maltese Falcon, arguably his career peak, is in many ways the anti-Gatsby. Jay Gatsby is chummy with New York’s fiercest gangsters; Sam Spade has an adversarial relationship with the police. Gatsby romanticizes women, especially Daisy Buchanan, without really knowing them; Spade enjoys women, but doesn’t revere them, and surrenders his latest lover to the gumshoes.

Perhaps most importantly, Jay Gatsby has no moral code, except perhaps whatever makes him rich enough to court Daisy Buchanan. Spade, by contrast, is so hog-tied by his own unique, self-written moral code that it costs him lucrative paydays. He’s forced to live in squalor, sleep on a Murphy bed, and eat his beans from the can. He’s almost the diametrical opposite of Gatsby—while still being written in simple, imagistic language that high schoolers can understand.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve written before about the importance of students reading books beyond their immediate comprehension, and how that changes their brain circuitry for the better. But too many teachers—underfunded, short-staffed, and hurt for time—lack the resources necessary to guide students to higher comprehension. I remember my Ninth Grade English teacher telling the class explicitly that we could tell Ernest Hemingway was deep because we couldn’t understand him.

Pairing The Great Gatsby and The Maltese Falcon would provide Freshman-level English teachers the opportunity to discuss important themes in American literature, while speaking an English that most students understand. Other “literary” writers tend to be hermetic, like Hemingway; abstruse, like Eliot; or simply outdated, like Mark Twain. Yes, Hammett writes about unseemly themes, like infidelity, racism, and violence, but so does Faulkner. Students have seen worse on TV.

And if it means more working-class students glowing up for their favorite book, well, that’s a win for everybody.