On 10 April 1925, the day The Great Gatsby was published, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Max Perkins, his editor, asking that great care be taken promoting his novel about modern carelessness. “Be sure and keep all such trite phrases as ‘Surely the book of the spring!’ out of the advertising,” he directed.

A far more fastidious writer than his reputation suggests, Fitzgerald was withering about cliches, his letters peppered with objections to inherited phrases and ideas. Despite his best efforts, however, his most acclaimed novel arrives a century after its publication encrusted with them: the American Dream, the Roaring Twenties, Gatsby’s green light, hot jazz and cold gin, feathered flappers dancing the Charleston, a book that’s all one extravagant spree.

New Statesman