I first read “The Great Gatsby” as a teenager; I imagine this is when most Americans encounter F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal work. Our teachers, rightly so, hail the novel as a masterpiece, so we read it under their influence, when we are young. We read it when we are bewildered and delighted at our changing bodies, flush with burgeoning sexuality, heady with the certainty of our ascendancy, the prospect of our future greatness shining off in the distance like a great green star.

It is easy for young people to see themselves in Gatsby. His earnestness is familiar. His ambition, twinned with desperation, resonates with any teenager who wants to journey off to college or move states away for work, in a bid to escape youthful boundaries. Poverty made Gatsby ravenously desperate for difference, for possibility. Some, perhaps from similar circumstances, will recognize that and see themselves. Others will empathize because they feel driven away by parents who don’t understand them, by peers who underestimate or limit them, by the larger culture that ostracizes them for one reason or another. Their hearts will be, as Gatsby’s was, “in a constant, turbulent riot.” The “instinct toward … future glory” leads them out into the world. They burn to flee, to grow beyond their birth circumstances. In some ways, adolescence is one great flight.

Teenage readers are especially understanding of Gatsby’s fixation on recreating that moment when his life was most open to possibility, when he could become and do anything. When he believed that if he worked hard enough, he could remake himself. He could ascend to a different social class, a class where life seemed to be an enchanted necklace, each moment a pearl on an endless string. It seems to be a universal sentiment of youth: the belief that, given the luxury of time and focus, one can become anything. Young readers walk down tree-lined Louisville streets with Gatsby and Daisy as the leaves fall. They see a ladder “mounted to a secret place above the trees. … Once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.” The young know that golden moment when anything can happen, and they understand its allure because they are living it.

By the end of the book, the reader’s empathy has burned to love. Young readers fall for Gatsby’s passion, his insistence that life should be relished, should be executed well. They have fallen in love with the persistence of his devotion to Daisy. I imagine they like to think they are capable of such a great love, one that smolders, lasting from year to year. They adore him so much, they feel a quiet disdain for those who do not possess his virtues: perhaps most of all for Tom, who embodies the worst excesses of the moneyed elite, the misogynistic, the racist. They pity Nick, too, because they understand he has fallen in love with Gatsby; readers understand that Nick doesn’t deserve Gatsby. Even though he insists he is not carelessly violent like Tom or Daisy, the young understand that Nick is as much a product of his social class as Tom, that its backwardness and insularity mark him as much as they do Tom and Daisy.

This is a book that endures, generation after generation, because every time a reader returns to “The Great Gatsby,” we discover new revelations, new insights, new burning bits of language. Read and bear witness to the story’s permanence, its robust heart. Read and bear witness to Jay Gatsby, who burned bright and bold and doomed as his creator. Read.