"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1926)

Gatsby—the man that he thought the woman he loved thought he was—was mistaken, owing to his not-yet “thinning briefcase of enthusiasm’’ (unlike that of the novel’s narrator), the flourishes of New York, and the insufficiency of his five-months’ overseas education.

The novel reads as a movie script waiting to be animated. The characters engage neither individually nor as a class. They are no class. Foreigners to the East, they are attracted to New York by its conspicuous features, which often are its most superficial ones. The characters' failings point not at a class, but at the lack of due diligence in the era of National newspapers, large-scale frauds, and affordable travel.