Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby by no means serves as a blanket condemnation of the American dream; instead, the author uses the novel and its upwardly mobile protagonist to celebrate the ability of those not born of wealth to rise to the pinnacle of American society while also examining the costs that can accompany such success. When this duality is understood, the book’s descriptions of the glittering banality of the upper-class lifestyle can be seen as a critique of the hollowness of strictly material success, rather than simply demonstrating that Fitzgerald possessed, as Trilling described it, “a taste for aristocracy.” Yet, the view among some critics that the book expresses moral complacency or shallow psychological insight has nonetheless persisted. Shulz, for example, criticizes the book for idealizing Gatsby despite his moral shortcomings. But the novel’s treatment of the way in which the character interacts with his milieu is no less complex than Wolfe’s insightful look at the challenges posed by the intersection of race and class, or Miller’s account of the perversion of the American dream in Death of a Salesman.