“The Inside Story” traces multiple levels of the history of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Garnering only slight impact at publication in 1925, this study summarizes the novel’s rise to a remarkable prominence in the canon of American literature. The novel’s popularity increased as everyday knowledge of social and historical experiences from the novel’s time period faded from readers’ memories, leaving a purely American story imbued with a mythical tale of social and economic disparity. In academia, both Fitzgerald and the novel inspired critical analysis and debate. For teachers, the novel epitomized the critical theory New Criticism, and, today, both novel and author nearly define the literary criticism known as New Historicism. “The Inside Story” also deconstructs the first person narrative, which Fitzgerald employed effectively in The Great Gatsby. The voice in the text breathes familiarity through allusions and references to a superabundance of real world events, people, products and printed materials from the 1920s—thus providing a nearly bottomless well of resources for the corpus of historical study surrounding this novel. For instance, the text exhibits a careless, offhand regard for Simon Called Peter, Clay’s Economics, James J. Hill and Hopalong Cassidy. Also, in contrast to the colorful backdrop of major and minor allusions and references, certain people, places and events, such as William G. Harding and William Randolph Hearst, are conspicuously absent from the novel. “The Inside Story” is distilled from hundreds of hours of reeling through newspaper microfilms, blowing the dust off aged periodicals, and purchasing era-sensitive, out of print books. It recognizes and credits existing scholarly study, with the overall point being the enrichment of the corpus surrounding The Great Gatsby.