The Great Gatsby

• 1. Introduction

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  The Great Gatsby arrived in bookshops on the 10th of April 1925 carrying a dust jacket unlike anything else in American publishing. A disembodied flapper's face, painted by a little-known Barcelonan artist named Francis Cugat, stared out from a dark blue skyline with eyes that F. Scott Fitzgerald said he had woven directly into the pages of the novel itself. The book sold fewer than 20,000 copies by October of that year. When Fitzgerald died in 1940, he believed himself a failure and the work forgotten.

  What transforms a commercial disappointment into what many regard as the Great American Novel? How does a story rooted in one man's unrequited love for a socialite named Ginevra King become the defining portrait of an entire era? And what does it mean that 155,000 copies were first pressed into the hands not of college students but of American soldiers fighting overseas in World War II? The answers lie in a novel that its own author never fully understood, written about a society he both envied and resented, published under a title he considered merely acceptable.

• 2. The Man Behind the Myth

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  In 1915, an 18-year-old Fitzgerald from Minnesota met Ginevra King, a 16-year-old socialite, and fell deeply in love with her. Her family openly discouraged the courtship because of his lower-class status, and her father purportedly told him that "poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls". That rebuke echoed through the rest of Fitzgerald's life and writing.

  Rejected as a suitor because of his lack of financial prospects, a suicidal Fitzgerald enlisted in the United States Army during World War I and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. While stationed at Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a 17-year-old Southern belle. After learning that Ginevra had married wealthy Chicago businessman William "Bill" Mitchell, Fitzgerald proposed to Zelda. She agreed but postponed the marriage until he became financially successful.

  Fitzgerald himself later explained the core of the novel he would write: "The whole idea of Gatsby is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it."

  After achieving success as a short-story writer and novelist, Fitzgerald married Zelda and the couple relocated to Long Island. Despite enjoying the exclusive milieu there, he quietly disapproved of the extravagant parties, and the wealthy people he encountered often disappointed him. He simultaneously admired the rich and harbored a smoldering resentment toward them. That double-edged feeling became the novel's moral center.

• 3. Writing West Egg

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  Fitzgerald began outlining his third novel in June 1922, but a flopped stage play called The Vegetable repeatedly interrupted his progress. He spent a winter writing magazine stories to pay debts from its production. He regarded those stories as worthless, though one of them, "Winter Dreams", he later described as his first attempt at the Gatsby idea.

  In October 1922, after the birth of their only child, Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald, the family moved to Great Neck, New York. Their neighbors included writer Ring Lardner, actor Lew Fields, and comedian Ed Wynn. All were considered nouveau riche, unlike the established families across the bay on Manhasset Neck. That real-life geography gave Fitzgerald the contrast he needed: Great Neck became West Egg, home of new money, and Port Washington became East Egg, home of old money. Several Gold Coast mansions, including Oheka Castle and the since-demolished Beacon Towers, served as models for Gatsby's estate.

  The Fitzgeralds' neighbor Max Gerlach, purportedly born to a German immigrant family and a former major in the American Expeditionary Forces, had become a gentleman bootlegger who flaunted his wealth, threw lavish parties, never wore the same shirt twice, and used the phrase "old sport" in his letters. These details moved almost directly into the character of Gatsby. Meanwhile, the Hall-Mills murder case, a double killing on the 14th of September 1922 that daily newspapers sensationalized for months, likely influenced the novel's plot; scholars have speculated Fitzgerald based aspects of the ending on that factual incident.

  By mid-1923, Fitzgerald had written 18,000 words but discarded most of them as a false start. Work resumed in earnest in April 1924, when he told editor Maxwell Perkins he was intent on creating an artistic achievement rather than the realism of his previous two novels. He consciously imitated the literary styles of Joseph Conrad and Willa Cather, particularly Cather's 1923 work, A Lost Lady, and later wrote Cather a letter apologizing for any unintentional plagiarism.

• 4. A Title Nobody Wanted

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  Fitzgerald submitted a near-final manuscript to Perkins on the 27th of October 1924. Perkins responded in a November letter saying that Gatsby was too vague as a character and that his wealth and business needed a convincing explanation. Fitzgerald thanked Perkins and spent the winter in Rome making revisions, including extensive rewrites of the sixth and eighth chapters. He declined an offer of $10,000 for the serial rights so the book could be published sooner, accepting instead a $3,939 advance and a further $1,981.25 upon publication.

  The title question consumed him throughout. He cycled through Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires, Trimalchio, Trimalchio in West Egg, On the Road to West Egg, Under the Red, White, and Blue, The Gold-Hatted Gatsby, and The High-Bouncing Lover. By November 1924, he had settled on Trimalchio in West Egg, after the crude upstart in Petronius's Satyricon, a character he explicitly references once in the novel. Perkins persuaded him the reference was too obscure and unpronounceable. Both Zelda and Perkins preferred The Great Gatsby, and Fitzgerald reluctantly agreed.

  A month before publication, Fitzgerald asked whether he could still re-title it Trimalchio or Gold-Hatted Gatsby. Perkins advised against it. On the 19th of March 1925, Fitzgerald expressed enthusiasm for Under the Red, White, and Blue, but it was too late. The novel was published under its reluctant title. Fitzgerald believed the final title to be merely acceptable and expressed his ambivalence about it often.

• 5. Celestial Eyes

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  Francis Cugat, born Francisco Coradal-Cougat in Barcelona, was commissioned by an unknown individual in Scribner's art department to paint the novel's cover while Fitzgerald was still composing the text. His first sketch depicted a dismal gray landscape inspired by the original title Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires. He discarded it.

  Cugat's second study became the seed of the final image: a pencil and crayon drawing of a flapper's half-hidden face over Long Island Sound, with scarlet lips, one celestial eye, and a single diagonal tear. Later drawings added a second eye looming over a shadowy New York cityscape. In subsequent versions, the cityscape gave way to dazzling carnival lights evoking a Ferris wheel, likely referencing Coney Island's amusement park. Cugat placed reclining nudes within the flapper's irises and added a green tint to the streaming tear.

  Fitzgerald viewed Cugat's preparatory drafts before sailing for France in April-May 1924 and was so taken with them that he told Perkins he had incorporated the imagery directly into the novel. The most cited interpretation links the celestial eyes to the faded billboard image of optometrist T. J. Eckleburg near George Wilson's garage. Ernest Hemingway supported this reading, claiming Fitzgerald told him the cover referred to a billboard in the valley of the ashes. A closer parallel may be Fitzgerald's own description of Daisy as "the girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs".

  Perkins hailed the finished painting as a masterpiece. It was the only work Cugat ever completed for Scribner's, and the only book cover he ever designed. Although Fitzgerald almost certainly never saw the final gouache before publication, the painting and the novel remain inseparable.

• 6. Failure, Then Resurrection

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  Initial reviews were mixed. Edwin Clark of The New York Times found the novel mystical and glamorous. Lillian C. Ford of the Los Angeles Times hailed it as leaving the reader in "a mood of chastened wonder". H. L. Mencken, writing in The Chicago Daily Tribune, found the plot highly improbable while praising the writing's "careful and brilliant finish". Other critics were sharply dismissive: Harvey Eagleton of The Dallas Morning News predicted the novel signaled the end of Fitzgerald's artistic success, and Ruth Snyder of the New York Evening World declared the editors of her newspaper were "quite convinced after reading The Great Gatsby that Mr. Fitzgerald is not one of the great American writers of today".

  Fitzgerald responded that of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, "not one had the slightest idea what the book was about". He had not written a realistic story and resented being judged as if he had. He was also hurt that critics failed to see the parallels between his own life and Gatsby's, particularly that both created mythical versions of themselves and attempted to live up to those legends. He remained hopeful the novel might at least sell as many as 75,000 copies. By October, the count was fewer than 20,000.

  Fitzgerald suffered a third and fatal heart attack in 1940. His New York Times obituary cited Gatsby as his greatest work. Future authors Budd Schulberg and Edward Newhouse had already been deeply affected by the novel, and John O'Hara acknowledged its influence on his own writing.

  In the spring of 1942, the Council on Books in Wartime began distributing paperback Armed Services Editions to combat troops. Gatsby was among them. Within several years, 155,000 copies had reached U.S. soldiers overseas, and the Saturday Evening Post reported in 1945 that the book proved popular among troops. By 1944, full-length scholarly articles on Fitzgerald's work were appearing in periodicals, and the earlier consensus that Gatsby was a nostalgic period piece had effectively vanished. By 1960, the book was selling 100,000 copies per year. By 1974, it was deemed a contender for the title of the Great American Novel.

• 7. What the Novel Argues

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  Scholar Roger L. Pearson, writing in 1970, argued that Fitzgerald's work is especially linked with the American Dream, tracing the literary origins of that dream to Colonial America. Pearson describes it as the belief that every individual, regardless of origin, may seek and achieve their desired goals, "be they political, monetary, or social". Gatsby's tragedy, in this reading, is that the dream is a false promise: pursuing it leads only to dissatisfaction, because the goal is unattainable.

  Scholar Sarah Churchwell frames the novel as a tale of class warfare in a country that refuses to publicly acknowledge it even has a class system. Dianne Bechtel argues Fitzgerald plotted the novel to show that class transcends wealth in America: even if poorer Americans become rich, they remain inferior to those with old money. Tom Buchanan calls Gatsby "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere", and Gatsby's vague last name Gatz, combined with his father's adherence to Lutheranism, marks his family as recent German immigrants, which would preclude them from the status of Old Stock Americans.

  The novel's treatment of gender has shifted considerably over time. Early critics read Daisy Buchanan as a villain. Writing in 1978, scholar Leland S. Person Jr. described her instead as a hapless victim, first of Tom's callous domination, then of Gatsby's dehumanizing adoration, reduced to a trophy wife whose sole existence augments her possessor's socio-economic success.

  In 2018, scholar Kyle Keeler added an environmental dimension, arguing that Gatsby's fictional mentor Dan Cody modeled a predatory approach to natural resources, and that Gatsby's own bootlegging relied on exploiting South American agriculture. The valley of the ashes, that sprawling refuse dump between West Egg and New York, represents a man-made wasteland produced by the same industrialization that makes Gatsby's wealth possible. As of early 2020, the novel had sold almost 30 million copies worldwide, with 500,000 additional copies sold annually, suggesting that its arguments about class, wealth, and aspiration have not lost their audience.