The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby   F. Scott Fitzgerald

Overview:

Ask readers of 20th-century literature to name their candidates for "The Great American Novel" and they surely would name F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. For almost 75 years now, the book has been recognized as a masterpiece of style and narration, and as the quintessential depiction of what Fitzgerald himself dubbed as "The Jazz Age." It is somewhat surprising, then, that The Great Gatsby was not especially well received when it was published in 1925, and that Fitzgerald gained a reputation as a writer past his prime.

Fitzgerald had first come to national attention in 1920 for his novel This Side of Paradise, a fictionalized account of his years at Princeton University. A huge popular success, the book had a generational appeal comparable to later novels like J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984). In the years that followed the publication of This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald married the glamorous Zelda Sayre, moved to Paris, and became a celebrated writer whose short stories appeared in prestigious magazines. At the peak of his success, he earned a princely $40,000 a year.

In 1922, Fitzgerald wrote his editor, the famed Maxwell Perkins of the equally famous Scriber's publishing house and told him that he wanted to take his work to a new level. He began to craft a story about a character named James Gatz, a provincial boy whose burning passion to win the heart of the upper-class beauty, Daisy Buchanan, knows no bounds. Although Daisy has married another man, Gatz hopes to draw her to him by reinventing himself as Jay Gatsby, a rich, glamorous, and somewhat mysterious figure whose fabulous parties become the talk of the Long Island town where Daisy lives. Gatsby's story is observed and told by fellow Midwesterner Nick Carraway, a cousin of Daisy's who is initially skeptical, but then increasingly intrigued by Gatsby's romantic quest.

The Great Gatsby did have its early admirers. The caustic Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken found the story little more than "a glorified anecdote," but nevertheless praised Gatsby as "plainly the product of a sound and stable talent, conjured into being by hard work." Gilbert Seldes, an early commentator on American popular culture, called it "brilliant," and poet T.S. Eliot considered Gatsby "the first step American fiction has taken since Henry James." But Fitzgerald's editor, Maxwell Perkins, made the most prescient observation: "One thing I think we can be sure of: that when the shouting and the rabble of reviewers and gossipers dies, The Great Gatsby will stand out as an extraordinary book."

In 1960, when the publisher started a series of best-selling classics in paperback, it labeled The Great Gatsby "SL1" (Scribner Library One), reflecting the incredible commercial success the book had achieved. Despite its early failures, The Great Gatsby ultimately withstood the test of time, emerging as one of the great American novels.

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