The centenary of F. Scott Fitzgerald's tale, hailed by many as the Great American Novel, is being celebrated this year
Why all the fuss?
"The poor son of a bitch," Dorothy Parker remarked at F. Scott Fitzgerald's funeral in 1940. Fitzgerald had died at just 44 in relative obscurity, and few of the mourners would have known that Parker was quoting "The Great Gatsby", a commercial flop that derailed its author's career when it was published in 1925. A century later, "Gatsby" is selling around half a million copies a year. Admired and referenced by everyone from John Updike to Taylor Swift, and adapted countless times for screen and stage, it is both one of the most securely classic novels in the American canon and a fixture of popular culture. But there's still lively discussion about what it means, and it still has some detractors; Gore Vidal called it the work of a writer who was "barely literate".
Who was Fitzgerald?
Born in St Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, Francis Scott Fitzgerald was a middle-class boy who failed the entrance exam for Princeton University twice but somehow talked his way in. He resolved to become "one of the greatest writers who have ever lived", but he was more interested in girls and parties than studying, and Princeton was about to throw him out when he dropped out to join the army during the First World War. At an officers' training school in Alabama, he fell in love with Zelda Sayre, a moneyed southern belle who broke off their engagement in 1919 over his lack of prospects. Fitzgerald responded by writing "This Side of Paradise", which made him a national celebrity in 1920. He and Zelda married just over a week after the novel was published.
How did it make him a celebrity?
Detailing racy goings-on among rich Princeton students, his first novel made its 23-year-old author the face of "youth in revolt". He was in demand as an expert on Prohibition-era partying and newly liberated young women who smoked cigarettes and kissed boys: in short, all the scandalous phenomena of the "Jazz Age" (a term he popularised). Slick magazines such as Collier's paid him a fortune – in the 1920s he could get around $75,000 (£55,800) in today's money for a single short story – and his and Zelda's extravagant, hard-drinking, hard-partying lifestyle made them newsworthy. But he was also a hardworking craftsman, and in his third novel, he told his editor in 1924, he wasn't aiming for "trashy imaginings as in my stories", but for something more artistic. The result, after several false starts, was "Gatsby".
Where did he get the idea for it?
At its heart the novel is the story of Jimmy Gatz, a poor boy from the Midwest who reinvents himself as the murky and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, in an obsessive effort to win back Daisy Buchanan, the wealthy socialite he'd loved as a penniless army officer. The Scott-Zelda romance influenced this plot, but the principal model for Daisy was Ginevra King, a Chicago heiress who threw Fitzgerald over in 1917. Various of his neighbours in Great Neck, Long Island – among them a gentleman bootlegger and a newspaper editor who constantly threw parties – went into "Gatsby", but, as Fitzgerald acknowledged, the character blurred "into myself". As he turned his simple story into a study of memory and desire, Fitzgerald had an eerie feeling that he was writing "something better than I am capable of".
Why did it flop, then?
Great writers such as Edith Wharton and T.S. Eliot immediately recognised "Gatsby" as a masterpiece, but professional reviewers were either downright hostile or found the book nicely written but rather tawdry and pointless. It sold less than half as many copies as his previous novels. Four years later the Wall Street Crash put paid to the Jazz Age, and Fitzgerald fell completely out of fashion. In 1936, his royalties on all his books amounted to $81 (£60). Consumed by alcoholism and weighed down by responsibility for Zelda, whose mental health broke down in 1929, Fitzgerald scraped a living as a Hollywood script doctor and died believing himself a failure. When a Hollywood colleague praised his old novels, he replied: "I'm surprised that you know who I am."
So how come we've heard of him?
After Fitzgerald's death, his Princeton friend Edmund Wilson, who had become America's leading literary critic, put together posthumous editions of his writing, and championed it tirelessly. More importantly, from 1942 a government programme distributed 155,000 copies of "Gatsby" to US servicemen fighting overseas, perhaps thinking they'd like a novel about a soldier who dreamed about a girl back home. By the late 1940s, a full-scale Fitzgerald revival was under way. A bestselling 1951 biography by Arthur Mizener burnished the legend of Scott and Zelda, and "Gatsby" became a staple of high-school reading lists. It has also been filmed four times, most recently by Baz Luhrmann in 2013.
Where does it stand now?
The novel is near unassailable: the leading, and certainly the most widely read, contender for the title of "Great American Novel". It impresses on many levels. At first glance it's a charming story about one golden summer before the Great Depression, full of memorable party scenes, lyrical phrases and unforgettable images, such as Gatsby looking out towards the green light on Daisy's dock across the bay at night. But it has also been seen since Mizener's time as a critique of the American Dream and US capitalism: the critic Lionel Trilling saw Gatsby, with his quest for reinvention and his hunger for riches, as embodying "America itself", torn between ideals and power. To celebrate the centenary there have been public readings, celebrations and "Gatsby"-themed parties; musical versions are showing on Broadway and in the West End. On 11 April, the exact centenary of publication, the Empire State Building was lit up in green in the book's honour.
