The Great Gatsby
— 1925 —
New York: Scribner, 2018; 180 pages
FIRST LINES
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
PLOT SUMMARY
The plot is simple. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy finds girl again.
Set on Long Island and in New York City in 1922—as the twenties begin to “roar”—The Great Gatsby is a love story at heart. It recounts the obsessive love of the mysterious and mysteriously rich Jay Gatsby for Daisy Buchanan, the wife of the also very rich Tom Buchanan. Gatsby and Daisy had met five years earlier when Gatsby was a young officer preparing to head for the trenches of World War I. In the intervening years, Daisy had married Tom, who is having a not-very-secret affair with the wife of a local car mechanic.
Against scenes of lavish parties on Gatsby’s sprawling estate, where Prohibition has little impact on the flow of alcohol, the guests wonder where the shadowy Gatsby made his money. This Jazz Age drama is seen through the eyes of Nick Carraway, a Yale grad, World War I veteran, and novice bond trader. Gatsby’s next-door neighbor and Daisy’s distant cousin, Nick becomes the go-between and not-disinterested narrator of this tale.
It is a three-act tragedy that underscores something Fitzgerald wrote in a later story: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Born into a middle-class family in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896, he was named Francis Scott Fitzgerald after a distant ancestor, Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Known as Scott, Fitzgerald attended prep schools before heading to Princeton. There he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson and fell in love with a beautiful socialite named Ginevra King—something of a model for Daisy. On academic probation, he dropped out and joined the army after the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917.
Stationed in Alabama, Scott met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre, the debutante daughter of a wealthy family in Montgomery. With ambitions to write, but dim prospects after the war, Fitzgerald wrote ad copy for laundry detergent and sold a few short stories. That was not a formula for winning Zelda.
Returning to Minnesota, he wrote his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), a thinly veiled autobiographical story about a Princeton man. Championed by the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins, it was an immediate success and gave Fitzgerald entrée into literary circles and better rates for his short stories. Its publication was also the hurdle he had to leap to marry Zelda. In 1921, their only child, a daughter named Frances Scott (called Scottie), was born.
Fitzgerald followed with another popular hit, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), exploring New York’s café society in the 1920s. Success turned Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who began to publish her own short stories and articles, into Jazz Age celebrities, whose hard-drinking and stormy relationship became the stuff of gossip columns.
But their bright-burning star soon dimmed. Having completed The Great Gatsby while on the French Riviera, Fitzgerald received good reviews but surprisingly disappointing sales when the novel appeared in 1925. Soon after, Scott and Zelda moved to Paris, where he and Ernest Hemingway became friends and joined the “Lost Generation”—the expatriate artists and writers flocking to Paris and Gertrude Stein’s famous salon.
Returning to America in 1926, Fitzgerald headed deeper into alcoholism while Zelda, who had taken an overdose of sleeping pills in France, became more erratic with growing signs of mental illness. Obsessed with ballet, she sometimes practiced eight hours daily, according to biographer Nancy Milford. Though Zelda was invited to join an Italian opera ballet company, mental and physical exhaustion led to her eventual admission to a French sanatorium in 1930.
With his drinking interfering with his work, and struggling financially, Fitzgerald needed ten years to complete his next novel, Tender Is the Night (1934). The story of a psychiatrist who marries one of his patients, it was also a commercial disappointment.
By this time, Fitzgerald was deep in debt and an alcoholic, while Zelda was in and out of clinics. During one stay, she had written Save Me the Waltz (1932), a thinly disguised portrayal of the couple’s relationship. The effort added friction to their marriage and proved a critical and commercial failure. Looking to earn more money, Scott moved to Hollywood in 1937 to work as a studio scriptwriter, while Zelda continued to be intermittently hospitalized.
“Whenever he was drunk,” Arthur Mizener, a biographer, later wrote, “he would insist on telling people who he was and pressing them to recognize him—‘I’m F. Scott Fitzgerald. You’ve read my books. You’ve read “The Great Gatsby,” haven’t you? Remember?’ ”
A 1939 trip to Cuba with Zelda was the last time they were together. After a long struggle with alcoholism, F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in Hollywood in December 1940, at the age of forty-four. His New York Times obituary read, in part:
Roughly, his own career began and ended with the Nineteen Twenties. “This Side of Paradise,” his first book, was published in the first year of that decade of skyscrapers and short skirts. Only six others came between it and his last…. The promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.
An unfinished novel based on his Hollywood experience was completed from his notes by longtime friend Edmund Wilson and published after his death as The Last Tycoon (1941).
Zelda, in the meantime, had again been in and out of institutions. In 1948 while she was awaiting electroshock therapy in a North Carolina hospital, a fire broke out. Zelda Fitzgerald was one of nine women who died in the disaster.
By then, the couple who had epitomized Jazz Age high living had been largely forgotten. The Great Gatsby was dismissed as “a period piece that had almost entirely disappeared.”
But then came a stroke of good fortune. During World War II, the book was issued as part of the Armed Services Editions, a publishing industry program that provided American GIs with free paperbound books shipped overseas. Selected from publisher submissions, the titles were chosen by a committee. Hundreds of thousands of copies of these stapled, digest-sized editions were distributed, helping create a postwar surge in Fitzgerald’s—and Gatsby’s—literary fortunes.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
Okay. What’s so great about Gatsby?
Honestly, when I set out on this project, the choice of Fitzgerald—and specifically The Great Gatsby—for my list of great short books was up in the air.
Everyone has read it already. Right? Or seen one of four Hollywood treatments. Was it dated? A bit clichéd?
And then came news late in 2020 that The Great Gatsby was going out of copyright and entering the public domain. That milestone occasioned conversation about the book’s place in American letters. As Parul Sehgal of the New York Times framed it:
With “The Great Gatsby,” the question is simpler and stranger: Can Fitzgerald write? Is the book a masterpiece—what T. S. Eliot called “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James”—or, as Gore Vidal put it, as Gore Vidal would, the work of a writer who was “barely literate”?
I am now firmly in the camp that considers it a great short book, full of lyrical prose and memorable characters. It is a signature touchstone in American popular culture, especially evocative of the extraordinary decade between the end of World War I and the Great Depression. Evidence of that comes from a planned musical version, with lyrics and music composed by Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine fame. But it is more.
“This is a book that endures, generation after generation,” wrote novelist Jesmyn Ward, “because every time a reader returns to The Great Gatsby, we discover new revelations, new insights, new burning bits of language. Read and bear witness to the story’s permanence, its robust heart. Read and bear witness to Jay Gatsby, who burned bright and bold and doomed as his creator. Read.”
I agree that the writing is often seamlessly brilliant. And, as a fable of striving, obsessive love, and the perils associated with excess, its moral holds true. It is timeless and timely. Consider this passage, much quoted in recent years:
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Among Fitzgerald’s other completed novels, good choices are This Side of Paradise, about a handsome, spoiled young man at Princeton University; and The Beautiful and Damned, about another handsome young man and his beautiful wife who party self-destructively through the Jazz Age. Finally, many critics consider Fitzgerald’s short stories among his best work. All the Sad Young Men (1926) collected many of his finest pieces. A story set after the Stock Market Crash of 1929, “Babylon Revisited” is also considered among his most memorable short works.