1924 You can see a sort of logic behind the title. The new story concerned a wealthy man who loved to give parties. In the Satyricon, the 1st-century Latin work of poetry and prose fiction by Petronius, Trimalchio was a man of self-made riches who loved to show off by throwing lavish feasts featuring such exotic dishes as live birds sewn up in the bellies of roast pigs.
In Fitzgerald’s novel West Egg is the fictional stand-in for Great Neck, a peninsula on Long Island where the new money built their mansions in the 1920s. Its counterpart, East Egg (Manhasset Neck), had already been colonised by old money. The two small communities faced each other across a narrow body of water.
Max Perkins, Fitzgerald’s editor at Scribner’s (see 20 September), was uneasy with the author’s choice of title. How many potential readers would understand the allusion to the Latin classic? What did ‘West Egg’ mean to someone who hadn’t already read the novel?
Other ideas Fitzgerald came up with at various times included Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires, On the Road to West Egg, The High- Bouncing Lover and – even after he had read the proofs – Under the Red White and Blue. ‘Fatal’ was the editor’s reaction to the last offering. Finally, Fitzgerald would settle for a title he never grew to like, The Great Gatsby.
Like other American novels (Look Homeward, Angel being the most famous), The Great Gatsby benefited from Perkins’s surgery. That evocative last chapter (‘So we beat on, boats against the current …’) came at the beginning in the original manuscript. Fitzgerald had concentrated Gatsby’s biography into a solid, indigestible block. Perkins persuaded him to break it up into segments, to be revealed piece by piece, to make the protagonist more mysterious. He was right about that title too.