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![]() Cover of the first edition, 1925.
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Author | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
Cover artist | Francis Cugat |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Genre | Novel |
Publisher | Charles Scribner's Sons |
Publication date | April 10, 1925 |
Media type | Print (Hardback Paperback) |
Pages | 218 pages |
ISBN | NA reissue ISBN 0-7432-7356-7 (2004 paperback edition) |
The Great Gatsby is a novel by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book takes place from spring to autumn 1922, during a prosperous time in the United States known as the Roaring Twenties. Although it did not receive widespread attention until after Fitzgerald's death in 1940, today the book is widely regarded as a "Great American Novel" and a literary classic. The Modern Library named it the second best English-language novel of the 20th Century.[1]
With The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald made a conscious departure from the writing process of his previous novels. He started planning it in June 1922,[citation needed] after completing his play The Vegetable and began composing The Great Gatsby [2] in 1923. He ended up discarding most of it as a false start, some of which resurfaced in the story "Absolution".[3] Unlike his previous works, Fitzgerald intended to edit and reshape Gatsby thoroughly, believing that it held the potential to launch him toward literary acclaim. He told his editor Maxwell Perkins that the novel was a "consciously artistic achievement" and a "purely creative work?? not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world". He added later, during editing, that he felt "an enormous power in me now, more than I've ever had".[4]
After the birth of their child, the Fitzgeralds moved to Great Neck, Long Island in October 1922, a setting used as the scene for The Great Gatsby.[6] Fitzgerald's neighbors in Great Neck included such prominent and newly wealthy New Yorkers as writer Ring Lardner, actor Lew Fields and comedian Ed Wynn.[3] These figures were all considered to be 'new' money, unlike those who came from Manhasset Neck or Cow Neck Peninsula, places which were home to many of New York's wealthiest established families, and which sat across a bay from Great Neck. This real-life juxtaposition gave Fitzgerald his idea for "West Egg" and "East Egg." In this novel, Great Neck became the new-money peninsula of "West Egg" and Manhasset the old-money peninsula of "East Egg".[7]
Progress on the novel was slow. In May 1923, the Fitzgeralds moved to the French Riviera, where the novel was finished. In November 1923 he sent the draft to his editor Maxwell Perkins and his agent Harold Ober. The Fitzgeralds then moved to Rome for the winter. Fitzgerald made revisions through the winter after Perkins informed him that the novel was too vague and Gatsby's biographical section too long. Content after a few rounds of revision, Fitzgerald returned the final batch of revised galleys in the middle of February 1925.[8]
The cover of The Great Gatsby is among the most celebrated pieces of jacket art in American literature.[9] A little-known artist named Francis Cugat was commissioned to illustrate the book while Fitzgerald was in the midst of writing it. The cover was completed before the novel, with Fitzgerald so enamored of it that he told his publisher he had "written it into" the novel.[9]
Fitzgerald's remarks about incorporating the painting into the novel led to the interpretation that the eyes are reminiscent of those of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg (the novel's erstwhile optometrist on a faded commercial billboard near George Wilson's auto repair shop) which Fitzgerald described as "blue and gigantic?? their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose." Although this passage has some resemblance to the painting, a closer explanation can be found in the description of Daisy Buchanan as the "girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs".[9]
Ernest Hemingway recorded in A Moveable Feast that when Fitzgerald lent him a copy of The Great Gatsby to read, he immediately disliked the cover, but "Scott told me not to be put off by it, that it had to do with a billboard along a highway in Long Island that was important in the story. He said he had liked the jacket and now he didn't like it."[10]
Fitzgerald was ambivalent about the title, making it hard for him to choose. He entertained many choices before settling on The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald shifted between Gatsby; Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires; Trimalchio; Trimalchio in West Egg; On the Road to West Egg; Under the Red, White, and Blue; Gold-Hatted Gatsby and The High-Bouncing Lover. Initially, he preferred Trimalchio, after the crude parvenu in Petronius's Satyricon. Unlike Fitzgerald's protagonist, Trimalchio participated in the audacious and libidinous orgies that he hosted. That Fitzgerald refers to Gatsby by the proposed title once in the novel reinforces the view that it would have been a misnomer. As Tony Tanner observed, there are subtle similarities between the two.[11]
On November 7, 1924, Fitzgerald wrote to Perkins.?? "I have now decided to stick to the title I put on the book [...] Trimalchio in West Egg" but was eventually persuaded that the reference was too obscure and that people would not be able to pronounce it. His wife and Perkins both expressed their preference for The Great Gatsby and the next month Fitzgerald agreed.[12] A month before publication, after a final review of the proofs, he asked if it would be possible to re-title it Trimalchio or Gold-Hatted Gatsby but Perkins advised against it. On March 19, Fitzgerald asked if the book could be renamed Under the Red, White and Blue but it was at that stage too late to change. The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925. Fitzgerald remarked that "the title is only fair, rather bad than good".[13]
The time is the summer of 1922 and the narrator is Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate and World War I veteran who takes a job in New York. He rents a small house on Long Island, next door to the mansion of Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire who holds extravagant parties.
Across the bay lives his attractive second cousin Daisy with her rich husband Tom Buchanan, who was at Yale with Nick. They ask him to lunch, where he meets a girl called Jordan Baker, but the atmosphere is spoiled when Tom answers a telephone call from his mistress Myrtle.
She is the unhappy wife of George Wilson, who owns an unsuccessful garage in the Valley of Ashes on the outskirts of the city. Tom takes Nick to the flat in New York where he meets Myrtle and holds parties, but once again Tom ruins the occasion upon hitting Myrtle and breaking her nose.
Nick gets an invitation to one of Gatsby?s huge parties, which he attends with Jordan. Most guests seem to be uninvited and not to know their host, who keeps aloof. However he befriends Nick, taking him to lunch in New York with a business associate, a notorious gangster called Meyer Wolfsheim. Gatsby then asks Nick, through Jordan, to arrange a meeting with Daisy. In 1917, though from a modest family and penniless, he had hoped to marry her but was sent to Europe to fight. Now he is rich, has bought a house near her and throws enormous parties in the hope she will attend.
Nick asks them both to tea, after which Gatsby shows them round his opulent mansion. Daisy, unhappy with the unpleasant Tom, is ready to revive her relationship with Gatsby. Daisy asks Gatsby to lunch at her house, together with Nick and Jordan. She then suggests that they all go into New York. Tom, Jordan and Nick get into Gatsby's car while Daisy and Gatsby follow in Tom's car. At Wilson?s garage, Tom stops to fill up and is told by an unhappy Wilson that he knows Myrtle has a lover.
The group goes to the Plaza Hotel, where Tom angrily confronts Gatsby over his relationship with Daisy and his criminal activities. Gatsby challenges Daisy to choose him, her first love, and to deny she ever loved Tom. She avoids both and, overwrought, begs to go home. Daisy sets off with Gatsby in his car, followed by the rest in Tom's car.
As Daisy passes Wilson?s garage, Myrtle runs into the road and, hit by the car, is killed. Daisy in panic drives on but Tom stops and finds the corpse. Back home, Tom and Daisy achieve a reconciliation, pack up and hastily leave. Having been told by Tom that Gatsby was to blame, Wilson finds Gatsby in his swimming pool, shoots him dead and then kills himself.
Nick is the only one left. He arranges Gatsby?s funeral, avoided by all his former friends, and attended only by his father. The old man tells Nick that his dead friend was a poor boy from North Dakota called James Gatz. Disgusted by the whole set-up and no longer interested in the unreliable Jordan, Nick gives up both his job and his house to return to his native Midwest.
The Great Gatsby received mostly positive reviews when it was first published [17] and many of Fitzgerald's literary friends wrote him letters praising the novel. However, Gatsby did not experience the commercial success of Fitzgerald's previous two novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, and although the novel went through two initial printings, some of these copies remained unsold years later.[18]
When Fitzgerald died in 1940, he had been largely forgotten. His obituary in The New York Times mentioned Gatsby as evidence of great potential that was never reached.[19] Gatsby gained readers when Armed Services Editions gave away around 150,000 copies of the novel to the American military in World War II.[20]
In 1951 Arthur Mizener published The Far Side of Paradise, a biography of Fitzgerald. By the 1960s, Gatsby's reputation was established, and it is frequently mentioned as one of the great American novels.
Gatsby has been adapted numerous times, in various media. In addition, an early draft of the novel is now available as Trimalchio: An Early Version of "The Great Gatsby".
The Great Gatsby has been filmed five times and is being filmed for the sixth time:
The Great Catsby, a South Korean TV drama adaptation, based on a South Korean web comic adaptation of The Great Gatsby, was filmed in 2007, starring Kang Kyeong-joon, Park Ye-jin and MC Mong.
The second season of the Showtime television series Californication, starting with its second episode "The Great Ashby", is partly a modern take on the novel, with the characters Lew Ashby, Janie Jones and Hank Moody as modern versions of Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan and Nick Carraway.[22][23]
In the HBO series Entourage the show's main character Vincent Chase stars in a fictional film based off the book entitled Gatsby playing the role of Nick Carraway with the film directed by Martin Scorsese.
An operatic treatment of the novel was commissioned from John Harbison by the New York Metropolitan Opera to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the debut of James Levine. The work, which is also called The Great Gatsby, premiered on December 20, 1999.[24]
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This section possibly contains original research. (November 2010) |
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