The Great Gatsby

This article is about the novel. For the film, TV and opera adaptations, see The Great Gatsby (disambiguation).

The Great Gatsby

File:Gatsby 1925 jacket.gif Cover of the first edition, 1925.
Author	F. Scott Fitzgerald
Cover artist	Francis Cugat
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Charles Scribner's Sons
Publication date	April 10, 1925
Publication place	United States
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.

Writing and publication

With The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald made a conscious departure from the writing process of his previous novels. He started planning it in June 1922, after completing his play The Vegetable and began composing The Great Gatsby in 1923. He ended up discarding most of it as a false start, some of which resurfaced in the story "Absolution". 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".

Oheka Castle on the Gold Coast of Long Island was a partial inspiration for Gatsby's estate.

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. 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. 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".

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.

Original cover art

The cover of The Great Gatsby is among the most celebrated pieces of jacket art in American literature. 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.

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".

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."

Title

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.

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. 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".

Plot

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 Gatsby 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 Plaza Hotel.

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.

Major characters

• Nick Carraway (narrator) — a man from the Midwest, a Yale graduate, a World War I veteran, and a resident of West Egg. He is Gatsby's next-door neighbor and a bond salesman.
• Jay Gatsby (originally James Gatz) — a young, mysterious millionaire with shady business connections (later revealed to be a bootlegger), originally from North Dakota. He is obsessed with Daisy Buchanan, whom he had met when he was a young officer stationed in the south during World War I. Based on the bootlegger and former World War I officer Max Gerlach, according to Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, Matthew J Bruccoli's biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
• Daisy Buchanan née Fay — an attractive and effervescent, if shallow, young woman, identified as a flapper. She's Nick's second cousin, once removed; and the wife of Tom Buchanan. Daisy is believed to have been inspired by Fitzgerald's own youthful romances with Ginevra King and Zelda Sayre. Daisy once had a romantic relationship with Gatsby, before she married Tom. Her choice between Gatsby and Tom is one of the central conflicts in the novel.
• Tom Buchanan — a millionaire who it's boy lives on East Egg, and Daisy's husband. Buchanan has parallels with William Mitchell, the Chicagoan who married Ginevra King. Buchanan and Mitchell were both Chicagoans with an interest in polo. Like Ginevra's father, whom Fitzgerald resented, Buchanan attended Yale and is a white supremacist.
• Jordan Baker — Daisy Buchanan's long-time friend, Nick Carraway's "girlfriend", and a professional golfer with a slightly shady reputation. Fitzgerald told Maxwell Perkins that Jordan was based on the golfer Edith Cummings, a friend of Ginevra King. Her name is a play on the two then-popular automobile brands, the Jordan Motor Car Company and the Baker Motor Vehicle, alluding to Jordan's "fast" reputation and the freedom now presented to Americans, especially women, in the 1920s.
• George B. Wilson — a mechanic and owner of a garage. Wilson is disliked by Tom Buchanan and his own wife, Myrtle Wilson, who describes him as "so dumb he doesn't know he's alive." When he learns of the death of his wife, he shoots and kills Gatsby, wrongly believing he had been driving the car that killed Myrtle, and then kills himself.
• Myrtle Wilson – George's wife, and Tom Buchanan's mistress. She is accidentally killed after being hit by a car driven by Daisy, though Gatsby takes the blame for it.

Secondary characters

• Meyer Wolfshiem — a Jewish man Gatsby describes as a gangster/gambler who had fixed the World Series. Wolfshiem is a clear allusion to Arnold Rothstein, a New York crime kingpin who was notoriously blamed for the Black Sox Scandal which tainted the 1919 World Series.
• Catherine — Myrtle Wilson's sister.
• Chester and Lucille McKee — Myrtle's New York friends.
• "Owl-eyes"—a drunken party-goer whom Nick meets in Gatsby's library. One of the few characters in the novel to attend Gatsby's funeral and he represents the Lost Generation itself.
• Ewing "The Boarder" Klipspringer — a sponger who virtually lives at Gatsby's mansion.
• Pammy Buchanan — the Buchanans' three-year-old daughter, who is a corrupted child.
• Henry C. Gatz — Gatsby's somewhat estranged father in North Dakota. One of the only characters in the book to attend Gatsby’s funeral.
• Mr. and Mrs. Sloane - a couple that visits Gatsby's house with Tom.
• Michaelis — George Wilson's Greek neighbor.
• Dan Cody — a wealthy adventurer who was Gatsby's mentor as a youth.

Reception

The Great Gatsby received mostly positive reviews when it was first published 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.

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. Gatsby gained readers when Armed Services Editions gave away around 150,000 copies of the novel to the American military in World War II.

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.

Adaptations

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".

Film

The Great Gatsby has been filmed five times and is being filmed for the sixth time:

1. The Great Gatsby, in 1926 by Herbert Brenon – a silent movie of a stage adaptation, starring Warner Baxter, Lois Wilson, and William Powell. It is a famous example of a lost film. Reviews suggest that it may have been the most faithful adaptation of the novel, but a trailer of the film at National Archives is all that is known to exist.
2. The Great Gatsby, in 1949 by Elliott Nugent – starring Alan Ladd, Betty Field, and Shelley Winters; for copyright reasons, this film is not readily available.
3. The Great Gatsby, in 1974, by Jack Clayton – the most famous screen version, starring Sam Waterston as narrator Nick Carraway, with Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan and Robert Redford as Gatsby, with a script by Francis Ford Coppola.
4. The Great Gatsby, in 2000 by Robert Markowitz – a made-for-TV movie starring Toby Stephens, Paul Rudd and Mira Sorvino.
5. G, in 2002 by Christopher Scott Cherot – a modernized, loosely based adaptation starring Richard T. Jones, Blair Underwood, and Chenoa Maxwell.
6. The Great Gatsby, directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, and Tobey Maguire. It is set to be released on May 10, 2013.

Television

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.

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.

Opera

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.

Books

• Ernesto Quiñonez's Bodega Dreams adapted The Great Gatsby to Spanish Harlem
• The Great Gatsby, a graphic novel adaptation by Australian cartoonist Nicki Greenberg
• The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian imagines the later years of Daisy and Tom Buchanan's marriage as a social worker in 2007 investigates the possibility that a deceased elderly homeless person is Daisy's son.
• The young adult novel Jake Reinvented by Gordon Korman is a modern version of The Great Gatsby in which the characters are high school students.
• Daisy Buchanan's Daughter (2011) by Tom Carson is the purported autobiography of Tom and Daisy Buchanan's daughter
• The Late Gatsby (2012) is a mashup of The Great Gatsby and a vampire narrative.

Radio

• In October 2008, the BBC World Service commissioned and broadcast an abridged 10-part reading of the story, read from the view of Nick Carraway by Trevor White.
• In May 2012 BBC Radio 4 broadcast The Great Gatsby, a Classic Serial dramatisation by Robert Forrest.

Music

• In April 2010, the folk duo Reg & Phil released a song entitled "Daisy Buchanan" on their self-titled album. The song, told by an anonymous narrator, directly addresses the novel's title character.
• Ballad group 2AM released an EP in 2012 titled 'F.Scott Fitzgerald's Way of Love', which draws inspiration from and narrates the story of Jay Gatsby's love for Daisy.

Theater

• The Great Gatsby Musical was due to open at the Kings Head Theatre, London, on August 7, 2012. A Ruby In The Dust production, it is adapted by Joe Evans and Linnie Reedman with music and lyrics by Joe Evans, directed by Linnie Reedman, with Matilda Sturridge as Daisy Buchanan.
• Simon Levy's stage adaptation, the only one authorized and granted exclusive rights by the Fitzgerald Estate, had its world premiere at The Guthrie Theater to commemorate the opening of its new theatre in July 2006, directed by David Esbjornson. It was subsequently produced by Seattle Repertory Theatre. In 2012 a revised/reworked version was produced at Arizona Theatre Company and Grand Theatre in London, Ontario, Canada. www.TheGreatGatsbyPlay.com
• Elevator Repair Service, an experimental theater group, produced a theater version of The Great Gatsby, entitled "Gatz." It is set in an office and read and performed by actor Scott Shepherd along with a cast of 12 other actors.

Computer games

• In 2010 a casual Hidden Object game called Classic Adventures: The Great Gatsby was released by Oberon Media.
• As a tribute to old NES games, developer Charlie Hoey and editor Pete Smith created an 8-bit version of The Great Gatsby that is playable online. Ian Crouch of The New Yorker compared it to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1989) for the NES.

See also

• Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century

References

• Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph (ed.) (2000). F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: A Literary Reference. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. ISBN 0-7867-0996-0. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph (2002). Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (2nd rev. ed.). Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 1-57003-455-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Curnutt, Kirk (ed.) (2004). A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-515302-2. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Mizener, Arthur (1951). "The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald" (Document). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. {{cite document}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help).
• Prigozy, Ruth (ed.) (2002). The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-62447-9. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)

External links

• The Great Gatsby overview
• The Great Gatsby, from Project Gutenberg Australia, plain text.
• In Gatsby's Tracks – Locating the Valley of Ashes
• The Great Gatsby Play – Authorized and Granted Exclusive Rights by the Fitzgerald Estate