Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896, and named for a distant cousin, the man who wrote the words to The Star-Spangled Banner. He went to Princeton, left in 1917 to join the Army during the First World War, and never took a degree.
His first novel, This Side of Paradise, came out on March 26, 1920, and sold about 40,000 copies in its first year. He married Zelda Sayre in New York eight days later. The Great Gatsby followed in 1925 and Tender Is the Night in 1934, and he died of a heart attack in Hollywood on December 21, 1940, with his fifth novel unfinished.
I disliked The Great Gatsby when I was forced to read it in high school. It sits on my list of assigned books I couldn’t stand, next to several others. The assigned books I did like were Animal Farm and 1984, and I liked Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn well enough. The story of how Gatsby got made, sold and nearly vanished is another matter. Any writer who has watched a book land with a thud should know it.
Why did The Great Gatsby flop in 1925?
Scribner’s published it on April 10, 1925.
It sold fewer than 23,000 copies by the end of the year, a poor showing for the author of a bestseller.
The reviews were mixed, and the readers who’d made him famous wanted more of the Fitzgerald who wrote about college boys and flappers. Gatsby was shorter, darker and stranger, a novel about a bootlegger who invents himself, chases a married woman for five years and dies in a swimming pool. Readers who’d bought This Side of Paradise for the parties found a book about what the parties cost, narrated by a man who leaves New York in disgust. That was a hard sell in 1925.
The slide got worse.
Tender Is the Night came out in April 1934 to mixed reviews and sold about 12,000 copies in its first three months. By 1936 his yearly book royalties had dropped to $80.
The low point came in August 1940. His Scribner’s statement listed forty copies sold across all his books, seven of them copies of The Great Gatsby, and a payment of $13.13.
Four months later he was dead.
He’d moved into the ground-floor apartment of the columnist Sheilah Graham so he wouldn’t have to climb stairs after an earlier heart attack, and he collapsed there. He believed, with good evidence, that his best book had failed.
How did F. Scott Fitzgerald pay for writing The Great Gatsby?
With short stories, and a lot of them.
His first sale to The Saturday Evening Post paid $400. Within a year his rate was $500, and by 1929 the Post paid him $4,000 a story.
He published 65 stories in the Post between 1920 and 1937 and wrote 168 over his career, and most of his income came from them, never from the novels. In 1924 he wrote a Post piece called How to Live on $36,000 a Year after overspending badly, then kept writing stories in France to stay ahead of his bills while he finished Gatsby.
The magazine work bought the time for the book, and the book paid back almost nothing. A few months after the $36,000 article, the Post ran a follow-up about how cheaply an American family could live in Europe, and Fitzgerald still couldn’t keep ahead of what he spent. The stories weren’t hackwork, either. The best of them hold up as well as anything he wrote, and the discipline of hitting a magazine’s length and delivering on a deadline shows in how tightly Gatsby is built.
That arrangement is older than Fitzgerald and still runs most writing careers. The work that pays and the work that lasts are seldom the same work.
A writer who sneers at the paying work has never had to live on the other kind.
What did Maxwell Perkins change in The Great Gatsby?
Perkins changed nothing himself. He told Fitzgerald what was wrong, and Fitzgerald fixed it.
Fitzgerald finished a rough draft in 1924 at the Villa Marie in Saint-Raphaël, on the French Riviera, and sent it to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s for his whole career and the man who’d taken a chance on This Side of Paradise. Perkins loved it and said so. Then he made the hard point. Gatsby himself was too vague, and the reader needed some convincing account of where his money came from.
Fitzgerald took the note. Over the winter in Rome he revised heavily, with major changes to chapters six and eight, and the Gatsby we read now is the result. He told a friend it was “about the best American novel ever written,” which tells you how much the revision gave him back.
That exchange holds a lesson every writer flinches from.
The editor who loves your book and tells you its central character doesn’t work yet is the editor worth keeping. Perkins also edited Ernest Hemingway, and he treated both men the same way: praise first, then the problem, then trust that the writer would solve it. He stayed Fitzgerald’s editor through the lean years of the 1930s, when the books stopped selling, and he came to the funeral.
What titles did F. Scott Fitzgerald consider for The Great Gatsby?
A long and odd list. Fitzgerald tried Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires, Trimalchio in West Egg, On the Road to West Egg, The Gold-Hatted Gatsby, The High-Bouncing Lover and Under the Red, White, and Blue.
Trimalchio is the vulgar rich host who throws an endless dinner party in the Satyricon, the ancient Roman satire by Petronius, and the comparison to Gatsby’s parties is exact. It’s also obscure to anyone who skipped Latin. The book went out as The Great Gatsby, with Francis Cugat’s painting Celestial Eyes on the jacket: a woman’s eyes and lips floating over the lights of an amusement park at night.
A good title tells the reader what kind of book this is without explaining it. Trimalchio would have needed a footnote. The Great Gatsby has an ironic edge that only shows itself on the last page.
Why does The Great Gatsby use Nick Carraway as narrator?
Because Gatsby only works if we never get inside his head.
Nick is the neighbor, a Midwesterner selling bonds in New York, close enough to see everything and far enough outside it to misread half of it. He hears rumors about Gatsby before he meets him. He learns the truth about James Gatz in pieces, out of order, from Gatsby and from other people, and he passes it on in the order he got it. The reader assembles the man the way Nick does, and the man stays partly invented to the end. That suits a character who invented himself.
Tell the same story from inside Gatsby and the mystery dies on page one. Every reader would know about the bootlegging, the war, the poor boy from North Dakota. The distance keeps the questions open and keeps the green light green.
Gatsby is short, about 50,000 words, and the narrator lets it stay that short. Nick skips what he didn’t witness and summarizes what bores him, so the book moves from party to confrontation to death without the connective tissue a longer novel would carry. Whole years of Gatsby’s life arrive in a paragraph of Nick’s retelling. A writer whose draft keeps swelling should look hard at what an outside narrator lets you leave out.
That’s a technique any novelist can borrow.
When a character’s power depends on being unknowable, put a witness between that character and the reader, and let the witness get things wrong.
Fitzgerald’s August 1940 royalty statement showed seven copies of The Great Gatsby sold. Four months later he was dead. Today it sells half a million a year.Share on X
How did The Great Gatsby become a classic after F. Scott Fitzgerald died?
A war did it. During the Second World War the Armed Services Editions program printed cheap paperbacks sized for a uniform pocket, and about 155,000 copies of The Great Gatsby went to American soldiers overseas.
A generation of young men read it in camps, on troopships and in hospital wards with time on their hands, and they came home knowing it. The paperbacks were free, small and disposable, and a book that had failed at full price found readers with nothing else to read. Critics and teachers took it up after the war, and the book settled into American classrooms, where it has stayed. By 2020 it was selling around 500,000 copies a year.
Fitzgerald never saw any of it. The lesson is cold comfort but real: a book’s first year says very little about its life.
What were F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Crack-Up essays?
Three confessional essays Esquire ran in February, March and April of 1936, titled The Crack-Up, Pasting It Together and Handle With Care.
In them Fitzgerald wrote about his own collapse at thirty-nine, without hiding behind a character, the drinking, the debts and the sense that his talent had gone, in plain sentences and with almost no self-pity. They read now as some of his best prose, and they showed a kind of nonfiction most writers of his generation wouldn’t touch. Edmund Wilson gathered them into a book in 1945.
The next year, 1937, he took a contract with MGM and moved to Hollywood to write screenplays. The money went largely to Zelda’s psychiatric care and his daughter’s schooling.
How much of The Last Tycoon did F. Scott Fitzgerald finish?
About two-thirds of a first draft. When he died he’d written roughly 44,000 words, 17 of a planned 30 episodes, most of it in about fourteen months.
His plan shows how he worked. He projected a draft of about 60,000 words and meant to cut it to 50,000, roughly the length of Gatsby, and he planned that cut before he’d reached the end. I cut a lot when I revise. Fitzgerald budgeted his cut before the draft even existed, because Gatsby had taught him that the short version was the strong one. Edmund Wilson edited what existed and published it in 1941.
His notes for the novel contain the line “There are no second acts in American lives.” His own career after his death proved it wrong.
What doesn’t hold up in The Great Gatsby?
Meyer Wolfsheim is an antisemitic caricature, described by his nose and his crooked dealings and given little else. That’s a stain on the book, and no amount of period context removes it.
Daisy is thin.
She’s the object of the plot more than a person in it, seen almost entirely through the longing of two men, and she gets few scenes of her own.
The prose is the main reason people love the book, and it tips into overwriting in places, with sentences that admire themselves. None of that makes the book less worth studying, but a reader who comes away unmoved isn’t missing anything obvious.
How should you mark F. Scott Fitzgerald Day?
Reread The Great Gatsby as an adult, and watch Nick. Count how much of what he tells you is secondhand. Then read the last page twice, down to the closing line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Then read a few of the Post stories. Babylon Revisited, from 1931, shows what he could do inside a magazine’s word count, and it’s a better introduction to his sentences than any classroom assignment.
If you write, find the editor’s note you’ve been avoiding and do what Fitzgerald did with Perkins’s letter. Then pull out a draft you’ve given up on because its first readers shrugged.
Fitzgerald died thinking he’d failed, and seven copies in one royalty period would convince anyone. He was wrong about the book and right about the business. The trade judges a novel by its first year and seldom looks again. For the writer whose assigned books I did enjoy, see George Orwell Day, and the rest of the author birthdays are on the literary holidays calendar. If your own book has a central character who’s still too vague, my writing services cover that problem.