The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald was twenty-eight when The Great Gatsby was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons on 10 April 1925. He had written most of it the previous year on the Riviera, at Valescure near Saint-Raphaël, and rewrote it hard over the winter in Rome, reworking the middle chapters in proof after his editor, Maxwell Perkins, told him that Gatsby himself was too vague a figure to carry the book. He was uneasy about the title to the last — he had tried Trimalchio, Trimalchio in West Egg, Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires, The Gold-Hatted Gatsby and Under the Red, White and Blue — and cabled Scribner’s about changing it when the book was already set. The jacket, Francis Cugat’s painting of a woman’s eyes above a carnival sky, was commissioned before the novel was finished; Fitzgerald asked that it be kept for him and told Perkins he had written it into the book.

It did not do what he needed it to do. It sold about twenty thousand copies in its first year, well under his two earlier novels, and the second printing had not sold out when he died in 1940 believing himself forgotten. The reversal came in the following decade, and one of its instruments was the war: an Armed Services Edition put something like a hundred and fifty thousand copies into the hands of American soldiers, most of whom had never heard of the book.

Nine chapters, under fifty thousand words, one summer — that of 1922. The method is withholding. Gatsby is a rumour for two chapters and a stranger at his own party in the third; where his money came from is established in the seventh; the account of who he was arrives after the reader has already decided. Nick Carraway announces on the first page that he reserves judgement and then spends the book judging, and the distance between what he claims to be and what he does is as much the subject as Gatsby is. Read it once for the story and again for the machinery — the telephone calls, the two cars, the heat of the seventh chapter, the hoarding above the ash heaps.

The text here is the 1925 first edition, complete and unabridged, with the dedication to Zelda and the epigraph signed Thomas Parke d’Invilliers, a poet Fitzgerald had invented for This Side of Paradise and who is therefore the author of his own book’s motto. The novel came out of copyright in the United States at the beginning of 2021; Fitzgerald died in 1940, and in Britain and the European Union it has been free of copyright since 2011.