reception

THE NOT-SO-GREAT RECEPTION OF THE GREAT GATSBY

Ask readers of 20th-century literature to name their candidates for "The Great American Novel" and they surely would name F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. For almost 75 years now, the book has been recognized as a masterpiece of style and narration, and as the quintessential depiction of what Fitzgerald himself dubbed as "The Jazz Age." It is somewhat surprising, then, that The Great Gatsby was not especially well received when it was published in 1925, and that Fitzgerald gained a reputation as a writer past his prime.

Fitzgerald had first come to national attention in 1920 for his novel This Side of Paradise, a fictionalized account of his years at Princeton University. A huge popular success, the book had a generational appeal comparable to later novels like J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1984). In the years that followed the publication of This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald married the glamorous Zelda Sayre, moved to Paris, and became a celebrated writer whose short stories appeared in prestigious magazines. At the peak of his success, he earned a princely $40,000 a year.

In 1922, Fitzgerald wrote his editor, the famed Maxwell Perkins of the equally famous Scriber's publishing house and told him that he wanted to take his work to a new level. He began to craft a story about a character named James Gatz, a provincial boy whose burning passion to win the heart of the upper-class beauty, Daisy Buchanan, knows no bounds. Although Daisy has married another man, Gatz hopes to draw her to him by reinventing himself as Jay Gatsby, a rich, glamorous, and somewhat mysterious figure whose fabulous parties become the talk of the Long Island town where Daisy lives. Gatsby's story is observed and told by fellow Midwesterner Nick Carraway, a cousin of Daisy's who is initially skeptical, but then increasingly intrigued by Gatsby's romantic quest.

As was his custom, Fitzgerald rearranged and rewrote passages of the book long after he turned the manuscript into his publisher; in fact, the book's cover, by artist Francis Cugat, was finished months before the novel was. While his rush to finish led to a series of plot errors, Fitzgerald clearly improved the book with his last-minute changes. "The author would like to say that never before did one try to keep his artistic conscience as pure as during the ten months put into doing it," Fitzgerald later wrote in the preface to a paperback edition of The Great Gatsby. "Reading it over, I see how it could have been improved-yet without feeling guilty of any discrepancy from the truth, as far as I saw it; truth or rather the equivalent of the truth, the attempt of honesty of imagination."

Fitzgerald may have felt that he had done his best, but relatively few critics or readers were impressed. F. SCOTT FITZERGALD'S LATEST A DUD read the headline in the New York World following the novel's publication in the spring of 1925. Another reviewer could not find "one chemical trace of magic, life, irony, romance, or mysticism in all of The Great Gatsby," and concluded that Fitzgerald had simply been "puttering around." The book also proved to be a commercial disappointment. Fitzgerald had hoped to sell 75,000 copies, but Scribner's produced only 20,000 in the first printing. Books from a subsequent printing of 3,000 were still on hand when Fitzgerald died 15 years later.

The Great Gatsby did have its early admirers. The caustic Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken found the story little more than "a glorified anecdote," but nevertheless praised Gatsby as "plainly the product of a sound and stable talent, conjured into being by hard work." Gilbert Seldes, an early commentator on American popular culture, called it "brilliant," and poet T.S. Eliot considered Gatsby "the first step American fiction has taken since Henry James." But Fitzgerald's editor, Maxwell Perkins, made the most prescient observation: "One thing I think we can be sure of: that when the shouting and the rabble of reviewers and gossipers dies, The Great Gatsby will stand out as an extraordinary book."

Niether Perkins nor Fitzgerald lived to see this prophecy realized. Wracked by alcoholism, and tormented by his wife's mental illness, Fitzgerald suffered a nervous breakdown following the poor reception of his 1934 novel Tender is the Night. His reputation and personal life went into steep decline. He continued to write high-quality stories for magazines and worked for a few years as a Hollywood screenwriter. During this stint, he was one of 17 people who tried their hand at the movie version of Gone with the Wind, but this endeavor, like the rest of his Hollywood career, met with little success. By 1939, he had gone from being a writer who had made $40,000 annually to one who earned a mere $33 annually in royalties. In 1940 Fitzgerald died a broken man leaving behind one unfinished novel about Hollywood called, rather ironically, The Last Tycoon.

A Fitzgerald revival did not get underway until the 1950s, when, in the words of Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli, his work experienced "an explosion the like of which has rarely been seen in American letters." Fitzgerald studies suddenly became a cottage industry. Scribner reissued all of his books and collected his short stories into new editions. In 1960, when the publisher started a series of best-selling classics in paperback, it labeled The Great Gatsby "SL1" (Scribner Library One), reflecting the incredible commercial success the book had achieved. Despite its early failures, The Great Gatsby ultimately withstood the test of time, emerging as one of the great American novels.

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