The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary masterpiece and a contender for the title of the Great American Novel. One persistent item of criticism is an allegation of antisemitic stereotyping. Scholars emphasize the novel's treatment of social class, inherited versus self-made wealth, gender, race, and environmentalism, and its cynical attitude towards the American Dream. Gatsby continues to attract popular and scholarly attention. Numerous stage and film adaptations followed in the subsequent decades. This new-found popularity launched a critical and scholarly re-examination, and the work soon became a core part of most American high school curricula and a part of American popular culture. When the author died in 1940, he believed himself to be a failure and his work forgotten.ĭuring World War II, the novel experienced an abrupt surge in popularity when the Council on Books in Wartime distributed free copies to American soldiers serving overseas. It sold fewer than 20,000 copies by October, and Fitzgerald's hopes of a monetary windfall from the novel were unrealized. Compared to his earlier novels, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922), the novel was a commercial disappointment. Painter Francis Cugat's dust jacket art greatly impressed Fitzgerald, and he incorporated its imagery into the novel.Īfter its publication by Scribner's in April 1925, The Great Gatsby received generally favorable reviews, though some literary critics believed it did not equal Fitzgerald's previous efforts. After making revisions, Fitzgerald was satisfied with the text, but remained ambivalent about the book's title and considered several alternatives. He submitted it to editor Maxwell Perkins, who persuaded Fitzgerald to revise the work over the following winter. Following a move to the French Riviera, Fitzgerald completed a rough draft of the novel in 1924.
The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan. The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. The front dust jacket art of the first edition
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