It’s hard to fathom, but “The Great Gatsby,” which is widely praised as one of the greatest American novels, was considered a “dud” when it was published 100 years ago in April 1925.
It was considered by the few who read it as just another potboiler.
Its failure possibly led to author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s disappointments, depressions, disillusionments, alcohol consumption and maybe even his early death of a heart attack at age 44 in 1940 in Los Angeles where he was working as a movie-script writer.
Born in St. Paul, Fitzgerald always felt like an outsider peering longingly into a world that would never be fully his. He fell in love with a young Chicago socialite, Ginevra King. But her wealthy father rejected him as an upstart without money. Fitzgerald never got over it, and his never-ending longing for Ginevra informs “The Great Gatsby.”
Later, he met an Alabama belle, Zelda Sayre. After a long courtship, he convinced her to marry him and thus began their madcap “Jazz Age” frolics in America and Europe during which Zelda’s mental health began to deteriorate.
Fitzgerald’s many short stories and his first two novels were widely read and admired for depicting Jazz-Age characters of the early 1920s. The Jazz Age was a glitzy, self-indulgent version of “The American Dream.” During that wild-and-crazy decade, young adults pursued frantic pleasures often among the nouveau riche (newly rich people), hot-jazz music, drinking booze, fast dancing and sexual flings.
Those themes pervade “The Great Gatsby,” which takes place on Long Island and nearby New York City. Its main character is Jay Gatsby, a mysterious and aloof young man who is among the newly rich, having made his fortune through bootlegging (distributing) liquor – illegal during the Prohibition Act of the 1920s.
Jay’s obsessive passion is for Daisy Fay, who married a blockhead named Tom Buchanen and moved with him to a mansion on Long Island. In pursuit of rekindling love with Daisy and of attaining the “American Dream,” Jay moves to the island too, into a mansion within sight of Daisy’s home right across the bay.
Jay hosts sprawling, noisy, lavish parties to attract Daisy’s attention, but he remains aloof, the enigmatic loner, the outsider always “inventing” himself.
Eventually, he and Daisy seem about to rekindle their former romance. However, a tangled chain of circumstances spoils it all and leads to a misdirected murder.
The exquisite prose of the novel is almost musically lyrical, vivid, descriptive, breathtaking. Ernest Hemingway said of Fitzgerald: “His prose was as natural as the scales on a butterfly’s wings.” And yes it was – and is!
During World War II, readers began to discover the rhapsodic-but-tragic wonders of that novel. At that time, many books were distributed free to soldiers fighting in the war. Among them were copies of “The Great Gatsby,” very likely unsold copies of that “dud” novel stored for 15 years collecting dust in warehouses. Soldiers loved the novel and shared it with others, including with the folks back home. At long last, readers everywhere began to realize that book is a haunting masterpiece. It gets even better with time because its themes are so “modern” – social-class tensions, the loss of cherished illusions, white-supremacist notions (Tom Buchanen) and believing that lots of money can buy both love and instant admission into the American Dream.
I’ve read “The Great Gatsby” at least 10 times in my life. Here is one of my favorite passages. It takes place after a lavish party at Gatsby’s mansion when the wheel of a car falls off, sending the vehicle and its two drunken occupants into a ditch. Bystanders reprimand the driver. He says he wasn’t driving; another man was.
“Ah-h-h!” the gathered crowd gasps, then look at the car.
“And when the (car) door had opened wide, there was a ghostly pause. Then, very gradually, part by part, a pale, dangling individual stepped out of the wreck, pawing tentatively at the ground with a large, uncertain dancing shoe.”