He died in 1940 at the age of 44.Įven when he died in 1940, Fitzgerald was denied burial in his own family's plot in Rockville, Md., because the Catholic Church decided that his novels were a little too risque and. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925, it didn't sell many copies. I think you get that sense in Fitzgerald of someone who remade himself but was also aware at times in his life that he was pretending to be someone he was not. He was always kind of on the outside looking in and hoping to be good enough for Princeton, to be good enough for the crowd on the Riviera who he hung out with - Gerald and Sara Murphy, the Hemingways, etc. Fitzgerald never owned a home - he always rented. His parents never owned a home, for instance, they always rented. Paul, Minn., whose parents didn't quite measure up to their neighbors. , he was also that Midwestern boy from St. So a lot of events are predicted in this novel. That car crash in which Myrtle Wilson is killed, Tom's mistress, there are two other car crashes that preceded that car crash. Events that occur in the novel, they're foretold many times. She grew up near an area where part of the book is set in Queens, N.Y., which is described as The Valley of Ashes because it was a dump for coal-burning ashes.Īnd, most importantly, film noir, hard-boiled detective fiction and The Great Gatsby - they're all stories that are obsessed with the presence of fate. While Corrigan is hardly alone in her evaluation of The Great Gatsby, she's perhaps unique in her ability to write in such a lively and engaging way about the book, Fitzgerald's life and the era in which it's set - the 1920s.Ĭorrigan has read The Great Gatsby more than 50 times and has taught it to generations of college students. The doomed beauty of trying - that's what this novel is about." to be the boat against the current, even though failure and death inevitably await you. "You can't escape the past, but isn't it noble to try?" she says. She's written a new book about it called So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.Ĭorrigan says she loves The Great Gatsby in part because of its message that it's admirable to try to beat your own fate. How?īut today Corrigan considers The Great Gatsby to be the greatest American novel - and it's the novel she loves more than any other. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary masterwork and a contender for the title of the Great American Novel.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title So We Read On Subtitle How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures Author Maureen Corrigan One persistent item of criticism is an allegation of antisemitic stereotyping. Contemporary scholars emphasize the novel's treatment of social class, inherited versus self-made wealth, 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.
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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. Compared to his earlier novels, Gatsby was a commercial disappointment, selling fewer than 20,000 copies by October, and Fitzgerald's hopes of a monetary windfall from the novel were unrealized. Painter Francis Cugat's cover art greatly impressed Fitzgerald, and he incorporated aspects of it 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. Description The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F.
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