Celebrating 100 years of The Great Gatsby, ‘the greatest novel in the English language’

The Great Gatsby was not a first-time hit. When it was published by Scribner’s in 1925, it was generally reviewed positively but often with the caveat that it wasn’t as successful a portrait of the jazz age as F Scott Fitzgerald’s previous two novels – This Side of Paradise in 1920 and The Beautiful and Damned in 1922. Sales were underwhelming. Published in April 1925 – 100 years ago this month – it had sold fewer than 20,000 copies by October. It certainly didn’t make Fitzgerald rich, as he’d hoped that it would, believing it to be his finest work, his first “consciously artistic achievement”.

It did finally get re-printed during Fitzgerald’s lifetime, but, poignantly, the second run had not sold out by the time of his death in 1940. He regarded his trajectory as notably downward and died considering himself a failure who had had no impact on the literary world. A tragic ending for the talented visionary and poet who wrote what is now regarded as one of the greatest novels of all time.

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Things had been going so well before 1925. Fitzgerald met the flamboyant socialite Zelda Sayre in 1918 when he was a soldier stationed in Alabama, and though she at first refused to marry him due to his lack of funds, the commercial success of his first novel changed her mind. The tongues of the American literary world were wagging – Fitzgerald was unarguably one of America’s rising stars.

The follow-up novel cemented his reputation. He began to travel around Europe, famously becoming a regular at the most fashionable Parisian haunts with the likes of Ernest Hemingway. So the relative disappointment of The Great Gatsby, when he was flying high, hit him hard.

It’s hard, in retrospect, to understand the cool reception the novel initially met with. And so odd that the wrong had not been righted by the time Fitzgerald died 15 years later. For me and many others, including Stephen Fry – who said it “is perfect, word for word” – in terms of language, mood and sentiment, it is the greatest novel in the English language. Every sentence flows and dazzles like liquid gold, every paragraph has its own rhythm. The characters are so brilliantly, authentically drawn they’re alive within a few lines. Crucially, we have a leading man with the quintessential qualities for an affecting drama; mystery, romance, longing, regret, and a Shakespearean tragic flaw.

On top of all that, there is quite possibly the most sublime ending of any novel of the last 100 years: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

If that whets your appetite and you’re among the few who haven’t read The Great Gatsby (or seen any of the movie adaptations), it is set among a small group of American east coast party-goers in the early 1920s, a time of economic prosperity marked by raucous music, even more raucous parties, and outlandish behaviour. The storyteller is Nick Carraway, who goes to stay with friends Tom and Daisy Buchanan in East Egg, the slightly less opulent area across from neighbour Jay Gatsby in West Egg. Gatsby throws magnificent glamorous parties in his enormous mansion, but no one has met him. He is rumoured to flit among his guests but as no one knows him, his identity is shrouded in mystery.

In time Nick does meet Gatsby and discovers he is has been in love with Daisy since they were together before the war. He has made plans to win her back and hopes the glamorous parties will draw her like a moth to a dancing flame. What follows is an unforgettable story of yearning and disillusionment. As Fitzgerald – who was still something of a playboy himself – says of his beautiful flighty East Egg set: “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money and vast carelessness.”

Jay Gatsby is an enigma – vain and yearning, egotistical and desperate, deluded and yet capable of the most profound thoughts. He seems at first glance to be the epitome of the American dream; a self made man who rose up from poverty and now flaunts his wealth. However it is his long held impossible dream of eternal love which determines his fate. It may be said that he is childishly naive, but what is sadder than a broken innocent?

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Fitzgerald himself ran into trouble in the years after Gatsby was published. The Great Depression arrived in 1929 and suddenly his studies of the roaring 20s didn’t seem as much fun as they once had. Book sales dipped, and, alongside financial worries, Fitzgerald had to cope with a wife with mental health issues (Zelda was placed in a mental institution in 1936). He moved to Hollywood to write screenplays but didn’t produce anything outstanding, perhaps because he was by then an alcoholic. His fourth novel, Tender is the Night, was published in 1934 and his final, The Last Tycoon, posthumously.

It is hard to believe that Fitzgerald died without seeing any of The Great Gatsby’s immense success. The Second World War saw a second wave of interest in the novel as American soldiers were given free copies, and it is now required reading in schools around the world. Four film adaptations have been attempted, two of which feature Hollywood golden boys – Robert Redford in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 movie, and Leo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 version. The novel consistently appears on lists of The Great American Novel. It is an acknowledged masterpiece, firmly established in the canon, with too many reprints to count – an achievement which would have amazed the jaded Fitzgerald.

The American Dream has gone through a number of iterations. And since its uptick in popularity during the Second World War, Gatsby has remained relevant while 15 American presidents have come and gone. One wonders what Elon Musk and Donald Trump would say about a book that mocks the empty headiness of the idle rich. The nuances might escape them, but Trump might like the idea of a Great man – a lot of people are saying the Greatest – who got his name in tremendously big letters on a front page.

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