The Great Gatsby

Written by

Robert Richardson

in

MOMENT IN TIME

NW-MIT-GATSBY-PUBLISHED-0409
The Great Gatsby is published
April 10, 1925: It has often been called the Great American novel, but when F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was first published it was met with decidedly mixed reviews. The New York Times called it “a curious book, a mystical, glamorous story of today.” While The New York World ran a review with the headline: “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Latest a Dud.” Set in the Roaring Twenties, it told the tragic story of Jay Gatsby, a self-made man who profited – as so many did at the time – on the sale of black-market liquor during Prohibition. It was a novel that perfectly encapsulated the heady Jazz Age of lavish parties and social climbing, an era Fitzgerald himself described as a “whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure.” A gripping love story, told with finesse, it nevertheless fell flat. The 20,000 copies of its first printing sold slowly, and there were still copies unsold from its second printing when Fitzgerald died in 1940. It is now required reading in English literature classes around the world and the story has been retold in film, theatre, ballet, opera, video games, TV movies and radio plays. Gayle MacDonald

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