One hundred years ago, on April 10, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald celebrated the publication of what he considered to be his greatest work of literature. He had high hopes for The Great Gatsby’s success in both sales and critical reception, proclaiming on the eve of its publication that his new novel “will be a consciously artistic achievement.”
“It will sell about 80,000 copies,” Fitzgerald supposed, “but I may be wrong.” In fact, he was wrong twice.
Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published five years earlier in March of 1920 and was so popular that it was reprinted nine times and sold more than 41,000 copies within the first year, ushering in the Jazz Age of American Literature.
Rather than being inspired by this success to pursue his next project, Fitzgerald indulged in years of celebration and excess. He languished in a stupor of drunken parties and ill-discipline, noting in April 1924 that he had “deteriorated” to writing an average of only 100 words per day over the past two years. (For reference, this blog post is already over 170 words long.)
In a letter, he blames three bad habits for his lack of productivity: “1) Laziness 2) Referring everything to Zelda [his wife] 3) Word consciousness + self doubt.” After identifying these causes for his lack of productivity, Fitzgerald describes a crippling lack of self-assuredness, writing that he had “not lived enough within myself to develop the necessary self reliance” to write with confidence.
Yet, in this same letter, and on the verge of launching himself fully into writing The Great Gatsby, he asserts that “I feel I have an enormous power in me now, more than I’ve ever had.” He was focused and eager to prove his literary mettle.
Most of Fitzgerald’s career featured bursts of serious literary ambition surrounded by longer periods spent writing lesser fiction for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, which provided him with a steady income and the payout of mass market publication. When Fitzgerald explained to Ernest Hemingway this practice of shifting between writing for art and writing for money, Hemingway accused Fitzgerald of “whoring” his talent. But Fitzgerald committed the summer of 1924 to writing “the very best he could write” and finished his first draft of The Great Gatsby before the end of August.
As Fitzgerald was writing Gatsby, his editor (Max Perkins) sent him an early sketch of Francis Cugat’s now-famous cover art depicting a woman’s face hovering over a carnival scene. Fitzgerald loved the imagery and pleaded with his editor “for Christs sake don’t give anyone that jacket you’re saving for me. I’ve written it into the book.”
Scholars disagree on how seriously to take Fitzgerald’s claim, but we might find the dust jacket’s influence in the novel’s depiction of a billboard with the looming eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, or else in the description of Daisy as a “girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs.” Regardless, Perkins saved the haunting painting for the dust jacket of The Great Gatsby, and Fitzgerald considered it “a masterpiece for this book.”
As Fitzgerald emerged from the sustained focus of crafting this tight 50,000-word novel, he turned his attention to the business side of things. Max Perkins of Scribner’s Sons offered Fitzgerald a $5,000 advance on a tiered royalty structure: he would receive 15% on the first 20,000 copies sold, 17.5% on the next 20,000 copies sold, and then 20% on all sales beyond 40,000 copies. The book was priced at $2.00, meaning that nearly the entire first print run of 20,870 copies would need to sell before Fitzgerald would earn out his advance.
The initial reviews of Gatsby were mixed. While some critics perceived the brilliance of Fitzgerald’s prose and the value of the novel’s commentary on American ambition and wealth, others considered the new novel “obviously unimportant,” “artificial,” “negligible,” “no more than a glorified anecdote,” and “far inferior” to Fitzgerald’s earlier work. Some readers couldn’t figure out if Gatsby was a crime novel without crime, a romance without love, or a mystery novel without a whodunit. The prevailing critical opinion was that Fitzgerald’s once-glorious talent was “ending in a fizzle of smoke and sparks.” In the words of one critic, Gatsby was simply “a dud.”
Consequently, The Great Gatsby underperformed the sales figures of his previous novels. The first run didn’t sell out until June of 1926, and boxes of unsold copies of the second printing spent two decades gathering dust in a Scribner’s warehouse. Only seven copies of the novel sold in the month preceding Fitzgerald’s death in 1940; he earned a paltry $13.13 in royalties that year.
So, The Great Gatsby did not sell 80,000 copies as Fitzgerald expected.
Rather, it sold over 30 million copies and continues to sell 500,000 more each year.
The novel’s astounding second wind is attributed to its inclusion in the Armed Services Editions, which were pocket-sized, unabridged paperback books printed for U.S. Servicemembers to read during World War II. In the months leading up to D-Day, General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered that every soldier storming the beaches of Normandy be equipped with an Armed Services Edition book in his breast pocket. Between 1943 and 1947, over 122 million paperbacks were printed for free distribution to U.S. Servicemembers.
The Great Gatsby was one of 1,324 titles selected for the Armed Services Editions by an advisory committee consisting of prominent literary and public figures who met twice a week. In 1945, 155,000 copies of The Great Gatsby were distributed to service members who read it, loved it, and returned home from the war hoping to buy a copy of the book. Scribner’s printed new editions to meet the renewed interest in the novel, and The Great Gatsby finally achieved its status as a Great American Novel.
Sadly, Fitzgerald did not live to see the eventual recognition and popularity of his greatest work. A few months before he died, Fitzgerald, burdened by debt and disappointment, wrote a forlorn but prescient letter to Perkins:
“I’m hunting for a small apartment. I wish I was in print. It will be odd a year or so from now when Scottie [Fitzgerald’s daughter] assures her friends I was an author and finds no book is procurable. Would the 25 cent press keep Gatsby in the public eye? Would a popular reissue in that series make it a favorite with class rooms, profs, lovers of English prose – anybody. But to die, so completely and unjustly after having given so much. Even now there is little published in American fiction that doesn’t slightly bare my stamp – in a small way I was an original.”
While Fitzgerald could not have imagined the wide distribution and popularity of the Armed Services Edition of Gatsby, his idea of a cheap paperback reissue was exactly what brought the novel into America’s collective consciousness. It hasn’t left us since.
While Fitzgerald did not live to experience the widespread success of The Great Gatsby that he had hoped to achieve back in 1925, the novel’s history provides hope for any writer, artist, or reader that great work will be found and appreciated in time.
“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Even now, a century later.
Sources and Further Reading:
Alter, A. (2018). “New Life for Old Classics.” New York Times.
Berg, A. S. (2016). Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. New American Library.
Bruccoli, M. (1981). Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Harcourt Brace.
Cole, J. “Books in Action: The Armed Services Editions.” Timeless: Stories from the Library of Congress.
Corrigan, M. (2014). So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures. Little, Brown and Company.
Dourgarian, J. (2001). “Armed Service Editions.” Firsts Magazine.
Hemingway, E. (1964). A Moveable Feast. Scribner’s Sons.
Mesher, D. (1991). “Covering a Debt: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Francis Cugat.” Modern Fiction Studies, 37 (2), 235–239.
Scribner, C. (1992). “Celestial Eyes: From Metamorphosis to Masterpiece.” The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 53 (2), 141–155.
Yochelson, A. (2022) “Books Go To War: World War II Armed Services Editions.” From the Catbird Seat: Poetry at the Library of Congress.