The Great Gatsby

Book excerpt: The Great Gatsby is synonymous with parties, glitz and glamour - but this is just one of many misunderstandings about the book that began from its first publication. Few characters in literature or indeed life embody an era quite so tenaciously as Jay Gatsby does the Jazz Age. Almost a century after he was written into being, F Scott Fitzgerald's doomed romantic has become shorthand for decadent flappers, champagne fountains and never-ending parties. Cut loose by pop culture from the text into which he was born, his name adorns everything from condominiums to hair wax and a limited-edition cologne (it contains notes of vetiver, pink pepper and Sicilian lime). It's now possible to lounge on a Gatsby sofa, check in at the Gatsby hotel, even chow down on a Gatsby sandwich - essentially a supersize, souped-up chip butty. Incongruous though that last item sounds, naming anything after the man formerly known as James Gatz seems more than a touch problematic. After all, flamboyant host is just one part of his complicated identity. He's also a bootlegger, up to his neck in criminal enterprise, not to mention a delusional stalker whose showmanship comes to seem downright tacky. If he embodies the potential of the American Dream, then he also illustrates its limitations: here is a man, let's not forget, whose end is destined to be as pointless as it is violent. Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about - F Scott Fitzgerald Misunderstanding has been a part of The Great Gatsby's story from the very start. Grumbling to his friend Edmund Wilson shortly after publication in 1925, Fitzgerald declared that "of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about." Fellow writers like Edith Wharton admired it plenty, but as the critic Maureen Corrigan relates in her book So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures, popular reviewers read it as crime fiction, and were decidedly underwhelmed by it at that. Fitzgerald's Latest A Dud, ran a headline in the New York World. The novel achieved only so-so sales, and by the time of the author's death in 1940, copies of a very modest second print run had long since been remaindered. The novel has become a force in pop culture, helped by Hollywood; the term 'Gatsbyesque' emerged a few years after the 1974 film starring Robert Redford Gatsby's luck began to change when it was selected as a giveaway by the US military. With World War Two drawing to a close, almost 155,000 copies were distributed in a special Armed Services Edition, creating a new readership overnight. As the 1950s dawned, the flourishing of the American Dream quickened the novel's topicality, and by the 1960s, it was enshrined as a set text. It's since become such a potent force in pop culture that even those who've never read it feel as if they have, helped along, of course, by Hollywood. It was in 1977, just a few short years after Robert Redford starred in the title role of an adaptation scripted by Francis Ford Coppola, that the word Gatsbyesque was first recorded.