The novel is a colorful study of America's Jazz Age-a term said to be coined by Fitzgerald himself-complete with wealthy socialites living in hedonistic abandon, libertine flappers, jazz bands, roaring roadsters, and greasy speakeasies populated with shady grifters. Contrasted against the glamorous lives of wealthy socialites is the entrenched lower class, who live in gray, dingy squalor among smoldering ash-heaps. Fitzgerald uses the setting to examine the American Dream: the idea that anyone in America can achieve success through hard work and dedication. Gatsby has spent his life reaching for his dream. Some say he's already achieved it. But has he? Is the dream even real for the hard-working poor that Gatsby and Tom race past in their glittering cars on the way to the decadent city?
Fitzgerald wrote much of his real life into the novel. Like Carraway, he was a Midwesterner educated at an Ivy-league school who went to live on Long Island. Despite his meager finances he hobnobbed with socialites, and spent his career struggling for money to maintain the grand style his romantic interests were accustomed to.
The cover art, titled Celestial Eyes, was commissioned from Francis Cugat, who completed it before the novel was finished. The huge eyes gazing down on the blazing city so moved Fitzgerald that he wrote them into the story.
Fitzgerald saw the novel as a purely artistic work, free of the pulp pandering required by his shorter commissions-but despite that, contemporary reviews were mixed, and it sold poorly. Fitzgerald thought it a failure, and died believing the novel to be fatally obscure. Only during World War II did it come back to the public consciousness, buoyed by the support of a ring of writers and critics and printed as an Armed Service Edition to be sent to soldiers on the front. Now it is an American classic.
If you read the epigraph, you would've noticed a poem by the name of "Thomas Parke D'invilliers." Thomas Parke D'Invilliers is both a pen name of Francis Scott Fitzgerald and a character in his
quasi-autobiographical first novel, This Side Of Paradise.
Fitzgerald most popular novel, when he was still alive, was The Side of Paradise. It sold 49,075 copies, while The Great Gatsby only sold 25,000 in his lifetime. Now, The Great Gatsby has sold over 30 million today.
The Great Gatsby was first filmed in 1926, just one year after the novel was published. This was in the pre-talkies age of cinema, and the film was a silent movie adaptation of the stage version. Only a minute of footage survives.
Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was admitted to multiple hospitals. She had a terrible psychological breakdown and was put into a mental hospital in Ashville. 7 years later, she passed away due to an awful fire burning the place down.
Fitzgerald was kicked out of college for failing grades, so he joined the army to prove himself during the battles of war. Since the war ended before he was ever deployed, he thought his experience in the army was rather disappointing.