One Hundred Years of Gatsby
Editions of The Great Gatsby—which achieved popularity only after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death—abound, but the mysteries surrounding the Great American Novel endure
BY NATHAN KING
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final royalty check was for $13.13, making him the recipient of a double dose of bad luck. By 1940, the novel he thought to be his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, was very nearly out of print, and the woman he regarded as the love of his life, Zelda Fitzgerald, was living across the country, in and out of mental hospitals.
When Fitzgerald died alone, of a heart attack in Hollywood at the age of 44—leave it to the world’s biggest romantic to perish of a broken heart—he considered himself a washed-up failure. The Great Gatsby hadn’t even sold out its initial printing, in 1925, of 23,000 copies, and Fitzgerald was living hand to mouth (the hand was big, but so was the mouth) writing short stories and film scripts. As an author, he was well known to the public but something of a back number. As a man, he was a shell of himself. The American Dream, the Great American Novel, the American Girl—for Fitzgerald, they were all wrapped up together—had eluded him, and not for want of trying.
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