The title Fitzgerald wanted was ‘Trimalchio in West Egg’. He argued for it with Maxwell Perkins almost until the presses rolled, then reluctantly gave it up. Trimalchio is a character from Petronius’s ‘Satyricon’, a freed slave who becomes obscenely rich and throws banquets so vulgar that his guests mock him behind his back. Fitzgerald wanted his novel named after literature’s most famous cautionary example of a man buying his way into a class that would never accept him.
He was born on this day in 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota, and would have turned 130. The book he published on 10 April 1925 is now sold at around half a million copies a year, and its central figure has become shorthand for glamour.
What Is Actually On The Page
Jay Gatsby is a criminal. He made his money bootlegging during Prohibition and dealing in stolen bonds, in partnership with Meyer Wolfsheim, a gangster Fitzgerald modelled on Arnold Rothstein, the man widely believed to have fixed the 1919 World Series. The parties are not celebrations. They are advertising, staged nightly in the hope that one woman across the bay might wander in.
The ending is bleaker still. Daisy runs Myrtle Wilson down and lets Gatsby take the blame. Gatsby is shot in his own swimming pool. His funeral is attended by almost nobody, a handful of people including his father, a minister and one former guest, while the hundreds who drank his champagne stay away.
Nick Carraway’s verdict on the Buchanans is the coldest sentence in American fiction. He calls them careless people who smashed things and retreated into their money.
How A Warning Became A Theme Party
The afterlife has gone the other way entirely. Gatsby-themed weddings are an industry. Party suppliers sell feather headbands and coupe glasses by the pallet. Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film arrived with a Jay-Z soundtrack and a palette that treated the parties as aspiration rather than indictment, and when the novel entered the American public domain on 1 January 2021, the merchandising accelerated further.
Part of the explanation sits in the prose itself. Fitzgerald wrote the excess too beautifully. The orchestras, the yellow cocktail music, the shirts tumbling in their dozens, all of it rendered with such longing that the seduction survives the judgement. Nick is appalled and enchanted at the same time, and audiences have always found it easier to keep the second half.
Part of it is Gatsby’s sincerity. He is a fraud who genuinely loves, which makes him sympathetic in a way Tom Buchanan never is, and sympathy slides easily into approval.
What The Numbers Say About Its Reception
Nobody in 1925 mistook it for a celebration, because hardly anyone bought it at all. The first printing of 20,870 copies did not sell out until June 1926. A second printing of 3,000 sat in a Scribner warehouse for two decades. In the month before Fitzgerald died, on 21 December 1940, seven copies sold, and his royalties for that final year came to $13.13.
The revival came from an unlikely source. Beginning in 1943, 155,000 copies were distributed free to American troops through the Armed Services Editions, against roughly 25,000 printed commercially in the previous seventeen years. Soldiers passed them around, brought the enthusiasm home, and a novel about the hollowness of American aspiration was rescued by men who had just fought a war for it.
Fitzgerald died believing himself forgotten, and he was right about the sales. What he could not have anticipated was the particular shape of the fame that followed, in which a book he wanted to call ‘Trimalchio’ became an excuse to throw exactly the sort of party it was written to condemn.