On first publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby was a flop. Reviews were mixed, sales were sluggish and things never much improved in the author’s lifetime. Fitzgerald died 15 years later in December 1940 convinced that his novel would be lost to obscurity. When he died, the remainder of the second printing of 3,000 copies still lay unsold in his publisher’s warehouse. Yet, in effect, the book was out of print because it was not stocked by bookstores — Fitzgerald knew this because he had tried and failed to buy a copy as a gift. The novel was begun and set in 1922, when he was 25 and at the height of his powers, born out of highest ambition ‘to write something new — something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned’.
How things have changed. To date, the novel has global sales of 34 million copies. It has cut through both academia and its status as a school exam staple to make an indelible stamp on popular culture and the popular imagination — for all kinds of, sometimes contradictory, reasons. As a marker of its value as contemporary currency, Taylor Swift refers to Gatsby regularly in songs such as ‘Happiness’, ‘This is why we can’t have nice things’ and ‘So long, London’ as a signifier for, by turns, fun, doomed love affairs and the realisation that some people are careless and destructive. So how does the novel ‘cut through’? Why does it still generate passion and controversy? Why do we still read it?
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