How an obscure book became a classic
In 1929, The Great Gatsby was 4 years old and struggling to live. F. Scott Fitzgerald, its author, made a grand total of $5 from the book that year. By 1939, it was practically dead. Fitzgerald was secretly buying all copies himself to keep his book in print...
But now? 500k copies sold each year!
Back from the dead...how?
This is the strange but true story of how an obscure book became a classic. Dig in.
The first half of Fitzgerald's career was a dream: his two novels were bestsellers. They made him rich and famous. Hollywood came calling.
The second half was a nightmare.
His wife tried to drive him off a cliff, his most ambitious works failed, and he died a poor alcoholic man.
By 1940, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was forgotten, and he was dead.
But when America entered the war in 1942, the top brass faced a strange new problem: Bored soldiers.
In war, there's a lot more ennui than action. Waiting, traveling, queues...
Solution? Books.
Publishers, librarians, & the army came together to create "Council on Books in Wartime" in 1942.
Their goal: Finding "weapons for the war of ideas."
1225 books were selected.
Among them: The Art of War, Shakespeare's plays, and...The Great Gatsby.
But why did Gatsby stand out?
Critics think the soldiers liked The Great Gatsby for the parties. Wrong.
Soldiers loved it because Fitzgerald was one of them.
He’d signed up to fight in WW-I, intending to die.
His gf had spurned him because he has no money. He was a burnt idealist, like all men eventually become.
Fitzgerald loved Ginevra King. Her father told him: "Poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls."
Jay Gatsby's problem is the same…
He throws his entire soul at the problem, becomes obscenely rich, but can't control the final outcome. Masculine tragedy: lack of control.
Each copy of The Great Gatsby was read 7 times on average…
Soldiers tore up different chapters and passed them around so everyone could read the book.
Throwing copies in the garbage was like, one soldier said, "striking your grandmother."
And then soldiers came home with their copies...
Cut to 1951.
The madness for The Great Gatsby gets compounded with the publication of another hit book, J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. It's protagonist Holden Caulfield says:
"I was crazy about The Great Gatsby. Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me."
By now, The Great Gatsby has sold 25 million copies.
400 weeks on bestsellers list...
500K new copies sold each year.
Fitzgerald achieved his goal: "An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward."
Fitzgerald's advice to writers: put your strongest emotional and intellectual concerns in the work. He said: "You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner."
Here's F. Scott Fitzgerald on the value of thinking for yourself:
"Either you think—or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you..."
Let’s end with a haunting quote from Fitzgerald: "All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase—I love you."
fin.
P.S: The Great Gatsby is now in the public domain! So, on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 128th birthday today...I'm releasing a new edition of the book. Never read this classic? Get your copy today!