Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby came out from Scribner's in April 1925. It is narrated by Nick Carraway and set on Long Island in the Jazz Age, and the man at the centre of it is Jay Gatsby, a millionaire of uncertain background whose parties are famous and who wants above all to be reunited with Daisy Buchanan.

Fitzgerald drew on his own life for the material. A romance he had as a young man with the socialite Ginevra King went into it, and so did the parties on Long Island's North Shore that he went to in 1922. He finished a rough draft in 1924, after moving to the French Riviera, and his editor Maxwell Perkins persuaded him to spend the following winter revising it.

Even after the revisions, Fitzgerald was not settled on a title and tried several alternatives. The jacket painting Francis Cugat produced for the book, Celestial Eyes, pleased him so much that he wrote its imagery into the novel. When it appeared, reviews were generally favourable, though some critics thought it fell short of his earlier work, and it sold fewer than twenty thousand copies by October.

The novel's standing came later. During the Second World War the Council on Books in Wartime gave the book away free to soldiers serving overseas, and the popularity that followed set off a scholarly re-examination. It has since become a standard part of American school curricula, and stage and film versions have followed one another for decades.