The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
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F. Scott Fitzgerald on The Great Gatsby
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
The wound that became the novelFitzgerald grew up on the outside of money, watching it from close enough to smell it. At nineteen, a girl’s family told him that poor boys had no business pursuing rich girls. That rejection did not leave him. When critics later pressed him on why he kept circling the same territory, love and wealth and the gap between them, his answer refused to apologize.
But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.
Fitzgerald did not treat his recurring obsessions as a limitation. In his 1933 essay ‘One Hundred False Starts,’ he built a theory around them: that a writer’s life furnishes only a handful of experiences worth returning to, and the work of a career is finding new containers for those same essential facts.
Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves—that’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives—experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before. Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories—each time in a new disguise—maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.
Gatsby is the most distilled version of that story: a man who mistakes the costume for the self and the symbol for the thing it points toward, chasing something that had already receded before the chase began.
He went into the writing with a confidence that matched the ambition. Drafting the novel at Valescure in the south of France through the summer and fall of 1924, he sent his editor Maxwell Perkins a letter that left no room for hedging.
I think my novel is about the best American novel ever written.
How he wrote it
Lean by design, borrowed by intentionHis first two novels, ‘This Side of Paradise’ and ‘The Beautiful and Damned,’ had both sprawled. By the time he sat down with Gatsby, he knew exactly what structural failure he was correcting. He told the critic H.L. Mencken as much, framing the new book not as an extension of his earlier work but as a deliberate break from it.
in protest against my own formless two novels
The result was a book roughly half the length of its predecessors, with every scene pulling double or triple duty in terms of theme and symbol.
The solution to the structural problem came partly from Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s Marlow narrators occupied a peculiar position: intimate enough to feel everything, removed enough to judge it. Fitzgerald had resisted that lesson earlier in his career, but by the time he wrote to Perkins in the years before drafting Gatsby, his position had shifted.
I’m not so cocksure about things as I was last summer [1919] — this fellow Conrad seems to be pretty good after all.
Nick Carraway, who attends Gatsby’s parties while standing apart from them, who narrates the entire novel from the distance of hindsight, is the direct result of Fitzgerald finally absorbing what Conrad had demonstrated.
The novel’s most famous visual symbol did not originate at his desk. Fitzgerald had seen the Francis Cugat painting, a pair of disembodied eyes gazing over a nighttime amusement scene, at the Scribner’s offices before he left for France. He became so attached to it that he wrote to Perkins in urgent terms while still mid-draft.
For Christ’s sake don’t give anyone that jacket you’re saving for me. I’ve written it into the book.
Most scholars trace the Doctor T.J. Eckleburg billboard, the faded oculist’s advertisement watching over the Valley of Ashes, directly to those painted eyes. The cover made it into the text before the text was finished.
Even the title was not settled. Three weeks before publication, Fitzgerald sent Perkins a cable pushing to change it to ‘Under the Red White and Blue.’ Perkins held firm: the existing title carried an irony the new one would blunt, and it was too late to change the printing. Fitzgerald’s reply arrived in a second cable.
CRAZY ABOUT TITLE UNDER THE RED WHITE AND BLUE STOP WHART [sic] WOULD DELAY BE.
He sent the second cable: ‘YOURE RIGHT.’ But he suspected for the rest of his life that ‘The Great Gatsby’ had cost him readers who might have understood the book more quickly under the title he had wanted.
The personal thread
The faith that outlived the writer who held itGatsby was written when Fitzgerald still believed in the thing the novel interrogates. By 1936, eleven years after publication, that belief had eroded. In a New York Post interview conducted while he poured shots from a desk bottle and a nurse watched from across the room, he described what the intervening years had taken from him. The image of Gatsby straining toward the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, that green light being the novel’s symbol for desire that recedes as fast as you approach it, is a faith Fitzgerald himself once held and had by then lost.
A writer like me… must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star. It’s an almost mystical feeling, a feeling of nothing can-happen-to-me, nothing-can-harm-me, nothing-can-touch-me. Thomas Wolfe has it. Ernest Hemingway has it. I once had it. But through a series of blows, many of them my own fault, something happened to that sense of immunity and I lost my grip.
What he wants us to sit with
Writing for the youth of his own generationHe had articulated his ambition for an audience before Gatsby existed. In the self-interview he wrote and circulated in 1920, he described not a wish to write for posterity in the abstract but a specific, generationally calibrated target: the people living through the same moment he was living through, with secondary readers trailing behind at a distance of decades.
My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer, I think, writes for the youth of his own generation, the critic of the next and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
A century of high school syllabi suggests the schoolmasters arrived on schedule. Whether the youth of any given generation still feel the intended shock of recognition is the question worth bringing to the table.
His consistent advice to writers, including late-career notes to Sheilah Graham in the late 1930s, points to the same method he used while building Gatsby: treat raw experience as perishable, and get it down before the vividness fades. The novel’s period detail, the parties in West Egg, the shirts tumbling from the wardrobe, the smell of money, all of it has the quality of notes taken in the moment.
You must begin by making notes. You may have to make notes for years.… When you think of something, when you recall something, put it where it belongs. Put it down when you think of it. You may never recapture it quite as vividly the second time.