Context & Background

The author

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, attended Princeton, and became the glittering chronicler of the era he named the "Jazz Age." His debut, This Side of Paradise (1920), made him famous at twenty-three and enabled his marriage to Zelda Sayre, with whom he lived a public life of glamour, extravagance, and eventual collapse. Fitzgerald wrote Gatsby's ambivalence toward wealth from the inside: dazzled by the rich, forever outside their circle, and painfully aware of the difference.

When and how it was written

Fitzgerald drafted The Great Gatsby in 1924, much of it while living on the French Riviera and in Rome, revising heavily through the winter. Working closely with his Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins, he pared the novel to roughly 50,000 words of extraordinary compression. It was published in April 1925. He fought over the title to the end — Trimalchio in West Egg and Under the Red, White, and Blue were among the rejected alternatives.

The historical moment

The novel is set in the summer of 1922, at the height of the Roaring Twenties: Prohibition had made bootlegging (Gatsby's trade) hugely profitable and criminalized ordinary pleasure; the stock market was climbing toward the 1929 crash; and a booming consumer culture put new fortunes and new anxieties into circulation. The 1919 World Series fixing scandal, invoked through Meyer Wolfshiem, was a real event that shadowed the decade's mood of glamorous corruption. Fitzgerald caught the era's exhilaration and its hollowness at once.

Intellectual and literary roots

Gatsby is a landmark of American modernism, contemporary with the fragmented, disillusioned art that followed the First World War — Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), whose ash-gray imagery echoes in the valley of ashes, was a direct influence Fitzgerald acknowledged. The book fuses that modernist unease with an older American subject: the myth of self-making that runs from Benjamin Franklin through the Horatio Alger success story, which Fitzgerald inspects and finds rotten at the core.

Reception and legacy

The novel sold modestly in Fitzgerald's lifetime and was largely out of print when he died in 1940 believing himself a failure. Its reputation was rebuilt after World War II — helped by an Armed Services Edition distributed to soldiers — and by the 1950s critics had installed it among the greatest American novels. Today it is a fixture of school curricula, endlessly adapted and quoted, and its central image — the green light, the receding dream — has become a permanent part of how Americans talk about ambition, class, and the promises the country makes to itself.