April 10, 1925: "The Great Gatsby" Is Published

April 10, 1925, 100 years ago: The Great Gatsby is published by Charles Scribner's Sons. It sold well in its initial printing, but it was after the 1940 death of its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, that it achieved legendary status.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He became known as one of the "Lost Generation" writers, disillusioned by their experiences in World War I, and willing to critique American society where mainstream writers went out of their way to praise it.

Although he wrote many short stories, including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 1922, he only published 5 novels. This Side of Paradise was published in 1920, and was a runaway success. The Beautiful and the Damned came in 1922, and was considerably less successful. The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, and did well at the time, but not well enough that people then would have considered it an all-time classic.

Fitzgerald stuck to writing short stories for a while, then went back to novels with Tender Is the Night in 1934. It didn't sell well. He moved west, thinking writing screenplays would make him a lot of money. He was right. But he had begun working on another novel, The Last Tycoon. It was unfinished on December 21, 1940, when he died of a heart attack in Los Angeles. He was 44 years old. Edmund Wilson, a writer and literary critic who was a close friend, finished it and published it.

As with many creative people, death was a great career move for Fitzgerald. He could no longer disappoint people with weak new product, and what little he left behind left people wondering what more he could have done. His books became popular among U.S. soldiers in World War II. By the 1950s, the nostalgia wave for the "Roaring Twenties" was underway, and Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda Sayre, the archetypal "flapper," became icons.

The other 4 novels are afterthoughts: It is The Great Gatsby that everyone remembers. It takes place in the Summer of 1922, in four places:

* New York City, during the Roaring Twenties, a.k.a. "the Jazz Age," a time of parties fueled by alcohol even though Prohibition is in effect, alcohol supplied by organized crime.

* East Egg, a glamorous stand-in for Great Neck, in Nassau County, on Long Island.

* West Egg, a less-wealthy stand-in for Little Neck, over the City Line in Queens, separated from East Egg/Great Neck by Little Neck Bay, known for the clams that wash up on its shore. Across the bay, narrator Nick Carraway can see the mansion of the titular Jay Gatsby, and both can see a green light on a dock, which seems to represent hope.

* And a place about halfway between Midtown Manhattan and East Egg, which Carraway calls "a valley of ashes," which has been alleged to be present-day Flushing Meadow-Corona Park, home of baseball's New York Mets and site of the 1939-40 and 1964-65 New York World's Fairs.

Spoiler Alert for a novel published a century ago: Gatsby is murdered, although not by any of his organized crime contacts. In fact, it turned out to be a mistake: Although it was revenge for a death caused by Gatsby's distinctive yellow convertible car, he wasn't the driver.

Gatsby was what would later be called an "anti-hero." Not knowing that Gatsby would soon be killed, Fitzgerald had Carraway tell Gatsby, "They're a rotten crowd. You're worth the whole damn bunch put together." But, on another occasion, Fitzgerald wrote, "Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy."

And people tend to not get it. Just as people read On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and wrongly guessed that the 1950s were a time of "kicks," people read The Great Gatsby, and love the old-time party aspect of it, without realizing what Fitzgerald, and his counterpart Carraway, realized: It was all fake, a cover-up for their generation being "lost." A remake might be set in the late 1970s, with disco and cocaine masking the anxieties of the recent Vietnam War taking the place of the jazz and booze unsuccessfully used to forget about "The Great War."

The Great Gatsby was made into a Broadway play and then a silent film, in 1926, which Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald hated, and left halfway through. It was filmed again in 1949, with Alan Ladd as Gatsby; staged for NBC television in 1955, with Robert Montgomery; staged for CBS-TV in 1958, with Robert Ryan; filmed in 1974, with Robert Redford; staged for cable TV network A&E in 2000, with Toby Stephens; and filmed in 2013, with Leonardo DiCaprio.