Facts, Fables, and Footnotes for the Week of March 19, 2023

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THIS WEEK IN

 
 
This Week in Literary History
 
 
APRIL 9 — APRIL 15
the great gatsby

The Great Gatsby is published.

On April 10th, 1925, Charles Scribner’s Sons published The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel, which Fitz had begun drafting almost three years before.

 

“The whole idea of Gatsby,” Fitzgerald once wrote, “is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it.” (That would be in regards to his failed love affair with Ginevra King, who inspired Daisy Buchanan. Bet Zelda loved that.)

 

Famously, the book was almost called something else—a number of something elses, in fact. “Before reluctantly deciding on The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald hemmed and hawed over more than half a dozen names,” writes Dustin Illingworth. “Gatsby; Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires; Trimalchio; Trimalchio in West Egg; On the Road to West Egg; Under the Red, White, and Blue; Gold-Hatted Gatsby; and The High-Bouncing Lover. As late as one month before publication, he was still trying to change the title. His final opinion of the name of his masterpiece was not exactly a ringing endorsement: ‘The title is only fair, rather bad than good,’ he said.”

 

Though The Great Gatsby was received warmly by Fitzgerald’s peers and enjoyed (mostly) positive reviews from critics, it did not sell well, particularly as compared to Fitzgerald’s previous two novels, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922). (Maybe it was the title.) By the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, he considered the book—and his entire career—a failure.

 

But books can have long lives. During WWII, The Great Gatsby was selected by the Council on Books in Wartime to be one of the titles sent to American soldiers stationed overseas—and its popularity soon soared.

 

Now, The Great Gatsby is, of course, one of the perennial candidates for what we think of as the Great American Novel. “Gatsby’s magic emanates not only from its powerhouse poetic style—in which ordinary American language becomes unearthly—but from the authority with which it nails who we want to be as Americans,” Maureen Corrigan writes in So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures. “Not who we are; who we want to be. It’s that wanting that runs through every page of Gatsby, making it our Greatest American Novel. But it’s also our easiest Great American Novel to underrate: too short; too tempting to misread as just a love story gone wrong; too mired in the Roaring Twenties and all that jazz.”

 

So if you’ve been on the fence (or out of high school for A While), consider this your sign to pick it up again.

 
 

SPONSORED BY GEORGIA WRITERS

 

2023 Red Clay Writers Conference

Red Clay Writers Conference

The Red Clay Writers Conference is the annual conference of Georgia Writers Association. Since 2009, Red Clay encourages and inspires writers through literary events that focus on the art and craft of writing. The two-day (April 15-16) conference consists of workshops and panels with renowned writers and editors.


The keynote address will be given by Tayari Jones, critically acclaimed author of An American Marriage (Oprah’s Book Club). Other writers include Anjali Enjeti, Emma Bolden, Mayra Cuevas, Carmen Deedy, and many others. In-person and online options available.

Buy Tickets Now
 
 
MORE ON GATSBY
gatsby

How the Male Point of View Shapes the Narrative of The Great Gatsby

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On Jay Gatsby, the Most Famous North Dakotan
party

I Love The Great Gatsby, Even if it Doesn’t Love Me Back

 

IT’S ONLY FAIR:

“When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.”

–F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
 
 

In other (old)

news this week

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (aka Mark Twain) receives his steamboat pilot’s license (April 9, 1859) • Maurice Sendak’s wild and wonderful Where the Wild Things Are is published (April 9, 1963) • George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion opens in London (April 11, 1914) • Quipmaster Dorothy Parker resigns her job as drama critic for The New Yorker (April 11, 1931) • Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale, is published (April 13, 1953) • Véra and Vladimir Nabokov get married; that evening, they have dinner with Véra’s family, and Véra drops the bomb: “By the way, we got married this morning” (April 15, 1925).

GATSBY

GREIL MARCUS ON GATSBY: A BLUES FABLE OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION

WEALTH

DO FICTIONAL CRITIQUES OF THE WEALTHY EVER REALLY . . . WORK?

AUDREY PARTY

WHY A PARTY IS A PERFECT LITERARY DEVICE

 

 

 
 
Red Clay Writers Conference
 
 

“Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it.”

nella larsen

–NELLA LARSEN

Born this week in 1891

“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”

eudora welty

–EUDORA WELTY

Born this week in 1909

 
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