Like so many of the feelings that went deepest with him, this one came out most clearly in the wry jokes and drunken extravagances of his defeated years. His very sense of identity, depended on recognition. If the world was for him, as it was for Gatsby, 'material without being real' unless he could live with that dream, the dream was a mere self-indulgence unless he could realize it in the actual world.Īs one of his friends said when his work became popular again in the early Fifties, 'How Scott would have loved to know that people admired and cared for his books!' He could have, and not out of vanity, but because his sense of achievement, There is a special irony in the belated fame of 'Gatsby' because Fitzgerald was a man like Gatsby himself, at least in this, that he had a heroic dream of the possibilities of life and a need, amounting almost to a sense of duty, to realize In 1937, when Fitzgerald wanted to give Miss Sheilah Graham copies of his books, they went from bookstore to bookstore only to be told again and again that there were no copies of any It has not always been so, nor has 'Gatsby' always sold at the rate of 50,000Ĭopies a year, as it did last year. There are three editions of it in print, and its text has become a subject of concern to professional bibliographers.

It is probably safe now to say that it is a classic of twentieth-centuryĪmerican fiction. He Great Gatsby' is thirty-five years old this spring.

Instal the new for ios The Great Gatsby