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| Francis Cugat, jacket for the first edition of “The Great Gatsby,” 1925. Digitally restored. Public domain. |
A Spanish-born artist, Francis Cugat, painted it for a fee of $100. Two eyes and a pair of red lips float in a dark blue sky above the glowing lights of a city. It was the only book jacket he ever painted.
Fitzgerald saw the design before he had finished writing. He loved it so much that he begged Perkins to keep it for him.
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“For Christ’s sake don’t give anyone that jacket you’re saving for me. I’ve written it into the book.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to Maxwell Perkins, 1924
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The book inside is short, barely 50,000 words. A young man named Nick Carraway rents a cottage on Long Island, next door to a mansion. Its owner, Jay Gatsby, throws huge parties every weekend, and nobody quite knows where his money comes from.
Across the bay lives Daisy Buchanan, the woman Gatsby loved five years earlier. At the end of her dock glows a single green light. Gatsby stands on his lawn at night and reaches toward it.
In other words, the parties were never the point. Gatsby built the whole glittering life to win back one person.
A few readers understood at once. The poet T.S. Eliot wrote to Fitzgerald that the novel seemed to him “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.”
But the public did not follow. Fitzgerald had been a star since 1920, when his first novel made him famous at 23. This is how he looked then.
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| F. Scott Fitzgerald, publicity photograph, about 1921. Public domain. |
Scribner’s did its best. It even advertised the new novel in The Daily Princetonian, the student paper of Fitzgerald’s old university.
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| Advertisement in “The Daily Princetonian,” 30 May 1925. Public domain. |
It made little difference. A second printing of 3,000 copies that August never sold out in his lifetime. By 1940, he was writing screenplays in Hollywood to pay his debts.
That May, he wrote to Perkins with a mix of pride and sadness. Whatever happened to his books, he said, “in a small way I was an original.”
Then the rescue came from two directions. His old Princeton friend, the critic Edmund Wilson, began to champion his work right after his death. And during the Second World War, a wartime council of publishers chose Gatsby for its Armed Services Editions… pocket-sized paperbacks given free to American soldiers.
About 155,000 copies went out to the troops. That is more than seven times the first printing. A whole generation of young Americans met the novel that way, far from home.
Today Scribner’s reportedly sells around half a million copies a year.
I first read it at 16 and thought it was about parties. Years later, in my finance years, I read it again after watching men spend fortunes to impress people who barely noticed them. That time, I understood Gatsby completely.
If you want a lively guide to its symbols, from the green light to the eyes on the jacket, John Green’s short lecture is a good place to start: Like Pale Gold, Crash Course Literature →
The novel ends with one of the most quoted lines in American writing: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Fitzgerald earned $13.13 from his books in his last year. The current carried Gatsby anyway… just not while he was alive to see it.
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