Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

The Great Gatsby

(1925)

F. Scott Fitzgerald
(October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005)

Notes

First published in 1925.

The Great Gatsby:

• Chapter I: Naming the Book, Cornell University
  

Once again to Zelda: Zelda is Fitzgerald's wife.

Thomas Parke d'Invilliers: F. Scott Fitzgerald himself; also a character in his novel This Side of Paradise (1920)

• Stephen Ferguson, "Authorship of The Great Gatsby epigraph revealed • Hollywood, 1939," Rare Books Collection, Princeton University (2013)
• Chapter III: Thomas Parke d'Invilliers, Cornell University

Chapter 1

2  I graduated from New Haven: Nick Carraway graduated from Yale College

3  West Egg:

• Early History: The Swamp and Ash Dump, Macaulay Honors College at Baruch

• wag (n.) (Merriam-Webster)
  1: wit, joker
  2 obsolete: a young man: chap

• a person who imports or exports goods secretly and illegally <a bootlegger of counterfeit electronics> (Merriam-Webster Thesaurus)
• bootleg (n.)
• 2: something bootlegged: as  a: moonshine  b: an unauthorized audio or video recording (Merriam-Webster)
• bootleg (v.)
• transitive verb
  1 a: to carry (alcoholic liquor) on one's person illegally  b: to manufacture, sell, or transport for sale (alcoholic liquor) illegally
  2 a: to produce, reproduce, or distribute illicitly or without authorization  b: smuggle
  intransitive verb
  1: to engage in bootlegging (Merriam-Webster)
• bootlegging
• Illegal traffic in the U.S. The term was probably first used to describe the practice of concealing flasks of illicit liquor in boot tops when going to trade with the Indians. It became widely used in the 1920s when the 18th Amendment to the Constitution and the Volstead Act of 1919 effected the prohibition of liquor manufacturing and sales. Early bootleggers smuggled foreign-made liquor into the U.S. from Canada and Mexico and from ships anchored in international waters. Later sources included medicinal whiskey, denatured alcohol, and the manufacture of corn liquor. Bootlegging led to the rise of organized-crime syndicates that controlled operations from the manufacture of liquor to its distribution in restaurants and speakeasies. In 1933 Prohibition was repealed by the 21st Amendment. (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Encyclopedia)

Letters about The Great Gatsby

[page 171] To John Peale Bishop, classmate at Princeton, fellow novelist, poet and critic.

                                                                                                                                                        [Postmarked, August 9, 1925]

                                                                                                                                                        Rue de Tilsitt

                                                                                                                                                        Paris, France

Dear John,

       Thank you for your most pleasant, full, discerning and helpful letter about The Great Gatsby. It is about the only criticism that the book has had which has been intelligible, save a letter from Mrs. Wharton. I shall only ponder, or rather I have pondered, what you say about accuracy—I'm afraid I haven't quite reached the ruthless artistry which would let me cut out an exquisite bit that had no place in the context. I can cut out the almost exquisite, the adequate, even the brilliant—but a true accuracy is, as you say, still in the offing. Also you are right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy. I never at any one time saw him clear myself--for he started out as one man I knew and then changed into myself—the amalgam was never complete in my mind.

       Your novel sounds fascinating and I'm crazy to see it. I'm beginning a new novel next month on the Riviera. I understand that MacLeish is there, among other people (at Antibes where we are going). Paris has been a mad-house this spring and, as you can imagine, we were in the thick of it. I don't know when we're coming back—maybe never. We'll be here till Jan. (except for a month in Antibes), and then we go Nice for the Spring, with Oxford for next summer. Love to Margaret and any thanks for the kind letter.

                                                                                                                                                                Scott

From Edith Wharton

Pavillon Colombe

St. Brice-Sous-Forêt (S&O)

Gare: Sarcelles

                                                                                                                                                     June 8, 1925

Dear Mr. Fitzgerald,

       I have been wandering for the last weeks and found your novel—with its friendly dedication—awaiting me here on my arrival, a few days ago.

       I am touched at your sending me a copy, for I feel that to your generation, which has taken such a flying leap into the future, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture & gas chandeliers. So you will understand that it is in a spirit of sincere deprecation that I shall venture, in a few days, to offer you in return the last product of my manufactory.

       Meanwhile, let me say at once how much I like Gatsby, or rather His Book, & how great a leap I think you have taken this time—in advance upon your previous work. My present quarrel with you is only this: that to make Gatsby really Great, you ought to have given us his early career (not from the cradle—but from his visit to the yacht, if not before) instead of a short résumé of [end of page 177] it. That would have situated him, & made his final tragedy a tragedy instead of a "fait divers" for the morning papers.

       But you'll tell me that's the old way, & consequently not your way; & meanwhile, it's enough to make this reader happy to have met your perfect Jew, & the limp Wilson, & assisted at that seedy orgy in the Buchanan flat, with the dazed puppy looking on. Every bit of that is masterly—but the lunch with Hildeshiem [Wolfsheim was mispelled as Hildeshiem in the first edition], and his every appearance afterward, make me augur still greater things!—Thank you again.

                                                                                                                                                                Yrs. Sincerely,

                                                                                                                                                                Edith Wharton

I have left hardly space to ask if you & Mrs. Fitzgerald won't come to lunch or tea some day this week. Do call me up.

—Frederick J. Hoffman, ed. and introd., The Great Gatsby: A Study (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962)

Review Sheet

Characters

Nick Carraway – "graduated from New Haven in 1915" (2); "I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War"

Tom Buchanan – "I'd known Tom in college"; "had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy"; "a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward"

Daisy Buchanan – "Daisy was my second cousin once removed"; "It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget"; "'Well, I've had a very bad time, Nick, and I'm pretty cynical about everything'"

Pamela Buchanan – Tom and Daisy's three-year-old daughter;

Jordan Baker – "a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her gray sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented face"; "the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair"; "her face the same brown tint as the fingerless glove on her knee"

George B. Wilson – owns a garage; "a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome...light blue eyes"; "Generally he was one of these worn-out men: when he wasn't working, he sat on a chair in the doorway and stared at the people and the cars that passed along the road. When any one spoke to him he invariably laughed in an agreeable, colorless way. He was his wife's man and not his own"

Myrtle Wilson – wife of George; "in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering"
Jay Gatsby – James Gatz;
Henry C. Gatz – "Gatsby's father, a solemn old man, very helpless and dismayed, bundled up in a long cheap ulster against the warm September day. His eyes leaked continuously with excitement, and when I took the bag and umbrella from his hands he began to pull so incessantly at his sparse gray beard that I had difficulty in getting off his coat"

Meyer Wolfshiem – "A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril"; "'He's the man who fixed the World's Series back in 1919'"

Michaelis – "The young Greek, Michaelis, who ran the coffee joint beside the ashheaps was the principal witness at the inquest" (104); "had been neighbors for four years" with the Wilsons (104); 

Ewing Klipspringer – "A man named Klipspringer was there [at Gatsby's house] so often and so long that he became known as "the boarder" (46); "a dishevelled an in pajamas was doing liver exercises on the floor...I had seen him wandering hungrily about the beach that morning"; "'we'll have Klipspringer play the piano'"; "an embarrassed, slightly worn young man, with shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blond hair"

owl-eyes – "A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books" (33–34)

Setting

Place

New York –

    West Egg – "I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two"

        Gatsby's mansion – "on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden"

Time

Sample Student Responses to Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby 

Response 1:

Study Question:

Reference

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. London: Harper, 2012. Print. Collins Classics.

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Last updated November 30, 2014