Why The Great Gatsby Still Matters – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Legacy in Modern Literature
- David Salariya
- Apr 24
- 38 min read
Updated: May 2
The Great Gatsby at 100: A Century of Broken Dreams
This year marks the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous and misunderstood novel. For decades, Gatsby has been remembered in popular culture for its parties, clothes, and the dream of romance - but the true novel is far darker, sharper, and sadder than the myth. Beneath the shimmering surface lies a brutal story of violence, misogyny, broken dreams, and the slow death of hope. Fitzgerald’s West Egg is not a playground, but a wasteland dressed in it's best, where love is transactional, loyalty is hollow, and women’s bodies - bruised, beaten, and finally destroyed - are the collateral damage of male ambition and carelessness. The Great Gatsby is not a celebration of the American Dream; it is an post-mortem. And one hundred years later, its anger, despair, and brilliance feel more necessary - and more haunting - than ever.
Can’t repeat the past? Gatsby cries. Why of course you can!
Gatsby’s cry feels eerily modern. Whether in vintage aesthetics, throwback fashion, franchise reboots, or slogans promising to make nations “great again,” we remain haunted by a golden age that never truly existed.
We probably all think we know The Great Gatsby: flappers, jazz, cocktail glasses, a pink suit. But strip away the champagne and the saxophones, and what’s left? A poor boy called Jimmy Gatz chasing a dream that's already rotting.
Gatsby falls for Daisy Fay - rich, pretty, and out of reach - during a brief wartime romance. She promises to wait...but doesn't. She marries super-rich brute Tom Buchanan instead: old money, bad temper, racist, more polo ponies than morals.
Fast-forward to the summer of 1922. Gatsby, now rolling in we assume bootlegger millions, buys a really grand mansion across the bay from Daisy’s. Every night he stares at the little green light on her dock, throwing wild parties for guests he doesn’t know, hoping Daisy will drift back.
She does. For a moment, the past almost seems within reach. Then it all falls apart: Tom exposes Gatsby’s criminal fortune, Daisy panics, and in a moment of reckless driving, she kills Tom’s mistress (I didn't mention her) in Gatsby’s car.
By the time the dust settles, Gatsby is dead in his swimming pool- shot by a grieving husband who got the wrong story. Daisy and Tom retreat into their fortress of vast wealth, untouched. Nick Carraway, the novel’s wounded narrator, watches it all collapse, and quietly walks away, carrying the one true lesson: the American Dream isn’t just broken - it was always a little crooked and chasing the past is a dangerous business.
100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby
A Flop at First
When the New York publisher Charles Scribner's & Sons published F. Scott Fitzgerald's third book The Great Gatsby on the 10th of April 1925, it was barely noticed; it sold fewer than 20,000 copies by October of that year. US critics were ambivalent:
The Chicago Tribune said Gatsby was “a minor performance” and full of “puerile and false” characters.
Collins, the UK publisher of Fitzgerald's first two books, turned it down, and Chatto's edition flopped. Fitzgerald initially titled the novel 'Trimalchio in West Egg,' drawing from Petronius' Satyricon. Scribner's editor Max Perkins suggested renaming the book The Great Gatsby.
To make Gatsby really Great, (Edith Wharton wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald on April 8, 1925), 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 resume of it. That would have situated him & made his final tragedy a tragedy instead of a fait divers for the morning papers.
Of course, by April 8th, 1925, Wharton’s letter arrived too late. The book had already gone to press - and the Gatsby we got was final.
The Reviews Were Brutal
Harvey Eagleton, reviewing the book for The Dallas Morning News, was dismissive.
One finishes Great Gatsby, (he wrote), with a feeling of regret, not for the fate of the people in the book, but for Mr. Fitzgerald."
When This Side of Paradise was published, Mr. Fitzgerald was hailed as a young man of promise, which he certainly appeared to be. But the promise, like so many, seems likely to go unfulfilled. The Roman candle which sent out a few gloriously coloured balls at the first lighting seems to be ending in a fizzle of smoke and sparks.
Fitzgerald died in 1940 believing his career had ended in disappointment. Royalties from The Great Gatsby totaled only $8,397 during Fitzgerald's lifetime. But the rhythm of ruin he set in motion in those nine compact chapters has never stopped resonating.
The Cover Artwork
Francis Cugat’s iconic painting of a disembodied face floating above the lights of New York is perhaps the most famous and celebrated book cover in all in Americanpublishing history and the only known cover by Cugat.
Two melancholy eyes and vivid red lips and a tear - with two nudes concealed in the eyes floating in the deep blue of a night sky, ominously above a skyline exploding with carnival lights. Capturing themes of sorrow and excess, this gouache image has become so interlinked with The Great Gatsby that it continues to grace the cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece a century after its first publication.
Readers might interpret the image as the figure of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, a gigantic advertising billboard featuring two eyes looking through a pair of glasses “which pass over a nonexistent nose,” or as Fitzgerald’s depiction of Daisy as the “girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs.” However, it is possible that instead of Cugat taking inspiration from Fitzgerald’s imagery, the opposite occurred, as Fitzgerald mentioned that he had “written it [the cover] into the book.”
The Timeless Power of The Great American Novel
Today, The Great Gatsby is thought of as the Great American Novel. It's not just literature - it’s a cultural metronome, ticking through the decades with unnerving relevance. Every generation rediscovers Gatsby, and in doing so, sees itself reflected in the mirrored surface of Jay Gatsby’s champagne-soaked lifestyle. Gatsby is about the impossibility of the Great American Dream, not its fulfilment. The book's brilliance lies in the deceptive lightness of its writing, the poetic undercurrent of longing, and the brutal truths lurking just beneath the glitter and of course we need to look at this book set in 1922 and what it leaves out.
In recent years, The Great Gatsby has joined the long and growing list of classic novels targeted by book bans and challenges in the United States. Despite being one of the most frequently taught texts in American schools, it has been pulled from shelves or flagged for removal in districts from Texas to Florida, often for vague concerns about its sexual references, language, violence or portrayal of class and race.
This censorship highlights the paradox at the heart of the book: Gatsby’s mythic pursuit of the American Dream remains seductive, but its underlying critique - of inequality, of privilege, of exclusion - is still unsettling.
So - Who’s Missing in The Great Gatsby’s 1922 America?
The Great Gatsby dazzles with its glamour, jazz, and doomed longing. But for all its literary brilliance, Fitzgerald’s classic is oddly silent about huge swathes of American life in the 1920s. The result? A party that feels exclusive and not in a good way.
The Erased Soundtrack: Black Americans and Jazz
The jazz is loud, but the musicians are silent. Gatsby’s wild parties pulse with the rhythm of the Harlem Renaissance, yet Fitzgerald doesn’t name a single Black artist. Harlem was booming just across town. What’s playing in West Egg is borrowed brilliance with the creators left outside the gates.
Immigrants and the Fear of ‘Others’
Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby’s business partner, is a grotesque Jewish caricature with cufflinks made of human teeth. Meanwhile, Tom Buchanan goes full supremacist, referencing a real book from the era.
Tom’s Book: The Rise of the Coloured Empires - a fictionalised version of Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 white supremacist tract The Rising Tide of Colour Against White World-Supremacy.
It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.
Fear of losing white dominance seeps into the narrative, masked as intellectual concern. Immigrants, too, are depicted with suspicion — shadows in Gatsby’s shimmering world.
Longing, Never Spoken
Nick Carraway’s relationship with Gatsby carries an unmistakable undercurrent. And that mysterious, possibly romantic overnight with Mr. McKee? It’s there - but never explored. The queer perspective is hinted at, then quickly buried. In a world built on longing, Nick’s desires are the ones left unsaid or is this what is now being referred to as 'presentism'
the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.
Working-Class Lives, Silenced
George and Myrtle Wilson live in the grey ash-heap between East Egg and Manhattan - a wasteland of ash overlooked by the all-seeing eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. Myrtle’s death is tragic, but her life is barely glimpsed. George becomes a plot device. The working poor are not characters with agency, but cautionary symbols.
A Dream for the Few
Fitzgerald critiques the American Dream, but only within the narrow lens of white, moneyed masculinity. If you weren’t born into privilege, Gatsby’s world doesn’t just exclude you. It pretends you’re not even there, and that was essentially Gatsby was on the outside looking in too.
The Great Gatsby is rightly celebrated - but its omissions are telling. To read it today is to see both what’s on the page and what’s not. The silences speak. And the people left out? Their stories are waiting to be told...in full colour. Gatsby in 2025 finds himself both enshrined and embattled. Is Gatsby a mirror, a warning, or simply a relic?
Zelda Fitzgerald and the Swiss Retreat: Madness as Muse
While Gatsby was chasing green lights, Zelda Fitzgerald was slipping into the shadows of alpine sanitoriums. Her descent into illness - first in Baltimore, then in the Swiss clinic at Prangins - runs parallel to the decline of the American Dream her husband mythologised.
Zelda wasn’t only a muse. She was a writer in her own right. Her 1932 novel Save Me the Waltz was a raw, fevered, semi-fictional account of their marriage - written in six weeks while institutionalised. It was lyrical, chaotic, and disturbingly vivid. Fitzgerald hated it.
She is a third-rate writer with a lot of bees in her bonnet, he reportedly told friends.
But it was Zelda who wrote about the interior lives of women, about dance, ambition, madness, and the price of beauty. Tender is the Night, published two years later, borrows heavily from her life - including the Swiss setting - but filters it through Scott’s gaze. She becomes Nicole Diver: unstable, symbolic, possessed.
Switzerland - the land of healing - becomes in both novels a space of disempowerment. A place where women are contained, not cured. Where madness becomes aesthetic.
The Alps may have been white, but they weren’t pure. They were silent, like Zelda, echoing back a man’s version of stories, even as a woman's life unravelled in the snow
Zelda and Scott's only daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald objected to revisionist biographies with depictions of her mother as "the classic 'put down' wife, whose efforts to express her artistic nature were thwarted by a typically male chauvinist husband"
My father greatly appreciated and encouraged his wife's unusual talents and ebullient imagination. Not only did he arrange for the first showing of her paintings in New York in 1934 he sat through long hours of rehearsals of her one play, Scandalabra, staged by a Little Theater group in Baltimore; he spent many hours editing the short stories she sold to College Humor and to Scribner's Magazine."
F Scott Fitzgerald and Colour in The Great Gatsby
The riot of symbolic colour that smears across every page, a dying sunset over Long Island Sound, each hue shimmering with meaning. But look closer, and you’ll see this riot of colour also functions like a filter: illuminating some, blinding us to others.
The novel’s obsession with surfaces, the sheen of wealth, the glow of the American Dream -comes at the cost of not seeing what lies beneath.
Yellow. Green. Blue. Pink. White. Grey.
Fitzgerald painted a portrait of a young country giddy on its own illusions - a world of new wealth, youthful excess, and blinding aspiration. A world, uncannily, not unlike our own in 2025.
Yellow: the colour of corruption
Gatsby’s car is not just any car - it’s a golden chariot of new money excess. Ostensibly "a rich cream colour," it morphs into “that big yellow car” in the mouths of others, symbolic of the bright, brassy falseness of Gatsby’s wealth.
It was a rich cream colour, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length…
Blue: the colour of illusion
Blue runs like a cold thread through the novel. There’s the “blue gardens” of Gatsby’s mansion, his “blue lawn,” and the omnipresent, godless stare of Dr T. J. Eckleburg’s “blue and gigantic” eyes.
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
Green: The Colour of Desire, Envy and Rot
The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock - the most famous colour in American books.
He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way... and distinguished nothing except a single green light.
That green is fertility, yes - but of a deeply twisted kind. It’s newness, but also envy. It’s money, but it’s also moss, creeping over everything. The new world Fitzgerald describes - brash, fertile, bursting with potential - is already rotting under the weight of its own desire.
White: The Colour of Innocence
Daisy and Jordan Baker are draped in white, evoking purity and refinement - but the whiteness here is performative. It conceals. It is blind.
They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.
It’s all weightless. All show. Daisy is no angel. Her voice is “full of money.”
Pink: The Colour of Masculinity...or is it the Working Class?
When Gatsby wears a pink suit - it’s a hopeful and a tragic outfit. Pink: a watered-down red, full of passion’s residue. Or is it of embarrassment…pink was certainly a masculine colour in the 1920’s but associated with the working classes.
An Oxford man!” He was incredulous. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.
The pink suit reveals Gatsby’s soft underbelly - his belief in love, and in the power of appearances. But in the world of Tom Buchanan and inherited wealth, pink is never enough. It gets washed away in the grey.
Grey: The Colour of Dust
Finally, there’s grey: the colour of the ash heaps, of the working poor, of the spaces in between the mansions and the dreams.
This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens…
It is here Myrtle dies. It is here the illusion unravels. In the end, Gatsby dies alone. No parties. The only mourner from his parties at his funeral is "Owl Eyes". Just the colourless, joyless truth of a society that eats its dreamers.
Welcome to West Egg: Where the Guest List Reads Like a Fever Dream
About a third of the way into The Great Gatsby, our narrator Nick Carraway does something deeply modern: he tries to curate meaning out of chaos by writing down names. Specifically, the names of the party people who pass through Gatsby’s mansion like flotsam in a tide of champagne
.
And what names they are. This isn’t just a society column - it’s a surrealist roll call:
Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester Meyer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull... Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys.
These names are more than filler. They’re performance. Caricature. A snapshot of people who exist only in their presentation - theatrical, hyphenated, semi-fictional. They sound like hangers-on at a premiere, influencers before Instagram, avatars before avatars. And then, jarringly, we get:
Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.
The tragedy of F Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald manages to find a balance between his attraction and aversion, between his empathy and his critique. As a middle-class, Midwestern Irish Catholic from what Edmund Wilson, the American writer, literary critic, and journalist, referred to as "a semi-excluded background" in relation to the Ivy League and the world of eastern privilege, he appears to possess a dual perspective, the ability to see characters both from within and without. Fitzgerald's most effective narrators always seem to be participating while simultaneously standing outside, shivering with their noses pressed against the glass.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life took on a tragic arc that might have come from one of his own novels. Following lukewarm reviews and hopeless sales, Fitzgerald’s star began to fade. The glitz of the Jazz Age gave way to the grit of the Great Depression, and with it came more troubles: his drinking, his wife Zelda was institutionalised after repeated mental breakdowns, and the once-golden couple became symbols not of glamour, but of collapse. Fitzgerald continued to write - short stories to pay the bills, and write his darker, more complex novel Tender Is the Night, published in1934, which failed commercially. In a final bid for solvency, he moved to Hollywood in 1937 to try his hand at screenwriting, only to find himself adrift in the studio system, dismissed as a ghost past his prime. He died of a heart attack in 1940 at just 44, mid-sentence on his unfinished novel The Love of the Last Tycoon, largely forgotten by the publishing world.
A Dream Reborn in War: Reinvention by Reprint
It’s the early 1940s. The world is at war. Steel is scarce. Food is rationed. Books? They’re heavy, bulky, fragile, and rationed like everything else.
But somewhere in a smoky office in New York, a plan is hatched - not to win the war with weapons, but with words.
The Armed Services Editions were born: cheap, cheerful, pocket-sized paperbacks designed to survive being slipped into boots, backpacks, and battlefield boredom.
Publishing’s secret weapon wasn’t propaganda. It was The Great Gatsby printed sideways.
ASEs - lightweight, horizontal-format paperbacks that could be slipped into a pocket or sock.
Dimensions: 5.5” x 3.75”: the size of a mobile phone today
Printed two-up on magazine presses
Durable, disposable, democratic
Over 122 million copies of over 1,300 titles were distributed between 1943 and 1947.
Fitzgerald. Steinbeck. Agatha Christie. Even P.G. Wodehouse made it to the Pacific Front.
Thousands of servicemen were issued free copies of The Great Gatsby, and his work began to be rediscovered - the novel’s haunting portrait of aspiration, illusion, and moral emptiness suddenly resonating with a country at war and a new generation seeking meaning in the rubble of the bomb sites.
Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald
While F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, largely forgotten and convinced of his own failure, his name never quite disappeared - and part of the reason is Ernest Hemingway. The two were friends, rivals, frenemies before the word existed. Fitzgerald had championed Hemingway early on, helping him connect with Scribner’s and editor Maxwell Perkins, and encouraging his first steps into the literary world. But Hemingway - ever self-mythologising- grew increasingly resentful of Fitzgerald’s early fame and Zelda’s supposed influence over him, portraying Scott in A Moveable Feast as brilliant but broken, promising but pliable, talented but weak. These character assassinations may have been laced with envy, but they also kept Fitzgerald’s name in play. Readers intrigued by Hemingway’s barbed asides often went looking for Gatsby - and found a very different, very luminous kind of writer. In the postwar years, as Hemingway's own myth ballooned, Fitzgerald became a kind of tragic counterpoint: the wasted genius, the golden boy gone to ruin. And nothing revives interest quite like a good literary fall from grace. In a strange twist of fate, Hemingway’s swagger may have inadvertently helped Gatsby walk back into the spotlight.
Bleeding on the Page
In America, where it seems that to be a great writer, you must suffer - visibly. Fitzgerald drank himself into a heart attack. Hemingway ended his days with a shotgun to the head. Sylvia Plath gassed herself while her children slept in the next room. David Foster Wallace hung himself in his garage. The list is so long it begins to feel like a requirement. To write is to bleed. To publish, perhaps, is to haemorrhage.
The myth of the American writer is not built on heritage or intellectual lineage - as it is in Europe - but on trauma. The more broken the person, the more sacred the prose. A body of work must, it seems, be backed by the body itself.
It’s a strange, brutal inversion of the American Dream like the themes of The Great Gatsby. Instead of striving toward life, the author earns their place through suffering. And somewhere between Hemingway’s machismo and Plath’s poetry, pain becomes marketable. An author’s personal collapse becomes part of the pitch.
A Masterwork of American Literature
In the post-war years, literary critics and academics began to re-evaluate Fitzgerald’s work. By the 1950s and ‘60s, Gatsby had entered the American canon, taught increasingly in high schools and universities. Scholars like Lionel Trilling and later Matthew J. Bruccoli championed the novel’s place as a masterwork of American literature. The 1950s also saw several adaptations: a radio play (1950), a stage version, and a 1949 film starring Alan Ladd, although that version was noirish and never quite caught the public's imagination.
Echoes Through Time: How the 1920s Roared Back in the 1960s
When the 1960s flirted with the flapper look and the Charleston found its way back onto dance floors, the spirit of the 1920s re-emerged - not as history, but as style. Bobbed hair, Deco prints and jazz made a comeback, and so did F. Scott Fitzgerald.
One reason was Beloved Infidel (1958), Sheilah Graham’s memoir of her life with Fitzgerald during his Hollywood decline. Graham - a sharp, self-made journalist - offered a new view of the man behind Gatsby: broke, brilliant and broken-hearted. The book was a bestseller. The film version followed in 1959, starring Gregory Peck and Deborah Kerr. It wasn't a hit, but it helped reintroduce Fitzgerald as a human being, not just a literary ghost.
By the mid-sixties, paperback editions of The Great Gatsby were back in classrooms. The twenties had returned - and with them, Gatsby for new generations - disillusioned by Vietnam, consumerism, and social inequality - began to see Gatsby’s glittering emptiness and disillusionment with the American Dream as eerily prescient. His longing, his performative wealth, his doomed love - it all fitted within a country beginning to question its own mythologies.
Robert Redford’s 1970's Gatsby: A Revolution in Style
In the 1970s, Gatsby glittered once more - this time in the form of Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan in Jack Clayton’s 1974 film The Great Gatsby, the script by Francis Ford Coppola brought Gatsby’s world to the screen in dazzling Technicolor. In a strange move for such a male driven book, the costume designer Theoni V. Aldredge won an Oscar for her work on the film, in order to save time (Mia Farrow was pregnant and the film makers were under pressure to shoot the party scenes in summer weather) chose to farm out the men's wardrobe rather than the women's, so it was Ralph Lauren’s "wardrobe" - the impeccable cut of his exquisitely tailored suits that defined the film’s legacy. Part of Ralph Lauren's contract was that he would receive no credit as designer, his role being described in the words "men's wardrobe by Ralph Lauren". Rather than sticking to strict 1920s historical accuracy, Lauren channelled the essence of Gatsby through a 1970s lens: a fantasy of upper-class American elegance that felt right at home in the era of disco decadence and Watergate disillusionment.
Suddenly, Gatsby wasn’t just literature. He was fashion. He was aspiration. He was a brand, even making the name into the long-running soap Coronation Street as a sort of shunters and punters club.
The 1974 film didn’t please every critic (some found it overly glossy), but it undeniably embedded Gatsby into the wider popular imagination. The dream was now wearable. Ralph Lauren’s clothes made Gatsby’s style aspirational again, linking the tragedy of the novel with the era’s hunger for beautiful surfaces - even as social fabric frayed underneath.
1974: Britain in the Dark
While Robert Redford, in his flawless Ralph Lauren tailoring, gazed longingly across the bay at green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, Britain in 1974 was stumbling through a far grimmer kind of darkness. That year, the UK was gripped by rolling power cuts, collapsing industries, and a political landscape so fractured it required two general elections to produce a working government. The country was on a three-day working week to conserve energy during a miners’ strike, IRA bombs were exploding in British cities, and the so-called "troubles" in Northern Ireland were at a boiling point. It was also the year ABBA won Eurovision and Bagpuss aired its first episode - a surreal juxtaposition of innocence and instability.
The Great Gatsby - film released in the UK with its high-society soirées, flowing champagne, and sun-drenched ‘blue’ lawns - felt less like nostalgia and more like escapism by design. Gatsby’s dream of reinvention, his glittering illusion of success, held an almost mythic allure for a British public watching their economy unravel and their political certainties fracture. The film didn’t just adapt a 1920s novel - it arrived as a visual balm for a nation whose own dream was dimming sitting within the fumes of paraffin lamps.
2000 - A Tight Lipped The Great Gatsby
The 2000 television adaptation - and it’s impossibly dull. It has the lifeless, made in thirty days in Canada, a heritage sheen of something Prince Edward might have made, in the same stiff-lipped style as Elizabeth and Bertie.
The film landed with a thud on its release, and deservedly so. Reviews at the time called it “flat-footed,” “uninspired,” and “mediocre.” It feels like a desperate cash-in by TV executives hoping to wring a few more drops out of a literary classic’s built-in audience.
Paul Rudd, of all people, is actually rather good as Nick Carraway - wry, observant, and a touch removed. But nothing can rescue Toby Stephens’ Gatsby. He plays the character as a rough-edged grifter trying to pass as suave, and the iconic smile becomes more of a smirk. There’s no fizz, no danger, and certainly no romance - just a slow trudge through the plot beats. It makes you long for a spin-off starring Meyer Wolfsheim and the racketeers -something gritty and wild, like Peaky Blinders set in 1920s New York, full of menace and moral rot. At least then, we’d feel the heat.
2013 The Great Gatsby A Chandelier Crashing into a Cocktail Shaker
The 2013 Baz Luhrmann film was marketed as the most faithful to Fitzgerald’s text, and exploded onto screens like a chandelier crashing into a cocktail shaker. This Gatsby didn’t so much shimmer as pulsate - set to a Lana Del Rey soundtrack Luhrmann brought his trademark maximalism: every shot loaded with digital dazzle, every party a dream of saxophones, and slow-motion stares. Leonardo DiCaprio gave a surprisingly restrained performance beneath it all, delivering the iconic “old sport” line with just enough uncertainty to suggest the mask might slip. But in true Luhrmann fashion, style frequently trumps subtlety, and the film’s emotional centre risks being drowned. It still captured the essential that Gatsby’s dream was always a performance, and what better way to show that than with a stage set made of CGI and longing?
Fitzgerald’s Genius: Language as Legacy
Fitzgerald was a master of rhythm. Not just in the musicality of his writing, but in his ability to show the rise and fall - the pulse - of dreams. Gatsby is a symphony of illusion: a man who builds a palace to reclaim a past that never truly existed. His tragedy is not just that he dies, but that he was never seen for who he was - only what he projected. That’s where Fitzgerald’s genius lies: not in the events, but in the emotional aftershocks.
The Great Gatsby does follow a structure eerily close to a dark fairytale. Strip away the Jazz Age trappings, the champagne and the linen suits, and what you have is a deeply archetypal tale: a lonely hero with a secret past, a dream wrapped in gold, and a ruinous ending marked by symbolic death.
Gatsby as a Fairytale: Enchanted Castles and Cursed Pools
The Hero in Disguise
Like many fairytale protagonists, Gatsby isn’t what he seems. He arrives cloaked in mystery, wealth, and whispers - his true name, James Gatz, hidden like a peasant prince. He’s remade himself into something magical, like Cinderella before the ball, but with silk shirts instead of glass slippers.
This reinvention is crucial in both fairytales and Gatsby: identity is mutable, social ascent is a fantasy, and transformation always comes at a cost.
The Enchanted House
Gatsby’s mansion is pure fairytale theatre,
a colossal affair by any standard... a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy.
In other words: it’s fake, and everyone knows it. Lit up like a castle of dreams, it hosts endless revels - a place of wonder to outsiders and strangers, who come like enchanted villagers to feast and dance. But, like all magical kingdoms, it is also hollow. No one knows the king. There is no queen.
It’s a house that looks alive but is cursed with loneliness, waiting for one guest who never truly arrives in the way he imagines her.
The Unreachable Prize
Daisy is Gatsby’s golden apple, his Rapunzel, locked in the tower of her own wealth and social status. She is an ideal, never a real person - and like many fairytale figures, her role is symbolic more than active. She doesn’t do anything so much as represent everything Gatsby wants: love, legitimacy, and the illusion of return.
But of course, in the great tradition of tragic myth and fairytale, the prize is flawed. She is not the girl he remembers. She cannot - or will not - leave her tower.
The Wicked Kings and Paper Princes
Tom Buchanan is every fairytale’s brute prince: brutish, entitled, and already in possession of the kingdom. He is the dragon at the gate, guarding Daisy not out of love, but out of the smug inertia of privilege. His violence is literal - he smashes Myrtle's face - and metaphorical, representing the system that always wins. In any other story, Gatsby slays this beast. In Fitzgerald’s fable, he cannot.
Gatsby dies not because he was unworthy of the dream, but because the dream itself was a lie.
The Bodies at the Side of the Road
Like the breadcrumb trail in Hansel and Gretel, Fitzgerald leaves grim markers along Gatsby’s path: Myrtle’s body, hit by Daisy’s reckless driving, is the first. Then comes Gatsby himself, murdered in his swimming pool, like a prince slain at the castle gates - punished for daring to reach beyond his station.
These deaths are the novel’s moral toll: blood for glitter, flesh for fantasy. The fairy tale, in the end, becomes a cautionary tale.
The Narrator as a Survivor
Nick Carraway, like many storytellers in traditional tales, is not the hero - but the one left behind to tell the tale. He is the wide-eyed traveller who ventures into the forbidden land, sees its strange customs, and returns scarred and wiser. His final judgment -
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy…
- reads like the moral at the end of a fable.
He escapes the castle. Just.
Why This Structure Matters
Seeing Gatsby as a fairytale repositions the novel not just as a critique of the American Dream, but as a mythic warning: about illusion, desire, and the futility of trying to reclaim a golden age that never really was.
And crucially, this lens explains its staying power. Fairytales aren’t just old stories. They’re psychic blueprints - tales we recognise in our bones. Gatsby, with his enchanted house, unreachable love, and glittering doom, speaks to us like a dream half-remembered.
It’s a tragedy, yes. But it’s a beautifully shaped one.
Foundations in Sand: Gatsby, West Egg, and the Illusion of America as a New Eden
F. Scott Fitzgerald understood that America is a story people tell themselves - and in The Great Gatsby, he writes as if chiselling that story into marble while warning it may crumble into the grey dust. The novel is saturated with the ideas of a nation newly built, flush with energy and aspiration, but already haunted by fakery, rot, and the old ghosts of European grandeur.
West Egg: Fertile, Flashy, and Fundamentally Fragile
West Egg is described as the “less fashionable of the two,” but it’s also where the vitality is - the dreamers, the hustlers, the self-made kings of bootleg kingdoms. Gatsby’s mansion is modelled on a European hôtel de ville - a detail that’s both comic and tragic.
Fitzgerald uses the word "fertile" sparingly but suggestively - this isn’t a barren land. It’s green and growing, flush with new money, new ambition, and the idea that identity, like property, can be reinvented. The names - East Egg, West Egg - are embryonic, whimsical, as if the country hasn’t quite decided what it wants to be. These aren’t established cities - they’re myths.
Old World vs. New World
The novel constantly juxtaposes the Old Money elegance of East Egg with the raw ambition of West Egg. Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s home is tastefully established; Gatsby’s is gauche and garish. The tension here isn’t just about wealth - it’s about origin myths.
Tom and Daisy inherited their status - they are American aristocracy. Gatsby crafted his, with illegal liquor and pure willpower. The novel’s central tragedy is that America claims to reward the latter, but protects the former. It tells you to build your dream, but then pulls up the drawbridge.
Building a Dream, Bricking in a Tomb
What Fitzgerald gives us is America as a dream under construction - a vast, fertile land where anything is possible, and everything is for sale. The mansions are not just homes; they’re monuments to self-delusion. Gatsby doesn't just live in a castle - he dies in a fairy tale gone wrong.
He lays the foundations. But for what? A nation? A legend? A ruin?
The Ghost in the Book?
Zelda haunts the edges of Gatsby like a siren just out of frame. Her stories, her wit, her spiral - all fed into Scott’s prose, yet she is often dismissed as distraction, not inspiration. In revisiting Gatsby, we might also begin to restore the ghost of Zelda, not just as muse, but as mirror.
Characters in The Great Gatsby
Daisy Buchanan
Daisy is Nick Carraway’s cousin and Gatsby’s former lover. She embodies charm and beauty, yet is ultimately shallow and careless. Married to Tom Buchanan, she represents the allure and emptiness of wealth and status.
“I'm p-paralysed with happiness.”
“That's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
Tom Buchanan
Tom is Daisy’s wealthy, arrogant, and aggressive husband. A former Yale football player, he is domineering, racist, and unfaithful, maintaining an affair with Myrtle Wilson.
Civilisation’s going to pieces!
Your wife doesn’t love you, said Gatsby. She’s never loved you. She loves me.
Nick Carraway
Nick is the novel’s narrator, a Yale graduate from the Midwest who moves to West Egg to learn the bond business. Nick as an Irritating Character: Nick is often sold to readers as a "neutral observer," but when you really look at him, he's anything but neutral. He's judgmental, he's evasive, and he's quietly self-important. His detached "I'm just reporting" stance actually drips with moral superiority. Imagine having him hanging around: watching, silently appraising, withholding his real feelings until it's too late to do anything about them. There's an air of the passive-aggressive about Nick - he feels more like someone who observes life rather than lives it.
I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.
Jay Gatsby (James Gatz)
Gatsby is the enigmatic millionaire known for his lavish parties. Born James Gatz, he reinvented himself to win back Daisy. Gatsby is driven by idealism and the pursuit of the American Dream, yet his wealth is acquired through dubious means. He could be thought of as a drag performance of the American male ideal: tailored, bootlegged, brittle. He reinvents himself with props, speech, and settings - like a theatrical act that demands suspension of disbelief, especially his own..."old sport".
He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it.
Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!
Jordan Baker
Jordan is a professional golfer and Daisy’s friend. She is cynical, dishonest, and embodies the modern woman of the 1920s. She becomes romantically involved with Nick.
It takes two to make an accident.
Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
Myrtle Wilson
Myrtle is Tom Buchanan’s mistress. She is dissatisfied with her marriage and seeks a better life through her affair with Tom. Her tragic end underscores the novel’s themes of desire and destruction.
I married him because I thought he was a gentleman... I thought he knew something about breeding.
These people! You have to keep after them all the time.
George Wilson
George is Myrtle’s husband and the owner of a garage in the valley of ashes. He is a weary and passive man, devastated by his wife’s infidelity and death, leading to his own tragic demise.
God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!
He was a blonde, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome.
Meyer Wolfsheim
Wolfsheim is a shady businessman and associate of Gatsby. He is involved in organised crime, including fixing the 1919 World Series, highlighting the corruption underlying Gatsby’s wealth.
He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.
Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.
Owl Eyes
Owl Eyes is a mysterious, bespectacled man whom Nick meets at one of Gatsby’s parties. He is one of the few who attended Gatsby’s funeral, a rare glimpse of genuine respect.
I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
Why, my God! they used to go there by the hundreds.
Gatz at the Noël Coward Theatre: Gatsby by Lamplight
I saw Gatz at the Noël Coward Theatre in London - in 2012 an experience not so much like attending a play as stepping into being read to inside the, echoing walls of someone else’s memory.
Staged by the Elevator Repair Service, this wasn’t an adaptation of The Great Gatsby in any traditional sense. It was the entire novel, read and performed in full over an eight-hour marathon. No lines were cut. No chapters abridged. It began in a drab, late-20th-century office. The fluorescent lighting flickered. A man’s computer wouldn’t start. And so, as if reaching for a lifeline, he opened a copy of The Great Gatsby and began to read.
And the office changed. Or rather, our perception of it did.
As he continued reading, other workers around him - sullen, coffee-cupped, almost Beckettian in their bleakness - slipped, one by one, into the roles of Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, Jordan, and the rest. Filing cabinets became doorways. Desks became cars. A photocopier clicked out the pulse of the Jazz Age. Nothing was literal, but everything made emotional sense.
Scott Shepherd, as Nick Carraway, carried the text with clarity and stamina. He didn’t perform at us; he inhabited the rhythm of Fitzgerald’s words. His voice wrapped around the audience like a narrator inside your own head - half confessional, half hypnotic.
There was no glamour, no roaring twenties fashion, no sequins or saxophones. The characters emerged from beige blazers and awkward silences. Yet somehow, by resisting spectacle, the production reached something more intimate. It showed how The Great Gatsby lives inside language itself - how it’s not just a story but a spell cast line by line.
And by the final act, when Gatsby is floating in his pool, abandoned and misremembered, the words felt like prophecy. It wasn’t just Gatsby’s dream that was dying - it was the illusion of clarity, of order, of being able to fix the past by sheer force of desire.
Gatz revealed the tragedy in a new way with filing cabinets and flickering lights. It was Gatsby by lamplight, sometimes, a novel isn’t best understood through summary or analysis, but through the long, slow act of listening. Word by word. Dream by dream.
The Great Gatsby Musical London Colloseum
And so, a century after The Great Gatsby first slipped quietly onto the shelves in 1925, greeted by underwhelming reviews and uncertain sales, the story returns to the stage - glittering, singing, and high-kicking at the London Coliseum. This new musical, like Gatsby himself, arrives dressed to impress: overwhelming sets, sequinned ambition, and a soaring score. And yet, the reviews are...mixed...and the slightly worrying look is of a 1970's disco meets the Black & White Minstrels in Las Vegas. As if the spirit of Fitzgerald’s elusive dream resists full translation - still shimmering, still slipping through our fingers. The green light may now pulse in LED, the champagne may be a bit flat, but the longing remains unresolved. Perhaps that's the point. Gatsby endures not because he’s flawless, but because, like all our most persistent illusions, he refuses to settle into certainty. The beat goes on.
Still Reaching for the Light
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s died just before Christmas in 1940, his funeral in Hollywood was quiet and rain-soaked attended by less than twenty-five mourners - including his editor from Scribners, Maxwell Perkins. His burial was rejected by St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Rockville, Maryland, for not being a practicing Catholic so Fitzgerald was buried in a nearby Protestant cemetery. His grave, like Gatsby’s, stood as a stark symbol of faded glory and forgotten promise. In 1975, after years of petitioning by his daughter Scottie to the Archbishop of Washington, William Baum, Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda were reinterred in the family plot at St. Mary’s, finally resting where he had wished - beside his father and under a headstone that bears the haunting final line of The Great Gatsby:
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past
In a world still obsessed with reinvention, where curated identities are broadcast like fireworks across social media, Gatsby remains our cautionary icon. A man who believed too much, too beautifully. A dream that glowed too green to be real.
The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock is not just personal longing - it’s national myth. It's the frontier, the land of plenty, the promise of reinvention. It flickers, unattainable, across the water. Gatsby reaches toward it like a pilgrim toward the promised land.
But the foundation like his mansion - is flawed. Built on deception, on hope rather than history. And in the end, there’s a body in the swimming pool and a billboard with godlike eyes that sees everything. In today’s world of Instagram filters and facial recognition, Eckleburg’s billboard isn’t just God watching - it’s a prototype for modern surveillance, where every curated image and digital action is being tracked, measured, and judged.
The “valley of ashes” has become the feed.
Gatsby has found new life not just in libraries, but in TikTok edits, fashion retrospectives, and Instagram dreamboards. The Great Gatsby is no longer just a book - it’s a brand, a vibe, a visual template for opulence. But in every party or Met Gala theme invoking the Roaring Twenties, the deeper themes of inequality and illusion risk being lost in the glitter.
Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“What little I've accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked back- but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: 'I've found my line - from now on this comes first.'” From a letter to his daughter, Scottie, dated June 12, 1940:
“Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself, leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.” From a letter to his daughter, Scottie:
“In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” From his essay The Crack-Up (1936):
“It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess and it was an age of satire.” From Echoes of the Jazz Age (1931):
“Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.” From Notebook L, published in A Life in Letters (1945):
“I never at any one time saw him clear (Gatsby) myself-for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself - the amalgam was never complete in my mind.” From a letter discussing the character of Gatsby:
“Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.”From Notebook E (1945):
“There are no second acts in American lives.”From his essay My Lost City:
“And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.” From The Crack-Up (1936)
“I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanitarium.”From his notebook, reflecting on Zelda's illness:
“Isn't Hollywood a dump—in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.”From a letter to Alice Richardson (July 29, 1940):
“I was in love with a whirlwind, so when the girl threw me over, I went home and finished my novel.” From a reflection on a past relationship:
December 23, 1940
Scott Fitzgerald, Author, Dies at 44
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
HOLLYWOOD, Calif., Dec. 22 (AP)-F. Scott Fitzgerald, novelist, short story writer and scenarist, died at his Hollywood home yesterday. His age was 44. He suffered a heart attack three weeks ago.
Epitomised "Sad Young Men"
Mr. Fitzgerald in his life and writings epitomized "all the sad young men" of the post-war generation. With the skill of a reporter and ability of an artist he captured the essence of a period when flappers and gin and "the beautiful and the damned" were the symbols of the carefree madness of an age.
Roughly, his own career began and ended with the Nineteen Twenties. "This Side of Paradise," his first book, was published in the first year of that decade of skyscrapers and short skirts. Only six others came between it and his last, which, not without irony, he called "Taps at Reveille." That was published in 1935. Since then a few short stories, the script of a moving picture or two, were all that came from his typewriter.
The promise of his Fitzgerald's brilliant career was never fulfilled.
But what if Gatsby wasn’t just a dreamer? What if he really walked the streets of New York, wearing a starched collar and whispering lies?
The Real Great Gatsby?
Behind Jay Gatsby’s immaculate pink suit and Oxford education stood a real man - and his story is even sadder, stranger, and more American than fiction.
His name was Max Gerlach. Born in Berlin in 1885, he emigrated to the U.S. as a boy, tinkered his way up through boats and car engines, and eventually managed military logistics for the American Expeditionary Forces during the First World War. But it was after the war that Gerlach found his true calling - bootlegging. In Prohibition America, selling illegal champagne and gin wasn't just profitable, it was fashionable. (Even Joe Kennedy, President Kennedy’s father, was rumoured to have made his fortune this way.) It was an era when charm, a sharp suit, and a flexible relationship with the law could turn you into a king.
And for a while, Gerlach lived like one.
He never wore the same shirt twice.
He threw grand reckless parties.
He insisted he'd gone to Oxford.
He called everyone "old sport" without a flicker of irony.
He even spread a rumour that he was a nephew of the German Kaiser.
Fitzgerald met Gerlach in the smokey New York’s speakeasy world - perhaps at the plush, illegal club Gerlach ran close to the Plaza Hotel, owned by none other than gangster kingpin Arnold Rothstein (the model for Gatsby’s sinister friend Meyer Wolfsheim).
Fitzgerald soaked it all up: the bravado, the performance, the hint of rot under the glitter. Gerlach became the living sketch for Jay Gatsby.
But the good times were shortlived. After Prohibition ended and the Great Depression hit, Gerlach lost his fortune overnight. The man who had lived like royalty ended up selling cars, broke and broken. In 1939, in despair, he attempted suicide by shooting himself in the head. He survived - but blind and helpless, a ghost of the man he once was.
In a twist, the real Gatsby tried to contact Fitzgerald's Biographer
After Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, as The Great Gatsby slowly climbed towards posthumous fame, Gerlach contacted Fitzgerald’s biographer, Arthur Mizener, to tell him: I was Gatsby. Mizener brushed him off, convinced that Gatsby was a work of fiction.
Zelda Fitzgerald, confirmed the truth: Gatsby had been based on “a neighbour named Von Guerlach or something who was said to be General Pershing’s nephew and was in trouble over bootlegging.” Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald’s close friend, also backed the claim, recalling Fitzgerald's fascination with Gerlach’s house and lifestyle.
Max Gerlach died in 1958 at Bellevue Hospital, blind, forgotten, buried in a pine box in Long Island National Cemetery. The dream he had sold to the world outlived him. The man himself - like Gatsby - faded into myth.
From a Single Seed: How Stories Grow
One of the most quietly powerful literary traditions is the act of taking a seed - a side character, a half-told life, a forgotten fragment - and giving it new voice. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea reclaimed the "madwoman in the attic" from Jane Eyre, granting her history, soul, and tragedy. Saving Mr Banks explored the hidden heartbreak behind P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins, blurring the line between biography and invention.
Tom Carson’s Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter spins Pamela Buchanan - the barely-glimpsed child of Daisy and Tom from The Great Gatsby - into a full, dazzling life, sweeping across oceans, wars, revolutions, and the glitter of Hollywood. In both structure and spirit, Carson’s novel feels close to the work of William Boyd, whose sweeping fictional biographies like Any Human Heart show how the life of a single, imagined person can refract an entire century.
There is something deeply human in this impulse. We cannot resist asking: "What happened next?" It is the driving force behind all stories, whether rooted in fact or fantasy. As the writer Robert McKee famously put it, the storyteller's first task is simple but absolute: "Make them care." Without that emotional connection, facts lie lifeless. With it, even the smallest detail—a child's brief appearance in a grand novel, a fading memory, a rumour—can ignite the imagination and become a whole world.
Stories, even those based on truth, are not final. They are invitations. Open doors. Whispered suggestions. Every fragment contains the possibility of a new story, if someone is willing to care enough to step through and bring it to life.
Party like it's 1922? (Illustration by David Salariya)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
1896: Born on September 24 in St. Paul, Minnesota.
1913: Enrolled at Princeton University; became involved in literary activities but left in 1917 without graduating.
1917: Joined the U.S. Army during World War I.
1918: While stationed in Alabama, met Zelda Sayre.
1920: Published his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, which brought immediate success; married Zelda Sayre.
1922: Released his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned.
1925: Published The Great Gatsby, now considered his masterpiece.
1934: Released Tender Is the Night, reflecting his personal struggles.
1940: Died of a heart attack on December 21 in Hollywood, California, at age 44.
1941: Posthumous publication of his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon.
Major Works by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Novels
This Side of Paradise (1920) – Charles Scribner's Sons
The Beautiful and Damned (1922) – Charles Scribner's Sons
The Great Gatsby (1925) – Charles Scribner's Sons
Tender Is the Night (1934) – Charles Scribner's Sons
The Last Tycoon (1941, unfinished) – Charles Scribner's Sons
Flappers and Philosophers (1920) – Charles Scribner's Sons
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) – Charles Scribner's Sons
All the Sad Young Men (1926) – Charles Scribner's Sons
Taps at Reveille (1935) – Charles Scribner's Sons
Other Notable Works
The Vegetable (1923, play) – Charles Scribner's Sons
The Crack-Up (1945, essays) – New Directions Publishing
F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary works have inspired many adaptations across different media. Here's a list of notable films, musicals, radio adaptations, and other connections.
Reading List
Biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald Author: Arthur MizenerPublication Date: 1951Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald Author: Matthew J. BruccoliPublication Date: 1981Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Scott FitzgeraldAuthor: Andrew Turnbull Publication Date: 1962 Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons
F. Scott Fitzgerald: A BiographyAuthor: Jeffrey MeyersPublication Date: 1994Publisher: HarperCollins
Biographies of Zelda Fitzgerald
Zelda: A BiographyAuthor: Nancy MilfordPublication Date: 1970 Publisher: Harper & Row
Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in ParadiseAuthor: Sally Cline
Publication Date: 2002 Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Z: A Novel of Zelda FitzgeraldAuthor: Therese Anne FowlerPublication Date: 2013Publisher: St. Martin's PressNote: A fictionalized account based on Zelda's life.
Biography of Max Perkins
Max Perkins: Editor of GeniusAuthor: A. Scott Berg
Publication Date: 1978 Publisher: Dutton
Biographies of Gerald and Sara Murphy
Living Well Is the Best Revenge Author: Calvin Tomkins Publication
Date: 1971Publisher: Viking Press
Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy – A Lost Generation Love Story Author: Amanda Vaill Publication Date: 1998 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Sara & Gerald: Villa America and AfterAuthor: Honoria Murphy Donnelly and Richard N. BillingsPublication Date: 1982Publisher: Times Books
Biographies of Other Contemporaries
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway: A BiographyAuthor: Mary V. DearbornPublication Date: 2017Publisher: Knopf
Ernest Hemingway: A Life StoryAuthor: Carlos BakerPublication Date: 1969Publisher: Scribner
Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe: A BiographyAuthor: Andrew TurnbullPublication Date: 1967Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons
Thomas Wolfe: A Writer's LifeAuthor: Ted MitchellPublication Date: 2017Publisher: Appalachian State University
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her WorkAuthor: Donald SutherlandPublication Date: 1951Publisher: Unknown
Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein
Author: Janet
Hobhouse Publication Date: 1989Publisher: Anchor Books
T.S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot: A Short BiographyAuthor: John WorthenPublication Date: 2011Publisher: Haus Publishing
Ezra Pound
The Life of Ezra PoundAuthor: Noel StockPublication Date: 1970Publisher: Pantheon Books
Film Adaptations
The Great Gatsby:
1926 silent film directed by Herbert Brenon (now lost). Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda loathed the silent version. Zelda wrote to an acquaintance that the film was "rotten". She and Scott left the cinema midway through the film.
1949 adaptation starring Alan Ladd
1974 film featuring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, with a script by Francis Ford Coppola
2013 version directed by Baz Luhrmann, starring Leonardo DiCaprio
Other Works:
The Beautiful and Damned (1922)
Tender Is the Night (1962)
The Last Tycoon (1976), featuring Robert De Niro
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), directed by David Fincher
Stage and Musical Adaptations
Musicals:
The Great Gatsby (2023), with music and lyrics by Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen, premiered on Broadway in 2024 and at the London Colosseum from April 2025
Gatsby: An American Myth (2024), featuring music by Florence Welch, premiered at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button musical, adapted by Jethro Compton and Darren Clark, captivated audiences in London's West End with its folksy score and emotive narrative
Radio Adaptations
BBC Radio has broadcast readings of many of Fitzgerald's novels, novellas, and short stories, including The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night.
In 1947, CBS's Studio One aired a radio drama adapted from Fitzgerald's unfinished novel The Last Tycoon
Television Adaptations
The Great Gatsby (2000), a television film broadcast on the BBC, starring Toby Stephens and Mira Sorvino
Tender Is the Night (1985), a television series featuring Mary Steenburgen and Peter Strauss
The Last Tycoon (2016–2017), a television series starring Matt Bomer and Kelsey Grammer
Opera
The Great Gatsby (1999), an opera composed by John Harbison, brought Fitzgerald's classic novel to the operatic stage
Portrayals of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Actors who have played Fitzgerald include:
Richard Chamberlain:
1974: Portrayed Fitzgerald in the TV film F. Scott Fitzgerald and 'The Last of the Belles' .
David Hoflin:
2017: Played Fitzgerald in Amazon's Z: The Beginning of Everything .
Woody Allen's Films:
1983: Fitzgerald appears briefly in Zelig.
2011: Tom Hiddleston portrays Fitzgerald in Midnight in Paris.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Brief Life
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on 24 September 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota, and died in Hollywood on 21 December 1940. In his short and often chaotic life, he defined the style and disillusionment of the Jazz Age with rare precision. He was both a chronicler and a casualty of the American Dream - dazzling on the surface, and deeply fractured underneath.
His marriage to Zelda Sayre in 1920 was famously intense. Zelda was sharp, charismatic, and creative in her own right. Their early years together glittered with promise, a daughter "Scottie" Frances Scott Fitzgerald born 26 October 1921, Saint Paul, Minnesota. Then the parties, publications, notoriety - but their relationship quickly became destructive. Zelda’s mental health deteriorated in the 1930s, and she was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. While Fitzgerald continued to write and travel, Zelda was often in and out of psychiatric institutions. Their story was romanticised for decades, but today it’s clear that both suffered terribly - not least from the way their ambitions were framed in competition rather than collaboration.
Later in life, Fitzgerald formed a significant relationship with Sheilah Graham, a British-born journalist working in Hollywood. Graham was pragmatic and supportive, offering him companionship and structure at a time when his health and confidence were failing. By then, Fitzgerald was writing scripts for studios, surviving on short stories and industry scraps, and feeling increasingly sidelined by the literary world.
One of the constants in Fitzgerald’s life was his editor, Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s. Their relationship was professional but deeply personal - Perkins believed in Fitzgerald’s talent from the beginning, and championed his work even when others dismissed it. Without Perkins, we may never have had The Great Gatsby in the form we know it.
As for his drinking - Fitzgerald’s alcoholism was not simply a character flaw or a tragic flourish. It was a chronic illness that robbed him of time, clarity, and ultimately his health. Today, his behaviour would likely be recognised as alcohol dependence, and treated with a degree of compassion that was absent in his lifetime. He was self-aware about it - painfully so - but unable to escape its grip.
British Counterpoints: Ruins Behind the Manor Gates
While America had Gatsby, Britain had its own reflections on glamour and decline:
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh – An elegy for the lost world of aristocratic England, drenched in memory, desire, and spiritual longing.
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst – A sharp, glittering portrait of 1980s London, where class and sexuality mingle with Thatcherite ambition.
The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley – A story of innocence shattered by the secrets of the elite, told through the lens of a summer that changes everything.
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro – Quiet devastation beneath English reserve; the decline of class and purpose through the eyes of a butler.
American Siblings: The Cracks Beneath the Dream
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser – A chilling dissection of ambition and moral failure in the pursuit of status.
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe – Greed and self-deception in Reagan-era New York.
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis – The nihilism of youth and wealth in 1980s Los Angeles.
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith – Identity, aspiration, and the darkness behind charm.
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