The Backstory: The Great Gatsby Was a Total Failure!

How does a book start out as a complete failure only to suddenly be celebrated as one of the great American novels, decades later? And what was its heartbreaking inspiration? This is the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby, published 100 years ago this month.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So one hundred years ago this month, the Great Gatsby,
the novel by f. Scott Fitzgerald, arrived on the scene.
It was a monumental failure. His previous novels, as well
as his many short stories, had made him a household name,
but the weak initial sales of Gatsby were a real disappointment,
and Fitzgerald actually died fifteen years later thinking he'd been

(00:23):
a failure. Worse yet, the main female character in the novel,
Daisy Buchanan, was based on a failed romance for Fitzgerald.
I'm Patty Steele. Where did The Great Gatsby originate? And
how did it belatedly become one of the great American novels.
That's next on the backstory. We're back with the backstory.

(00:47):
Do you like to read the classic novels or maybe
watch movies based on them? I am fascinated by those
peaks at the past based on a contemporary observation. One
of the best books for that kind of experience, in
my estimation, is The Great Gatsby by f. Scott Fitzgerald.
He was writing about his life as a bit of

(01:07):
an inside observer in the social swirl of the ruing
nineteen twenties on Long Island. But he wasn't exactly an insider.
The characters weren't real life people, but they were totally
inspired by the people he knew and the events he
was a part of. It was a time of total
excess money, the jazz age, with wild parties and bootleg liquor,

(01:30):
women being freed from the constraints of Victorian expectations and
fashion and behavior. Fashion had gone from hiding as much
of your body as possible to softer, more clingy, and
filmier fabrics. It was, in a way, the first sexual revolution.
On a deeper level, Gatsby explores themes of the American dream, money,

(01:53):
social class, and the disillusionment of the nineteen twenties. F
Scott Fitzgerald painted a vivid picture of those days. He
described Gadsby saying he had one of those rare smiles
with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you
may come across four or five times in your life.
It understood you just as far as you wanted to

(02:15):
be understood, believed in you as you would like to
believe in yourself. But the character Daisy Buchanan was the
romantic center of the story, and she was based on
Fitzgerald's real life teenage love, a girl named Geneva King.
Sixteen year old Geneva met eighteen year old Fitzgerald at
a sledding party in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and they had

(02:38):
a passionate romance from nineteen fifteen to nineteen seventeen. Problem is,
her very wealthy father, Charles King, from Chicago, did not
want his daughter, one of the main debutantes of her year,
involved with Fitzgerald, telling him that poor boys shouldn't think
of marrying rich girls. Fitzgerald was t when the pair

(03:00):
broke up, and it broke his heart. He dropped out
of Princeton University and joined the army during World War One.
Even though he started dating his future wife, Zelda, he
continued to write to Geneva until she entered into a
marriage to the son of a wealthy family friend arranged
by her father. Folks that knew Fitzgerald say Geneva was

(03:22):
the love of his life until his death in nineteen
forty and the inspiration for numerous characters in his books
and short stories, most especially Gatsby's Daisy Buchanan. They were
all based on unobtainable upper class women. In Gatsby, he
describes the way Daisy speaks. Her voice is full of money.

(03:44):
That was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it,
the jingle of it, the symbol song of it, high
in the White Palace, the King's daughter, the Golden Girl.
The book describes the pain he felt of never being
able to have her, of never quite fitting in in
her world. So The Great Gatsby is finally published in

(04:05):
April of nineteen twenty five. He's bared his soul in
this book. So what happens. It's a miserable failure. His
first two novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful
and the Damned, as well as his short stories, had
made him a household name, a popular author. He was
a sensation. Critics said he was the author who chronicled

(04:27):
the young jazz age. But when The Great Gatsby came along,
they were not impressed. Critics called it boring and unimaginative.
They felt the characters were underdeveloped and uninteresting. They called
them neither likable nor unlikable, the ultimate insult. Fitzgerald had
believed this would be his great novel before it was published.

(04:49):
He said, first off, it'll sell about eighty thousand copies,
but I may be wrong. He was monumentally wrong, and
that translated into really crummy sales. When all was said
and done, the Great Gatsby sold less than twenty thousand
copies in those years. Fitzgerald was devastated. The characters were
so close to him and to the pain of his young,

(05:11):
failed romance. In the aftermath, he felt that the young
women who were the target audience for this kind of
novel didn't appreciate the lack of a likable female character.
He felt that critics and maybe even the public misunderstood Gatsby.
In describing the world of Gatsby, Fitzgerald said, let me

(05:31):
tell you about the very rich. They're different from you
and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does
something to them. They think, deep in their hearts that
they are better than we are. For the remainder of
his life, Fitzgerald harbored a sort of smoldering resentment towards
the wealthy. It made sense because he never regained his

(05:52):
early fame. It was the depression, and people didn't really
want to read about insanely rich, irresponsible, beauty full young
people life was just too hard. But then World War
II starts and some publishers decide that the troops need
something to read, so they print over a thousand different
books and send over a million copies of them to

(06:15):
folks serving overseas and also to POW's The Great Gatsby
was chosen to be one of the Armed Services editions.
Upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand copies of Gatsby
were handed out. NPR more recently said, you read these
accounts of the guy's landing on Normandy Beach, and they're
reading trying to take their minds off of what's about

(06:38):
to face them. It's just such an amazing testament to
what books can mean to people at critical times in
their lives. One book historian said, without the Armed Services
edition of The Great Gatsby, the book may have been
lost to history. Fitzgerald died in nineteen forty at the
age of forty four, before that edition made his book

(06:59):
a classic. Until he died, he was convinced he was
a failure. He wasn't even allowed to be buried in
his family plot at a Catholic cemetery in Maryland because
his books were considered too risque fast forward. The Great
Gatsby has now sold over thirty million copies and continues
to sell half a million a year. It's been made

(07:22):
into at least four movies, as well as ballets, operas,
video games, and graphic novels, and it may just inspire
all of us to never give up on telling our stories.
Hope you're enjoying The Backstory with Patty Steele. Please leave
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(07:42):
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if you have a story you'd like me to cover.
On Facebook, It's Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele.
I'm Patty Steele. The Backstory is a production of iHeartMedia,
Premiere Our Networks, the Elvis Durand Group, and Steel Trap Productions.

(08:04):
Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our writer Jake Kushner. We
have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Feel free to
reach out to me with comments and even story suggestions
on Instagram at Real Patty Steele and on Facebook at
Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele.
The pieces of history you didn't know you needed to

(08:24):
know