Nine things you didn't know about The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary masterpiece turns 90 this week. It's a common set text, and the recent movie adaptation was very popular, but how much do you really know about the story?
Leonardo DiCaprio starred as Jay Gatsby (with Carey Mulligan, centre, and Joel Edgerton) in Baz Lurhmann's 2013 adaptation of the story.The Great Gatsby turned 90 on April 10. The story, with its legendary tragic hero, is familiar to many people - you may have studied the book at school, or you may have seen the movie. But how much do you really know about the great American novel?
To celebrate, the publisher, Scribner, is reissuing a commemorative edition with that famous jacket art by Francis Cugat. And on the publisher's website, you can read authors' statements about how The Great Gatsby influenced their writing.
Here are nine curious facts about The Great Gatsby, noted in Matthew J. Bruccoli’s 1992 preface to the novel, and Maureen Corrigan’s recent book, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.
- That we’re still talking about The Great Gatsby would have surprised its author. When Fitzgerald died in 1940, copies of the second printing were still piled up unsold.
- Today, Scribner sells more than 500,000 copies a year.
- Editor Maxwell Perkins commissioned Cugat’s jacket cover design months before Fitzgerald finished writing the book.
- The first publication said Daisy’s daughter was three, suggesting that Daisy was already pregnant when she married Tom.
- The Jewish gangster associated with Gatsby works at "The Swastika Holding Company".
- After Fitzgerald’s death, Edmund Wilson changed the spelling from "orgastic" to "orgiastic" in the famous closing line: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us."
- Over the years, more than 1,000 of Fitzgerald’s original punctuation marks were omitted from the novel. Bruccoli’s "authorised" version restored them in 1992.
- Spoiler alert: maybe Gatsby didn’t dodge a bullet, but we did: Fitzgerald considered calling his masterpiece The High-Bouncing Lover or even Trimalchio in West Egg. Um, well ...
- One of the first reviews to appear - in the New York World - carried this headline: "F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Latest a Dud." Perhaps it's not surprising the newspaper no longer exists.