Dubbed “The Fairway Flapper,” Cummings won the U.S. Daisy Buchanan’s best friend Jordan was modeled on one of Ginevra’s good friends, Edith Cummings.Ĭummings was not only a fellow debutante-one of Chicago’s “Big Four,” the most eligible women in the city-she was also a famous amateur golfer. That may be true, considering that these words, found written in Fitzgerald’s ledger, are thought to have been said by King’s father: “Poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls.” 13. One Fitzgerald scholar says his romance with King was the most important relationship he experienced, even more so than the one with his wife. Many characters in The Great Gatsby were based on Fitzgerald's friends and lovers.ĭaisy Buchanan was based on Ginevra King, a Chicago debutante and one of Fitzgerald’s girlfriends. (The Biltmore, the Vanderbilt family's estate in Asheville, North Carolina, is the largest.) Some literary scholars also liken Fitzgerald’s description of the mansion to Beacon Towers, a mansion with more than 140 rooms that was owned by William Randolph Hearst and demolished in 1945. Even today, nearly a century after construction began on it in 1915, Oheka Castle is still the second-largest private estate in the United States.

The real-life models included Oheka Castle, in Huntington, New York. Jay Gatsby’s lavish mansion was inspired by a couple of real mansions. That’s where Fitzgerald witnessed the collision of “old money” and “new money.” People who came from Great Neck had recently acquired money, while those who came from nearby Manhasset Neck or Cow Neck had inherited theirs. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald moved to Great Neck on Long Island after their daughter Scottie was born in 1922. The joke’s on the Evening Sun, because not only was much of Gatsby probable it actually happened. Some events in The Great Gatsby actually happened.

Fitzgerald is not one of the great writers of to-day.” And The Baltimore Evening Sun concluded that “Scott Fitzgerald’s new novel, The Great Gatsby, is in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that.” 10. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle sniffed, “Why should be called an author, or why any of us should behave as if he were, has never been satisfactorily explained to me,' while The New York Evening World opined, “We are quite convinced after reading The Great Gatsby that Mr. A few critics didn't like The Great Gatsby much, either. He also thought that the title, which was only “fair,” resulted in poor sales. Scott Fitzgerald blamed his lack of a strong female protagonist.įitzgerald was convinced that the reason the book wasn’t a rousing success was because Gatsby didn’t have a single admirable female character-and, at the time, the majority of people reading novels were women. It sold about 20,000 copies in the entire first year of publication. Unlike Fitzgerald’s previous two novels, Gatsby was not a runaway success. At the time of its publication in 1925, a copy of The Great Gatsby cost $2. Till she cry, “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, “Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her Fitzgerald also occasionally used it as his pen name. The poet was actually a character in Fitzgerald’s previous book, This Side of Paradise. The poet who “wrote” the Great Gatsby’s epigraph never actually existed. Fitzgerald so loved Cugat’s art that he rewrote parts of the book to better incorporate it. The famous cover of The Great Gatsby was designed by Francis Cugat.Ĭugat went on to become a designer for actor/director/producer Douglas Fairbanks. It has since been translated into English with the titles The Wanderer and The Lost Estate. That earlier book was called Le Grand Meaulnes, written in 1913 by author Alain-Fournier. The Great Gatsby was partly inspired by a French novel.

Lovecraft, Henry Miller, and Octavio Paz, among others. The story had other famous fans, too: You can find mentions of Trimalchio in Les Miserables, Pompeii, and works by H.P. The original Trimalchio was a character in a 1st-century work of fiction called Satyricon. Scott Fitzgerald was told that readers wouldn't understand the reference to Trimalchio.įitzgerald was quite close to choosing one of the Trimalchio titles until someone persuaded him that the reference was too obscure. Scott Fitzgerald's first choice for a title.Īt one time or another, all of these were in consideration for the book that would become The Great Gatsby: Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires Trimalchio Trimalchio in West Egg On the Road to West Egg Under the Red, White, and Blue Gold-Hatted Gatsby and The High-Bouncing Lover. Here are a few more facts about The Great Gatsby you may not have known. But when this story of the Jazz Age was published in 1925, readers were far more skeptical. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is revered as a classic American novel.

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