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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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 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
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 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. 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 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 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. 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, 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 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
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 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 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 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 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 a review and follow or subscribe for free to get new episodes delivered automatically, and feel free to dm me 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. 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 know