F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final royalty check was for $13.13, making him the recipient of a double dose of bad luck. By 1940, the novel he thought to be his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, was very nearly out of print, and the woman he regarded as the love of his life, Zelda Fitzgerald, was living across the country, in and out of mental hospitals.
When Fitzgerald died alone, of a heart attack in Hollywood at the age of 44—leave it to the world’s biggest romantic to perish of a broken heart—he considered himself a washed-up failure. The Great Gatsby hadn’t even sold out its initial printing, in 1925, of 23,000 copies, and Fitzgerald was living hand to mouth (the hand was big, but so was the mouth) writing short stories and film scripts. As an author, he was well known to the public but something of a back number. As a man, he was a shell of himself. The American Dream, the Great American Novel, the American Girl—for Fitzgerald, they were all wrapped up together—had eluded him, and not for want of trying.
Like Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s capacity for emotion was majestically unreasonable, powerful enough to give him ecstatic visions and make him the cynosure of a generation replete with literary superstars but also to recoil and lay him in an early grave.
In America, though, a dream deferred can explode well after the person who holds it has gone. And so in 2025, four years after The Great Gatsby’s copyright protection expired, 84 years after its author died, and 100 years after it was first published, the novel is among our nation’s most beloved. James L. W. West III, general editor of the 18-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, estimates that “until it entered the public domain, the novel regularly sold upwards of 500,000 copies per year in the U.S.” in the various original Scribner editions.
Now that Fitzgerald’s third book is fair game for other publishers, there are countless new editions of The Great Gatbsy, which, according to West, has become “a secular scripture in the U.S.... Even a small slice of the yearly sales of the novel would make it attractive to a publisher.”
But whether all the new editions are attractive in themselves is another matter. As Kara Watson, a vice president and executive editor at Scribner who has worked with the Fitzgerald estate since 2013, says, “Publishers saw the sales opportunity. Unfortunately, the quality is very inconsistent across editions.”
Indeed, woe betide the man or woman who runs to Amazon for a copy of The Great Gatsby. The listings are a great dumpster fire of indiscrimination, where wretched independently published copies are given prime billing next to, and sometimes above, the classic Scribner version. Watson notes that Scribner’s latest edition, which features a new introduction by Jesmyn Ward and a foreword by the author’s granddaughter Eleanor Lanahan, is the only one authorized by the Fitzgerald estate. Nevertheless, nearly every major publisher has gotten in on the action, adding introductions by accomplished authors and, in some cases, scholarly notes, indexes, and other back matter.
Some of the new introductions work—those by Amor Towles (Library of America) and Min Jin Lee (Penguin Classics), for example—while others make you wonder if the whole thing has gone too far. Signet Classics tapped Baz Luhrmann, who directed the violently uninspired 2013 film, and John Grisham’s seven-page book report at the start of the Vintage Classics edition might have been written by A.I. had it not come out in 2021.
Then there are the sequels and prequels that variously attempt to draft off The Great Gatsby’s success, usher it into a new age, or shackle it to some errant past morality. Nick (2021), by Michael Farris Smith, imagines Nick Carraway’s life before he moved to West Egg and met Gatsby, while Beautiful Little Fools (2022), by Jillian Cantor, reconstructs the story to correct for the common criticism—one Fitzgerald himself made—that The Great Gatsby’s female characters are under-developed and feeble.
Other derivatives that take bigger liberties with Fitzgerald’s story include The Gay Gatsby, Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix, Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter, and Agent Gatz, which imagines Gatsby’s life as a spy during World War I. Those who delight in revisionist history and specious reasoning might also be tickled by a Salon article asking, “Was Gatsby black?” (If you are overwhelmed by Gatsby’s whiteness, you’d be better served by Wesley Morris’s introduction to the Modern Library edition.)
According to Gerry Howard, a former Doubleday editor and author of The Insider, an upcoming book on the 20th-century critic, poet, and Jazz Age chronicler Malcolm Cowley, there’s a simple explanation for the profusion of new Gatsby material. “It’s just business,” he says.
For Fitzgerald’s admirers and the literary-inclined, the story of how a nearly forgotten gem waltzed to prominence in the first place is far more interesting. Howard attributes it to several factors: Fitzgerald’s Princeton friend Edmund Wilson publishing The Crack-Up, a posthumous collection of Fitzgerald’s writings, and The Last Tycoon, the novel he left half finished at the time of his death; a late-1940s vogue for the lost generation; and “the search for a usable past,” the mid-1940s American intellectual movement to create a canon of national literature.
What’s more, says Howard, “Gatsby was perfect for the new critics because it’s self-contained … and it’s an incredibly teachable book.” Jam-packed with symbols and engineered with the efficiency of an internal-combustion engine, the book lent itself equally well to syllabuses and the million-plus-paperback Armed Services Editions that were deployed to American troops during W.W. II, helping remember the recently dead Fitzgerald to a cohort who likely didn’t know he existed in the first place.
Fitzgerald was a man born for love and could well be described by his first novel’s working title—one that This Side of Paradise editor Maxwell Perkins wisely insisted he change—“The Romantic Egoist.” Growing up in a middle-class family in Minnesota, Fitzgerald compensated for his lack of fortune with talent, flamboyance, and a benighted affair with his upper-crust dream girl. Cowley’s memoiristic 1964 essay “A Ghost Story of the Jazz Age” presents the Fitzgeralds at their most ghoulish—on a 1933 visit to their faded Baltimore estate, Cowley finds Zelda fresh from the sanitarium (and none the better for it) and Scott, who was midway through writing Tender Is the Night, wavering between maudlin unease and petulant self-assurance—and, like The Great Gatsby, shows what happens when the past freezes but the players keep on decaying.
In this way, Fitzgerald arrived a century or so too late for the reason-flouting, post-Enlightenment feast of individualism that was the Romantic movement—a dream-seeking Gatsby to the cretinous, science-spewing Tom Buchanan—and just early enough to be its 20th-century figurehead.
In a 1945 essay on Fitzgerald, Lionel Trilling wrote, “The voice of his prose is of the essence of his success. We hear in it at once the tenderness toward human desire that modifies a true firmness of moral judgment.” And indeed, the biggest criticism levied against The Great Gatsby is that its protagonist’s herculean heart belies his moral deficiencies.
But what if we’re moralizing ourselves away from the point, relying too much on literature to grant us deliverance in the form of facile symbols and messages? The cruel, double-edged razor that exists between writers and readers is that one might have something the other doesn’t—or might not have something the other does. In Fitzgerald’s case, this means a capacity to bear love out even to the edge of doom, an aspiration that’s perceived but not necessarily shared by most readers. How many people can truly empathize with such a man?
After all these years, there remain so many questions—even more than there are versions of Gatsby. Is the book’s title meant to be taken literally? Why is the book remembered for its beauty even though it is a nervous novel, one that reads like a patient bleeding out on a gurney? Are we still reading it merely because we’ve been compelled to for so long? Or does our collective fixation betray a sick desire to see other people fly high, then fall? Does the impossibly delicate eggshell protect a complicated interior life, or is it the last barrier before a void?
Is Fitzgerald Gatsby, or is he all three of the novel’s male characters, a Hydra that lives and dies on its own terms? Why do we say the American Dream or the Great American Novel, as if there can only be one? Had Fitzgerald been more careful, could he have outlasted the horrible fate he predicted in his writing, or was dying his hero’s death the only path to glory?
Fitzgerald might as well have been describing himself in his 1931 short story “A New Leaf”: “Like so many alcoholics, he has a certain charm. If he’d only make his messes off by himself somewhere—except right in people’s laps. Just when somebody’s taken him up and is making a big fuss over him, he pours the soup down his hostess’ back, kisses the serving maid and passes out in the dog kennel. But he’s done it too often. He’s run through about everybody, until there’s no one left.”
The messiness that hamstrung the man also prevented him from seeing certain happy truths. We live in a country where even piteously strong visions are permitted to exist, and to be pursued to their end for better or for worse. Death is not the end, and there are second acts in plenty of American lives—they just don’t get to bear witness to them. Only under such conditions could one man’s abortive dream turn into the Great American Novel.
After 100 years, we’re still hypnotized by The Great Gatsby’s winking symbolism, trying to construe some semblance of morality and find justice in the shimmering ruins. But Fitzgerald’s not saying, Be like me; he’s saying, Look at me. And all these years later, he’s gotten his way.
Nathan King is a Deputy Editor at Air Mail