Speaker 1: So one hundred years ago this month, the Great Gatsby,
Speaker 1: the novel by f. Scott Fitzgerald, arrived on the scene.
Speaker 1: It was a monumental failure. His previous novels, as well
Speaker 1: as his many short stories, had made him a household name,
Speaker 1: but the weak initial sales of Gatsby were a real disappointment,
Speaker 1: and Fitzgerald actually died fifteen years later thinking he'd been
Speaker 1: a failure. Worse yet, the main female character in the novel,
Speaker 1: Daisy Buchanan, was based on a failed romance for Fitzgerald.
Speaker 1: I'm Patty Steele. Where did The Great Gatsby originate? And
Speaker 1: how did it belatedly become one of the great American novels.
Speaker 1: That's next on the backstory. We're back with the backstory.
Speaker 1: Do you like to read the classic novels or maybe
Speaker 1: watch movies based on them? I am fascinated by those
Speaker 1: peaks at the past based on a contemporary observation. One
Speaker 1: of the best books for that kind of experience, in
Speaker 1: my estimation, is The Great Gatsby by f. Scott Fitzgerald.
Speaker 1: He was writing about his life as a bit of
Speaker 1: an inside observer in the social swirl of the ruing
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties on Long Island. But he wasn't exactly an insider.
Speaker 1: The characters weren't real life people, but they were totally
Speaker 1: inspired by the people he knew and the events he
Speaker 1: was a part of. It was a time of total
Speaker 1: excess money, the jazz age, with wild parties and bootleg liquor,
Speaker 1: women being freed from the constraints of Victorian expectations and
Speaker 1: fashion and behavior. Fashion had gone from hiding as much
Speaker 1: of your body as possible to softer, more clingy, and
Speaker 1: filmier fabrics. It was, in a way, the first sexual revolution.
Speaker 1: On a deeper level, Gatsby explores themes of the American dream, money,
Speaker 1: social class, and the disillusionment of the nineteen twenties. F
Speaker 1: Scott Fitzgerald painted a vivid picture of those days. He
Speaker 1: described Gadsby saying he had one of those rare smiles
Speaker 1: with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you
Speaker 1: may come across four or five times in your life.
Speaker 1: It understood you just as far as you wanted to
Speaker 1: be understood, believed in you as you would like to
Speaker 1: believe in yourself. But the character Daisy Buchanan was the
Speaker 1: romantic center of the story, and she was based on
Speaker 1: Fitzgerald's real life teenage love, a girl named Geneva King.
Speaker 1: Sixteen year old Geneva met eighteen year old Fitzgerald at
Speaker 1: a sledding party in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and they had
Speaker 1: a passionate romance from nineteen fifteen to nineteen seventeen. Problem is,
Speaker 1: her very wealthy father, Charles King, from Chicago, did not
Speaker 1: want his daughter, one of the main debutantes of her year,
Speaker 1: involved with Fitzgerald, telling him that poor boys shouldn't think
Speaker 1: of marrying rich girls. Fitzgerald was t when the pair
Speaker 1: broke up, and it broke his heart. He dropped out
Speaker 1: of Princeton University and joined the army during World War One.
Speaker 1: Even though he started dating his future wife, Zelda, he
Speaker 1: continued to write to Geneva until she entered into a
Speaker 1: marriage to the son of a wealthy family friend arranged
Speaker 1: by her father. Folks that knew Fitzgerald say Geneva was
Speaker 1: the love of his life until his death in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty and the inspiration for numerous characters in his books
Speaker 1: and short stories, most especially Gatsby's Daisy Buchanan. They were
Speaker 1: all based on unobtainable upper class women. In Gatsby, he
Speaker 1: describes the way Daisy speaks. Her voice is full of money.
Speaker 1: That was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it,
Speaker 1: the jingle of it, the symbol song of it, high
Speaker 1: in the White Palace, the King's daughter, the Golden Girl.
Speaker 1: The book describes the pain he felt of never being
Speaker 1: able to have her, of never quite fitting in in
Speaker 1: her world. So The Great Gatsby is finally published in
Speaker 1: April of nineteen twenty five. He's bared his soul in
Speaker 1: this book. So what happens. It's a miserable failure. His
Speaker 1: first two novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful
Speaker 1: and the Damned, as well as his short stories, had
Speaker 1: made him a household name, a popular author. He was
Speaker 1: a sensation. Critics said he was the author who chronicled
Speaker 1: the young jazz age. But when The Great Gatsby came along,
Speaker 1: they were not impressed. Critics called it boring and unimaginative.
Speaker 1: They felt the characters were underdeveloped and uninteresting. They called
Speaker 1: them neither likable nor unlikable, the ultimate insult. Fitzgerald had
Speaker 1: believed this would be his great novel before it was published.
Speaker 1: He said, first off, it'll sell about eighty thousand copies,
Speaker 1: but I may be wrong. He was monumentally wrong, and
Speaker 1: that translated into really crummy sales. When all was said
Speaker 1: and done, the Great Gatsby sold less than twenty thousand
Speaker 1: copies in those years. Fitzgerald was devastated. The characters were
Speaker 1: so close to him and to the pain of his young,
Speaker 1: failed romance. In the aftermath, he felt that the young
Speaker 1: women who were the target audience for this kind of
Speaker 1: novel didn't appreciate the lack of a likable female character.
Speaker 1: He felt that critics and maybe even the public misunderstood Gatsby.
Speaker 1: In describing the world of Gatsby, Fitzgerald said, let me
Speaker 1: tell you about the very rich. They're different from you
Speaker 1: and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does
Speaker 1: something to them. They think, deep in their hearts that
Speaker 1: they are better than we are. For the remainder of
Speaker 1: his life, Fitzgerald harbored a sort of smoldering resentment towards
Speaker 1: the wealthy. It made sense because he never regained his
Speaker 1: early fame. It was the depression, and people didn't really
Speaker 1: want to read about insanely rich, irresponsible, beauty full young
Speaker 1: people life was just too hard. But then World War
Speaker 1: II starts and some publishers decide that the troops need
Speaker 1: something to read, so they print over a thousand different
Speaker 1: books and send over a million copies of them to
Speaker 1: folks serving overseas and also to POW's The Great Gatsby
Speaker 1: was chosen to be one of the Armed Services editions.
Speaker 1: Upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand copies of Gatsby
Speaker 1: were handed out. NPR more recently said, you read these
Speaker 1: accounts of the guy's landing on Normandy Beach, and they're
Speaker 1: reading trying to take their minds off of what's about
Speaker 1: to face them. It's just such an amazing testament to
Speaker 1: what books can mean to people at critical times in
Speaker 1: their lives. One book historian said, without the Armed Services
Speaker 1: edition of The Great Gatsby, the book may have been
Speaker 1: lost to history. Fitzgerald died in nineteen forty at the
Speaker 1: age of forty four, before that edition made his book
Speaker 1: a classic. Until he died, he was convinced he was
Speaker 1: a failure. He wasn't even allowed to be buried in
Speaker 1: his family plot at a Catholic cemetery in Maryland because
Speaker 1: his books were considered too risque fast forward. The Great
Speaker 1: Gatsby has now sold over thirty million copies and continues
Speaker 1: to sell half a million a year. It's been made
Speaker 1: into at least four movies, as well as ballets, operas,
Speaker 1: video games, and graphic novels, and it may just inspire
Speaker 1: all of us to never give up on telling our stories.
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Speaker 1: On Facebook, It's Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele.
Speaker 1: I'm Patty Steele. The Backstory is a production of iHeartMedia,
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Speaker 1: Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our writer Jake Kushner. We
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Speaker 1: Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele.
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