“Maybe my book is rotten,” F Scott Fitzgerald told a friend, in February 1925, shortly before the publication of The Great Gatsby, “but I don’t think so”. If the first half of his sentence was perfunctory, the second half was the wildest kind of understatement. By that point, Fitzgerald knew what he had achieved. Six months earlier, he informed Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, that his work in progress “is about the best American novel ever written”. And Perkins’s reaction had done little to shake his sense of confidence. He called the book “a wonder”, adding: “As for sheer writing, it’s astonishing.”
Fitzgerald’s manuscript went through a number of iterations on its way to becoming the nine-chapter, 48,000-word novel that still sells boisterously every year. It began as something on a Catholic theme, set in 1885. Along the way, material on Jay Gatsby’s humble Midwest origins was repurposed for the story “Absolution”. And even after Fitzgerald hit on the novel’s eventual form, he toyed with a number of titles, including “Trimalchio in West Egg”, “On the Road to West Egg”, “The High-Bouncing Lover”, “Gold-Hatted Gatsby” and “Under the Red, White and Blue”.
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