Literature11 The Great Gatsby: Context

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The autograph manuscript and corrected galleys show Fitzgerald as an author at work, conceiving, crafting and reworking his novel in layers over a four-year period, from June 1922 — when Fitzgerald first began planning a third novel originally set in the Midwest around 1885 — until it was published in its present form by Charles Scribner’s Sons in April 1925.

Most of the autograph manuscript of “The Great Gatsby” was completed in France, where Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda were living. By September 1924 he had completed a manuscript draft in just over 250 pages. As the author worked on the manuscript, he made many changes in the story line and inserted new text at countless points. Clearly visible on nearly every page of the autograph manuscript are his extensive corrections (from entire passages and paragraphs to crossouts with interlinear replacements of a word or phrase); erasures (some decipherable, others not, leaving gaps in the text); instructions (with arrows); handwritten additions on additional sheets of paper; and other changes.

Since Fitzgerald wrote in pencil and did not type, he had a secretary prepare a typescript from the autograph manuscript. In November 1924 he sent the typescript to Maxwell Perkins, who had galleys set from them. The galleys of the novel, then called “Trimalchio” or “Trimalchio in West Egg,” were sent to Fitzgerald in Rome, where he corrected and revised them during the first two months of 1925. He made changes in pencil, but also pasted typed additions on the galleys. Fitzgerald conveyed or recommended additional corrections and changes to Perkins by letter and telegram, including various alternative titles, such as “Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires” and “Gold-Hatted Gatsby.” Fitzgerald finally settled on “Under the Red, White and Blue” in spring 1925, by which time the book had already been published as “The Great Gatsby,” the title that Perkins liked best.

The direct link to the Gatsby materials is: https://findingaids.princeton.edu/catalog/C0187

Whilst people usually imagine icons of the 1920s to be purely hedonistic jazz, flapper, speakeasies and gangsters, the decade was so much more than that.

After years of migration from Europe, those who saw themselves of "WASP" (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) heritage looked down upon new arrivals as 'the other" or "gangsters". Industry boomed with the chance for anyone to "make it" and the "American Dream" was born. Lighting, automobiles, manufacturing mass production and assembly lines in factories made it possible for people to aspire to puchase goods, which frred them up for leisure time. Mass entertainment on a grand scale heralded the rise of popular culture.

This photograph is remarkable in that it shows three of the great names of industry - Henry Ford (automobiles), Thomas Edison (the lightbulb) and Harvey S Firestone (Firestone tyres) in an informal setting together with Harding - the president at the time.