We all know The Great Gatsby as a successful and quintessential American novel, but it was not always perceived as such. The novel received mixed reviews when it was first published in 1925 and was not successful until after Fitzgerald’s death.
Fitzgerald received some praise from his contemporaries like T. S. Eliot and positive reviews from the The New York Times, but the general public did not share in this positive view of the novel. The book initially sold only 20,000 copies when Fitzgerald hoped it would sell as many as 75,000. Some reviews described the novel as raw, “painfully forced”, and “a minor performance“. While scathing, perhaps the most biting comment was by Harvey Eagleton of The Dallas Morning News:
One finishes Great Gatsby with a feeling of regret, not for the fate of the people in the book, but for Mr. Fitzgerald.”
Ironically, Fitzgerald considered The Great Gatsby to be his greatest achievement and what would prove him to be a serious novelist. He blamed poor sales on the female audience for novels at the time and the story lacking a female character they could relate with.
All the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Appreciation for the novel grew slowly after Fitzgerald’s death in 1940. Writers like John O’Hara acknowledged its influence and full-length articles about the novel began being published. Mizener wrote in Fitzgerald’s biography that positive reception by literary critics likely influenced public opinion and renewed interest in the book. Finally, in 1960, it was proclaimed in The New York Times that The Great Gatsby is “a classic of twentieth-century American fiction”, as we now know it.
Eagleton, Harvey (May 10, 1925). “Prophets of the New Age: III. F. Scott Fitzgerald”. The Dallas Morning News. Dallas, Texas.
Snyder, Ruth (April 15, 1925). “A Minute or Two with Books—F. Scott Fitzgerald Ventures”. New York Evening World.
Insightful post Noor!
Usually, works become highly acknowledged after the death of their creator. It’s sort of funny, how humans are curious, the death of a creator makes them curious to know or disect what he could have been (in the hopes of piecing the creator together after his death). Also, this shift in opinion regarding Fitzgerald’s novel could merely be because of the change in eras.
Fitzgerald blamed it on the female audience?? Well what did he expect when creating a character like Daisy who puts on a performance identity and wished her child to be a “beautiful little fool”??
Either way, this is just really funny because this happens way too often with authors and their works, like Fatima mentioned. I also think that it was not taken well because the novel acted sort of like a critique of the time, which people did not always take lightly (especially critics.)
The ionic part of this all is how the novel is one of the most prominent novels of today’s time.
Great post, Noor! Thank you for sharing!
Fun fact Fitzgeral was a raging alcoholic and partyed a lot. So most of his books represented his lifestyle or a lifestyle that he was trying to achieve. But the problem, at least in my opinion, is that he wrote a book critiquing societal problems, when all people wanted to do was party. He wrote a male dominated book, when for the most part his audience was femlae.
People don’t want to be criticised for how they are living their lives, and women during that time period had just won their right to vote. This is arguably also the time when the second wave of feminism started, so being portrayed as ditzy dumb blonds, may have angered many of the women reading it. So it’s not that surprising that The Great Gatsby had poor sales.
Reception studies is a specific field in literary studies. It explores how readers (across space and time) make meaning of texts – how they read, interpret, and use those texts. University of California-Davis has a great interdisciplinary and transhistorical/national working group on this topic: http://receptionstudies.ucdavis.edu/
Examining the initial critical reception of Gatsby highlights how meaning-making is fluid and literary value is subjective and changing. Many literary “classics” (like Moby Dick and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which you may have read in Dr. Brian’s class) were not popular when published. It’s fascinating to see how and why literary value was eventually ascribed to them. I’d be interested to learn more about the dynamics of women readers and bookbuyers in the 1920s – the Book-Of-the-Month Club was first started in 1926. Women were the market drivers for fiction books.
As the others mentioned, it is usually common for works to become known after the authors die, however, I was surprised that The Great Gatsby got bad reviews especially because a movie adaptation was made of it.
I think the main reason why it got bad reviews is that it can easily be misread and misinterpreted as just a love story that went wrong. In addition, Daisy is portrayed as weak and naive considering she says that the best thing in the world a girl can be is “a beautiful little fool”. also the fact that she is staying in her marriage despite her being disrespected shows a degrading side to women. This obviously would not be accepted by his audience who are mostly female.
fun fact: His friend at the time named Edith Wharton wrote to Fitzgerald a few days before The Great Gatsby was published and told him “To make Gatsby really Great, you ought to have given us his early career (not from the cradle-but from his visit to the yacht, if not before) instead of a short resume of it. That would have situated him & made his final tragedy a tragedy instead of a fait divers for the morning papers.” ( The New York Times, 1988) but it was already being printed and too late for Fitzgerald to change anything.
such an interesting post Noor!
Thank you for your blog Noor!
I wanna also mention that the popularity of a certain work doesn’t, as we know, denote its value. It’s important to note, that the reception of a certain work might diminish when it makes the readers uncomfortable, by making them face their issues head on. There is no question that the novel raises issues that are critical and sensitive at the time, hence I can’t help but think that the readers didn’t identity with the characters because they didn’t view themselves in the way the author viewed them.
This post also reminds me of the subjectivity of the ever changing “Canon” of literature.
I know I already commented before lol, but I just thought of something that may be related to your blog post. Maybe the reason why we like it so much now, is because the concepts that make it up and things that it represents, or the themes present in the Great Gtasby relate to what we’re experiencing to day. The jarring split between the working class, and the wealthy in society.
So even though a lot of people nowadays can get really rich really fast (selling drugs, acting, youtoube …) to attain some kind of glory or a person, they end up being rejected or they end up suffering from mental health issues or drug abuse. They may turn to drugs to help cope with the sudden shift in their lives (Rappers, actors, singers …). Because of that I feel like we may misrecognise ourselves as Gatsby feeling like we’re reaching for things that we can’t have.
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I don’t know if i’m right, but it was a thought that I just had, because it seems like back then they were to happy to realize the consequences of their actions, or they just did not want to face them. Whereas we don’t have those feelings to hold us back, because it doesn’t feel like our morality is being attacked.
love the post! great job Noor!
I agree with Rasha that the novel was like a form of social critique for the kind of lifestyle common to that era. I mean it was after all the roaring 20s where people thrived on excess and materialism. Society as a whole was wealth-obsessed and blatantly consumerist driven. So, for Fitzgerald to come and criticize that… I can see how people wouldn’t like that. People who disliked the novel probably felt like they were being bashed for following such a lifestyle. It also might’ve made them uncomfortable to look at the whole uncensored reality of things.
People were only able to appreciate it once they have moved past that era and were able to gain full retrospective.
Thank you for the post Noor. I am surprised to hear that this book was not successful at first, but not that surprised that the female audience did not approve of it, especially given their portrayal in the novel. Personally, I found the female representation in the novel horrible, and I’m not just talking about the female characters, but the way Nick addresses females and the way they behave. There are many instances in the novel where Nick points out the behavior of females in Gatsby’s party, but gives little attention to the male characters. We get so much insight into female characters, but so little with other characters (except Gatsby) and most of these insights are not really ‘insights,’ but subjective remarks Nick makes as he observes the crowd in Gatsby’s party.