Daisy Buchanan – a shallow, self-absorbed, and young debutante and socialite from Louisville, Kentucky, identified as a flapper. She is Nick’s second cousin, once removed, and the wife of Tom Buchanan. Before marrying Tom, Daisy had a romantic relationship with Gatsby. Her choice between Gatsby and Tom is one of the novel’s central conflicts. Fitzgerald’s romance and life-long obsession with Ginevra King inspired the character of Daisy.
Thomas “Tom” Buchanan – Daisy’s husband, a millionaire who lives in East Egg. Tom is an imposing man of muscular build with a gruff voice and contemptuous demeanor. He was a football star at Yale and is a white supremacist. Among other literary models, Tom has certain parallels with William “Bill” Mitchell, the Chicago businessman who married Ginevra King. Tom and Mitchell were both Chicagoans with an interest in polo. Also, like Ginevra’s father Charles King, whom Fitzgerald resented, Tom is an imperious Yale man and polo player from Lake Forest, Illinois.
Jordan Baker – an amateur golfer with a sarcastic streak and an aloof attitude, and Daisy’s long-time friend. She is Nick Carraway’s girlfriend for most of the novel, though they grow apart towards the end. She has a shady reputation because of rumors that she had cheated in a tournament, which harmed her reputation both socially and as a golfer.
Fitzgerald based Jordan on Ginevra’s friend Edith Cummings, a premier amateur golfer known in the press as “The Fairway Flapper”. Unlike Jordan Baker, Cummings was never suspected of cheating. The character’s name is a play on two popular automobile brands, the Jordan Motor Car Company and the Baker Motor Vehicle, both of Cleveland, Ohio, alluding to Jordan’s “fast” reputation and the new freedom presented to American women, especially flappers, in the 1920s.
George B. Wilson – a mechanic and owner of a garage. He is disliked by both his wife, Myrtle Wilson, and Tom Buchanan, who describes him as “so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive”. At the end of the novel, George shoots Gatsby dead, wrongly believing he had been driving the car that killed Myrtle, and then kills himself.
Myrtle Wilson – George’s wife and Tom Buchanan’s mistress. Myrtle, who possesses a fierce vitality, is desperate to find refuge from her disappointing marriage. She is accidentally killed by Gatsby’s car, as she mistakenly thinks Tom is still driving it and runs after it.
Writing and production
Fitzgerald began outlining his third novel in June 1922. He longed to produce an exquisite work that was beautiful and intricately patterned, but the troubled production of his stage play The Vegetable repeatedly interrupted his progress. The play flopped, and Fitzgerald wrote magazine stories that winter to pay debts incurred by its production.
He viewed these stories as all worthless, although included among them was “Winter Dreams”, which Fitzgerald described as his first attempt at the Gatsby idea. “The whole idea of Gatsby”, he later explained to a friend, “is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it”.
In October 1922, after the birth of their only child, Frances Scott “Scottie” Fitzgerald, the Fitzgeralds moved to Great Neck, New York, on Long Island. Their neighbors in Great Neck included such newly wealthy personages as writer Ring Lardner, actor Lew Fields and comedian Ed Wynn.
These figures were all considered to be nouveau riche, unlike those who came from Manhasset Neck, which sat across the bay from Great Neck—places that were home to many of New York’s wealthiest established families. This real-life juxtaposition gave Fitzgerald his idea for “West Egg” and “East Egg”. In the novel, Great Neck (Kings Point) became the “new money” peninsula of West Egg and Port Washington (Sands Point) became the “old money” East Egg. Several Gold Coast mansions in the area served as inspiration for Gatsby’s estate including Land’s End, Oheka Castle, and the since-demolished Beacon Towers.
While living on Long Island, the Fitzgeralds’ enigmatic neighbor was Max Gerlach. Purportedly born in America to a German immigrant family, Gerlach had been a major in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I, and he later became a gentleman bootlegger who lived like a millionaire in New York.
Flaunting his new wealth, Gerlach threw lavish parties, never wore the same shirt twice, used the phrase “old sport”, and fostered myths about himself including that he was a relation of the German Kaiser. These details about Gerlach inspired Fitzgerald in his creation of Jay Gatsby.
During this same time period, the daily newspapers sensationalized the Hall–Mills murder case over many months, and the highly publicized case likely influenced the plot of Fitzgerald’s novel. The case involved the double-murder of a man and his lover on September 14, 1922, mere weeks before Fitzgerald arrived in Great Neck. Scholars have speculated that Fitzgerald based certain aspects of the ending of The Great Gatsby and various characterizations on this factual incident.
Inspired by the Halls–Mills case, the mysterious persona of Gerlach and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island, Fitzgerald had written 18,000 words for his novel by mid-1923 but discarded most of his new story as a false start.
Some of this early draft resurfaced in the 1924 short story “Absolution”. In earlier drafts, Daisy was originally named Ada and Nick was Dud, and the two characters had shared a previous romance prior to their reunion on Long Island. These earlier drafts were written from the viewpoint of an omniscient narrator as opposed to Nick’s perspective. A key difference in earlier drafts is a less complete failure of Gatsby’s dream. Another difference is that the argument between Tom Buchanan and Gatsby is more balanced, although Daisy still returns to Tom.
Work on The Great Gatsby resumed in earnest in April 1924. Fitzgerald decided to depart from the writing process of his previous novels and told Perkins that he was intent on creating an artistic achievement. He wished to eschew the realism of his previous two novels and to compose a creative work of sustained imagination. To this end, he consciously imitated the literary styles of Joseph Conrad and Willa Cather.
He was particularly influenced by Cather’s 1923 work, A Lost Lady, which features a wealthy married socialite pursued by a variety of romantic suitors and who symbolically embodies the American dream. He later wrote a letter to Cather apologizing for any unintentional plagiarism. During this period of revisions, Scott saw and was influenced by early sketches for the book’s dust jacket art. Soon after this burst of effort, work slowed while the Fitzgeralds moved to the Villa Marie in Saint-Raphaël on the French Riviera, where a marital crisis soon developed.
Despite his ongoing marital tension, Fitzgerald continued to write steadily and submitted a near-final version of the manuscript to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, on October 27. Perkins informed him in a November letter that Gatsby was too vague as a character and that his wealth and business, respectively, needed a convincing explanation. Fitzgerald thanked Perkins for his detailed criticisms and claimed that such feedback would enable him to perfect the manuscript. Having relocated with his wife to Rome, Fitzgerald made revisions to the manuscript throughout the winter.
Content after a few rounds of revision, Fitzgerald submitted the final version in February 1925. Fitzgerald’s alterations included extensive revisions of the sixth and eighth chapters. He declined an offer of $10,000 for the serial rights to the book so that it could be published sooner. He received a $3,939 advance in 1923 and would receive $1,981.25 upon publication.
Alternative titles
Fitzgerald had difficulty choosing a title for his novel and entertained many choices before reluctantly deciding on The Great Gatsby, a title inspired by Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. Previously he had shifted between Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires, Trimalchio, Trimalchio in West Egg, On the Road to West Egg, Under the Red, White, and Blue, The Gold-Hatted Gatsby, and The High-Bouncing Lover. The titles The Gold-Hatted Gatsby and The High-Bouncing Lover came from Fitzgerald’s epigraph for the novel, one which he wrote himself under the pen name of Thomas Parke D’Invilliers.
Fitzgerald initially preferred titles referencing Trimalchio, the crude upstart in Petronius’s Satyricon, and even refers to Gatsby as Trimalchio once in the novel. Unlike Gatsby’s spectacular parties, Trimalchio participated in the orgies he hosted but, according to literary critic Tony Tanner, there are subtle similarities between the two characters. By November 1924, Fitzgerald wrote to Perkins that he had settled upon the title of Trimalchio in West Egg.
Disliking Fitzgerald’s chosen title of Trimalchio in West Egg, editor Max Perkins persuaded him that the reference was too obscure and that people would be unable to pronounce it. Zelda and Perkins both expressed their preference for The Great Gatsby, and the next month Fitzgerald agreed.
A month before publication, after a final review of the proofs, he asked if it would be possible to re-title it Trimalchio or Gold-Hatted Gatsby, but Perkins advised against it. On March 19, 1925, Fitzgerald expressed enthusiasm for the title Under the Red, White, and Blue, but it was too late to change it at that stage. The novel was published as The Great Gatsby on
