Dust jacket art
The artwork for the first edition of The Great Gatsby, known as Celestial Eyes, is among the most celebrated in American literature and represents a unique instance in literary history in which a novel’s commissioned artwork directly influenced the composition of the text.
Rendered in an Art Deco visual style, the artwork depicts the disembodied face of a Jazz Age flapper with celestial eyes and rouged mouth over a dark blue skyline. A little-known Barcelonan painter named Francis Cugat—born Francisco Coradal-Cougat—was commissioned by an unknown individual in Scribner’s art department to illustrate the cover while Fitzgerald was composing the novel.
In a preliminary sketch, Cugat drew a concept of a dismal gray landscape inspired by Fitzgerald’s original title for the novel, Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires. Discarding this gloomy concept, Cugat next drew a divergent study which became the prefiguration to the final cover: A pencil and crayon drawing of a flapper’s half-hidden visage over Long Island Sound with scarlet lips, one celestial eye, and a single diagonal tear.
Expanding upon this study, his subsequent drawing featured two bright eyes looming over a shadowy New York cityscape. In later iterations, Cugat replaced the shadowy cityscape with dazzling carnival lights evoking a Ferris wheel and likely referencing the glittering amusement park at New York’s Coney Island.
Cugat affixed reclining nudes within the flapper’s irises and added a green tint to the streaming tear. Cugat’s final cover, which Max Perkins hailed as a masterpiece, was the only work he completed for Scribner’s and the only book cover he ever designed.
Although Fitzgerald likely never saw the final gouache painting prior to the novel’s publication, Cugat’s preparatory drafts influenced his writing. Upon viewing Cugat’s drafts before sailing for France in April–May 1924, Fitzgerald was so enamored that he later told editor Max Perkins that he had incorporated Cugat’s imagery into the novel. This statement has led many to analyze interrelations between Cugat’s art and Fitzgerald’s text.
One popular interpretation is that the celestial eyes are reminiscent of those of optometrist T. J. Eckleburg depicted on a faded commercial billboard near George Wilson’s auto repair shop. Author Ernest Hemingway supported this latter interpretation and claimed that Fitzgerald had told him the cover referred to a billboard in the valley of the ashes. Although this passage has some resemblance to the imagery, a closer explanation can be found in Fitzgerald’s explicit description of Daisy Buchanan as the “girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs”.
Critical reception
Initial reviewsCharles Scribner’s Sons published The Great Gatsby on April 10, 1925. Fitzgerald cabled Perkins the day after publication to monitor reviews: “Any news?” “Sales situation doubtful but excellent reviews”, read a telegram from Perkins on April 20. Fitzgerald responded on April 24, saying the cable dispirited him, closing the letter with “Yours in great depression”. Fitzgerald soon received letters from contemporaries Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and poet T. S. Eliot praising the novel. Although gratified by such correspondence, Fitzgerald sought public acclaim from professional critics.
The Great Gatsby received generally favorable reviews from literary critics of the day. Edwin Clark of The New York Times felt the novel was a mystical and glamorous tale of the Jazz Age. Similarly, Lillian C. Ford of the Los Angeles Times hailed the novel as a revelatory work of art that “leaves the reader in a mood of chastened wonder”.
The New York Post described Fitzgerald’s prose style as scintillating and genuinely brilliant. The New York Herald Tribune was less impressed, referring to The Great Gatsby as “a literary lemon meringue” that nonetheless “contains some of the nicest little touches of contemporary observation you could imagine—so light, so delicate, so sharp”. In The Chicago Daily Tribune, H. L. Mencken judged the work’s plot to be highly improbable, although he praised the writing as elegant and the “careful and brilliant finish”.
Several reviewers felt the novel left much to be desired following Fitzgerald’s previous works and criticized him accordingly. Harvey Eagleton of The Dallas Morning News predicted that the novel signaled the end of Fitzgerald’s artistic success.
Ralph Coghlan of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch dismissed the work as an inconsequential performance by a once-promising author who had grown bored and cynical.
Ruth Snyder of New York Evening World lambasted the book’s style as painfully forced and declared the editors of her newspaper were “quite convinced after reading The Great Gatsby that Mr. Fitzgerald is not one of the great American writers of today”. John McClure of The Times-Picayune insisted the plot was implausible and the book itself seemed raw in its construction.
After reading these reviews, Fitzgerald believed that many critics misunderstood the novel. He despaired that “of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about”.
In particular, Fitzgerald resented criticisms of the novel’s plot as implausible since he had never intended for the story to be realistic. Instead, he crafted the work to be a romanticized depiction that was largely scenic and symbolic.
According to his friend John Peale Bishop, Fitzgerald further resented the fact that critics failed to perceive the many parallels between the author’s life and the character of Jay Gatsby; in particular, that both created a mythical version of themselves and attempted to live up to this legend. Dispirited by critics failing to understand the novel, Fitzgerald remained hopeful that the novel would at least be a commercial success, perhaps selling as many as 75,000 copies.
To Fitzgerald’s great disappointment, Gatsby was a commercial failure in comparison with his previous efforts, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922). By October, the book had sold fewer than 20,000 copies.
Although the novel went through two initial printings, many copies remained unsold years later. Fitzgerald attributed the poor sales to the fact that women tended to be the primary audience for novels during this time, and Gatsby did not contain an admirable female character. According to his ledger, he earned only $2,000 from the book.
Although Owen Davis’ 1926 stage adaptation and the Paramount-issued silent film version brought in money for the author, Fitzgerald lamented that the novel fell far short of the success he had hoped for and would not bring him recognition as a serious novelist in the public eye. With the onset of the Great Depression, The Great Gatsby was regarded as little more than a nostalgic period piece. By the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, the novel had fallen into near obscurity.
Revival and reassessment
In 1940, Fitzgerald suffered a third and fatal heart attack and died believing his work forgotten. His obituary in The New York Times hailed him as a brilliant novelist and cited Gatsby as his greatest work.
In the wake of Fitzgerald’s death, a strong appreciation for the book gradually developed in writers’ circles. Future authors Budd Schulberg and Edward Newhouse were deeply affected by it, and John O’Hara acknowledged its influence on his work. By the time that Gatsby was republished in Edmund Wilson’s edition of The Last Tycoon in 1941, the prevailing opinion in writers’ circles deemed the novel to be an enduring work of fiction.
In the spring of 1942, mere months after the United States’ entrance into World War II, an association of publishing executives created the Council on Books in Wartime with the stated purpose of distributing paperback Armed Services Editions books to combat troops.
The Great Gatsby was one of them. Within the next several years, 155,000 copies of Gatsby were distributed to U.S. soldiers overseas, and the book proved popular among beleaguered troops, according to the Saturday Evening Post’s 1945 report.
By 1944, a full-scale Fitzgerald revival had occurred. Full-length scholarly articles on Fitzgerald’s works were being published in periodicals and, by the following year, the earlier consensus among professional critics that The Great Gatsby was merely a sensational story or a nostalgic period piece had effectively vanished.
The tireless promotional efforts of literary critic Edmund Wilson, who was Fitzgerald’s Princeton classmate and his close friend, led this Fitzgerald revival. In 1951, three years after Zelda’s death in a hospital fire, Professor Arthur Mizener of Cornell University published The Far Side of Paradise, the first biography of Fitzgerald. Mizener’s bestselling biography emphasized The Great Gatsby’s positive reception by literary critics, which may have further influenced public opinion and renewed interest in it.
By 1960—thirty-five years after the novel’s original publication—the book was steadily selling 100,000 copies per year. Renewed interest in it led The New York Times editorialist Mizener to proclaim the novel was a masterwork of 20th-century American literature.
By 1974, The Great Gatsby had attained its status as a literary masterwork and was deemed a contender for the title of the “Great American Novel”. Hunter S. Thompson retyped pages of The Great Gatsby “just to get a feeling of what it was like to write that way.” According to Thompson’s friend William Nack, Thompson once retyped the entirety of the novel. Roger Ebert wrote that “perhaps Fitzgerald’s words ‘compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired’ is the best possible description of Thompson’s life’s work.”
By the mid-2000s, many literary critics considered The Great Gatsby to be one of the greatest novels ever written, and the work was part of the assigned curricula in the near majority of U.S. high schools. As of early 2020, The Great Gatsby had sold almost 30 million copies worldwide and continues to sell an additional 500,000 copies annually.
Numerous foreign editions of the novel have been published, and the text has been translated into 42 different languages. The work is Scribner’s most popular title; in
