The Making of the Great Gatsby

About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about the writing and publication of the Great Gatsby, focusing in particular on: (i) Fitzgerald’s literary output up to 1925, including This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922); (ii) the style of Fitzgerald’s earlier novels; (iii) the concept of The Great Gatsby as a ‘consciously artistic achievement’, and influence of writers such as Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Henry James (1843-1916), TS Eliot (1888-1965), James Joyce (1882-1941), Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), and (especially) Willa Cather (1873-1947); (iv) some of Fitzgerald’s personal experiences that contributed to The Great Gatsby: his rejection by the socialite and heiress Ginevra King (1898-1980); his feeling of being ‘the boy poor’ at Princeton; his initial rejection by Zelda Sayre (later Fitzgerald, 1900-1948); (v) the importance of the four ‘Gatsby cluster’ stories, including ‘Winter Dreams’ (1922), ‘Dice, Brassknuckles and Guitar’ (1923), ‘Absolution’ (1924) and ‘The Sensible Thing’ (1924); (vi) the extent to which the characters in the novel were based on real people, e.g. Max von Gerlach (1885-1958); (vii) the galley proof version of the novel, which has since been published as ‘Trimalchio’; (viii) Maxwell Perkins’ comments on ‘Trimalchio’ and the edits made by Fitzgerald to create the novel we now know as The Great Gatsby; and (ix) the title of the novel and the story of its iconic cover image, which was created by the Spanish artist Francis Cugat (1893-1981).

About the lecturer

Michael Nowlin is Professor of English at the University of Victoria in Canada. He specialises in American literature in the period 1900-45, in particular the works of Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton. His recent publications include Literary Ambition and the African American Novel (2019) and (as editor) The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald (2023).