When was the great gatsby written

With World War Two drawing to a close, almost , copies were distributed in a special Armed Services Edition, creating a new readership overnight. As the s dawned, the flourishing of the American Dream quickened the novel's topicality, and by the s, it was enshrined as a set text. It's since become such a potent force in pop culture that even those who've never read it feel as if they have, helped along, of course, by Hollywood.

It was in , just a few short years after Robert Redford starred in the title role of an adaptation scripted by Francis Ford Coppola, that the word Gatsbyesque was first recorded.

Along with Baz Luhrmann's divisive movie extravaganza, the book has in the past decade alone spawned graphic novels, a musical, and an immersive theatrical experience. From now on, we're likely to be seeing even more such adaptations and homages because at the start of this year, the novel's copyright expired , enabling anyone to adapt it without permission from its estate. Early calls for a Muppets adaptation may have come to nothing never say never , but a big-budget TV miniseries is already in the works, and author Min Jin Lee and cultural critic Wesley Morris are both writing fresh introductions to new editions.

The Great Gatsby has in the last decade spawned a film adaptation, a musical, a ballet and an immersive theatre experience Credit: Alamy. If this all leaves Fitzgerald purists twiddling their pearls like worry beads, it's quite possible that while some such projects may further perpetuate the myth that throwing a Gatsby-themed party could be anything other than sublimely clueless, others may yield fresh insights into a text whose very familiarity often leads us to skate over its complexities.

Take, for instance, Michael Farris Smith's new novel, Nick. The title refers, of course, to Nick Carraway, the narrator of Gatsby, who here gets his own fully formed backstory. It's the tale of a Midwesterner who goes off to Europe to fight in World War One and comes back changed, as much by a whirlwind love affair in Paris as by trench warfare.

Like many, Smith first encountered the novel in high school. It seemed like something on almost every page was speaking to me in a way I had not expected," he recalls. Reaching the scene in which Carraway suddenly remembers it's his thirtieth birthday, Smith was filled with questions about what kind of a person Gatsby's narrator really was.

The thought crossed my mind that it would be really interesting if someone were to write Nick's story," he says. In , by then a published author in his forties, he sat down to do just that, telling neither his agent nor his editor. It was only when he delivered the manuscript 10 months later that he learned copyright law meant he'd have to wait until to publish it.

Smith points to a quote from one of Fitzgerald's contemporaries as having provided the key to understanding Carraway. It's a far cry from the riotous razzmatazz of all that partying, yet Carraway is, Smith suggests, the reason Fitzgerald's novel remains read.

We have to respond to and understand Gatsby and, as we do so, remain aware that we're approaching him through Nick's very particular perspective, and through Nick's very ambivalent relationship to Gatsby, which is simultaneously full of praise and full of severe criticism, even at some moments contempt," he says.

Like Smith, Cain first encountered the novel as a student. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. How does Nick Carraway first meet Jay Gatsby? Why did Daisy marry Tom? Why does Gatsby arrange for Nick to have lunch with Jordan Baker?

How does Tom find out about the affair between Gatsby and Daisy? How does Gatsby make his money? How are West Egg and East Egg different?

What is the importance of the character Owl Eyes? Does Daisy love Gatsby or Tom? Why does Tom insist on switching cars with Gatsby when they go to the city?

Why is Nick the narrator of the story? Why does Tom bring up race so often? The answer is yes, or a qualified yes, since in this case the history behind a famous passage seems as important to its legacy as the final meaning of the words on the novel's page.

In actuality Scott stole the words right out of Zelda's mouth, or, to be more accurate, out of the ledger in which he'd jotted down the words his wife said, while still floating on waves of ether, as she learned the sex of her child: "I hope it's beautiful and a fool--a beautiful little fool.

It's a brilliant line, and the fictional use Scott makes of it seems to me brilliantly loaded. Still, whenever I think of the backstory of Daisy's famous declaration, I can't help but wonder how one defines the ethics--and who gets to define them? Daisy's staged declaration of a variation on Zelda's phrase works on two levels. We're being asked as readers to see both sides, which is to say, both the inside and outside of a self.

Even Daisy, ever self-aware, seems to have anticipated Nick in doubting that her own words can be trusted. If we spend our lives on a social stage, performing emotions, ideas, and acts for others, how are we ever to be sure of the authenticity of our feelings and memories?

Might there be holes in her own story of which Daisy herself is half-aware? In the larger sweep of the novel, a sense of irony --which might be defined precisely as those holes puncturing the surface meaning of every direct declaration--attaches to the very idea of the "beautiful fool.

A woman raised to be decorative must sooner or later become the occasion of disillusionment--as much for herself as for the men who pursue her. This is the proto-feminist theme of too many a Fitzgerald short story to count "Winter Dreams" and "The Rich Boy" are the finest examples in this vein. But the idea of the "beautiful fool" also nods to the beauty of those foolish enough to have reckless dreams, unrealistic hopes, untiring aspirations. I'm talking about Gatsby himself, of course, who is a fraud, a criminal, an aristocratic poseur, redeemed only by his uncompromisingly quixotic dream of winning Daisy back.

It's Gatsby, not Daisy, who is the novel's truest "beautiful fool. In pilfering the phrase for my new novel, Beautiful Fools: The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald , I was inspired in part by Fitzgerald's nagging reservations about his hero's foolishness, but also by memory of Zelda's playfully nagging charge of plagiarism. How much of the drama in any life belongs on the public stage? And how exactly do our truly private thoughts and our historically lived yet secret hopes inform the dramatic staging of personal lives on which all literary fiction thrives?

Historical fiction only makes our ethical worry about the line between private and public selves more urgent because it draws attention to the fact that as authors we're poaching material from documented, historically significant lives. The very act seems to cry, "Plagiarism, plagiarism! A few years ago novelist Jonathan Lethem butted heads with our culture's copyright-crazed management of everything from pop music to the fine arts, offering an impassioned plea on behalf of plagiarism.

Appropriation, mimicry, masked and unmasked quotation--these are the very founts from which creativity springs. Not only that, but insofar as the artist creates a work of art as a gift to society, we ought to be free to borrow from that recreated world as freely as possible.

Interestingly, Lethem fails to address literature's most fundamental thieving, its talent for raiding ordinary lives, even those that don't "belong" to the author. In raiding a scene from Fitzgerald's Gatsby and the real-life incident behind it for my title Beautiful Fools , I was drawn in part to the cultural controversy first provoked by Nancy Milford's fine biography Zelda about Scott's use of Zelda's life.