Essay --

The Great Gatsby is a novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925. The plot involves characters living in summer of 1922 in a fictional town on West Egg on Long Island. The book is centered on Jay Gatsby, a mysterious young millionaire, who has a quixotic passion for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. The Great Gatsby is said to be the magnum opus of Fitzgerald. 500,000 copies of the book are sold annually. The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald's third novel. Maxwell Perkins, the editor, thought the novel needed revision because it was too vague. Considered to be classic literature, The Great Gatsby is a contender for the title "Great American Novel". Over 25 million copies of the book have been sold all over the world. On April 10, 1925, Charles Scribner's Sons first published the novel. Only 20,000 copies were sold in its first year of release. What Fitzgerald wanted when he wrote The Great Gatsby was to make a work of literature that would be evidence of his talent as a writer. The Great Gatsby is the most popular title of the publishing company Scribner The 1920's societal developments were used by Fitzgerald to form Gatsby's stories, from the automobiles to where Gatsby's fortune came from. In June 1922, Fitzgerald began planning for the book, but was stalled around summer and fall by the production of his play, The Vegetable, which miserably failed. Fitzgerald's play, The Vegetable, contained "Winter Dreams" which Fitzgerald described as "a sort of first draft of the Gatsby idea" In Great Neck, New York of Long Island was where The Great Gatsby scenery came from. Fitzgerald and his family moved here after the birth of their child i... ... by Le Grand Meaulnes, a novel by Alain-Fournier. Cugat finished the cover even before the book. Fitzgerald loved it so much that he had "written it into the novel", said the publisher. Fitzgerald himself originated the term Jazz Age (1920), and all his works are centered on that theme. Fitzgerald's remarks about writing the cover into the book resulted in the interpretation that the eyes belong to Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, a fictional optometrist which Fitzgerald wrote as "blue and gigantic — their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose." Even though this passage has similarities to the cover, a more accurate passage can be found of Daisy Buchanan described as the "girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs."