“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

One of the most beautiful sentences in American literature, ending one of the most beautiful books in all of American literature.

And not just according to me, although I’ve made secret of my love for Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, published on this day back in 1925. The Great Gatsby has regularly been named on lists of great American books, including Modern Library’s 100 Best Books, Time Magazine’s 100 Novels, and the Library of Congress’s ’88 Books That Shaped America’ list. It is a staple in both high school and college level literature classes and has been adapted into several films, including a 1974 version that won two Academy Awards (Best Costume Design and Best Music) and a 2013 version that won for Best Production Design and Best Costume Design.

Not bad for a book that was considered a flop upon its initial release.

Fitzgerald had experienced moderate success with his previous two novels, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922), and had been working on a stage play entitled The Vegetable. The play was dud, however, as well as a financial disaster. Soon, Fitzgerald began work on a third novel, hoping to earn enough to pay debts incurred by the doomed play’s production.

The idea for Gatsby arose from a short story he wrote for a magazine (an exercise he loathed but did in effort to further lessen his aforementioned debt). The piece, entitled “Winter Dreams”, spoke of the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. “This theme,” he told a friend, “comes up again and again because I lived it”.

Born into a middle-class family, Fitzgerald strove against his blue collar upbringing. In his late teens, he fell hard for Ginevra King, a local socialite and heiress. The couple began a romantic relationship spanning several years, and King would eventually become his literary model for the characters of Isabelle Borgé in This Side of Paradise and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. When Fitzgerald traveled to King’s family’s Lake Forest estate to meet her parents, however, he was immediately rejected as an unsuitable beau, and the courtship soon fizzled.

Fitzgerald then sank into a deep depression. He enlisted in the United States Army amid World War I, believing he would die in combat. Hoping to have a novel published before his anticipated death, however, Fitzgerald hastily wrote a 120,000-word manuscript entitled The Romantic Egotist. Though rejected by publishers, he was encouraged to submit future work.

With renewed purpose, Fitzgerald threw himself into his writing. After the army, he moved to New York City, where he wrote advertising copy to sustain himself while awaiting his literary breakthrough. He got engaged to Zelda Sayre, the affluent granddaughter of a Confederate senator, but she refused to marry him until he proved he could provide for her financially. As the years ticked on and no breakthrough came though, Zelda eventually called off the engagement.

While Prohibition-era New York City was exploding into the Roaring Twenties, Fitzgerald felt defeated and rudderless: two women had rejected him in succession, he detested his advertising job, his stories failed to sell, he could not afford new clothes, and his future seemed bleak. Unable to earn a successful living, Fitzgerald publicly threatened to jump to his death from a window ledge of the Yale Club, and he reportedly carried a revolver daily while contemplating suicide.

In July 1919, Fitzgerald quit his advertising job and returned to St. Paul, becoming a social recluse and living on the top floor of his parents’ home. As a desperate effort to prove he wasn’t a failure, he decided to make one last attempt to become a novelist. Abstaining from alcohol and parties, he worked day and night to revise The Romantic Egotist, retitling it This Side of Paradise.

The book was published on March 26, 1920 and became an instant success.

This Side of Paradise sold approximately 40,000 copies in the first year, and F. Scott Fitzgerald became a household name. On April 3, 1920, he married Zelda at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, although he never truly forgot the sting of being dumped; their marriage was fraught with problems from the moment they said “I do.”

Professionally, however, Fitzgerald was at the top of his game…for awhile. Another commercial success was found in his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, and both he and his wife lived the embodiment of the Jazz Age lifestyle thanks to its profits. But abundant liquor, excessive spending, and a failed play soon left Fitzgerald in desperate need of another book.

And so he turned, once again, to the ghosts of his past.

Living in Europe, Fitzgerald began work on a novel he described to his publisher as “beautiful and intricately patterned.” Drawing heavily on his experiences in Long Island as well as his relationship with Ginevra King, he cycled through several names for the book, including The Great Gatsby: Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires; Trimalchio (a reference to a character in a 1st century Latin work called Satyricon; this was ultimately rejected when Fitzgerald became convinced readers would not recognize the name); Trimalchio in West Egg; On the Road to West Egg; Under the Red, White, and Blue; Gold-Hatted Gatsby; and The High-Bouncing Lover.

Although not thrilled with it, he eventually acquiesced to The Great Gatsby…but it could not save the book.

Charles Scribner’s Sons published The Great Gatsby on April 10, 1925.

Despite several positive reviews–Edwin Clark of The New York Times felt the novel was a mystical and glamorous tale of the Jazz Age while 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”–others were less impressed. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle wondered, “Why [Fitzgerald] should be called an author, or why any of us should behave as if he were, has never been satisfactorily explained to me,” while The New York Evening World opined, “We are quite convinced after reading The Great Gatsby that Mr. Fitzgerald is not one of the great writers of to-day.” And The Baltimore Evening Sun concluded that “Scott Fitzgerald’s new novel, The Great Gatsby, is in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that.”

Readers, too, were less than enthused. By October of 1925, a full six months after its release, the novel had only sold a dismal 20,000 copies and was deemed a commercial disappointment.

Fitzgerald was convinced that the reason the book failed was because Gatsby didn’t have a single admirable female character—and, at the time, the majority of people reading novels were women. He also blamed the title for poor sales. As for the reviews, Fitzgerald believed many critics had misunderstood the novel, claiming “not one had the slightest idea what the book was about.”

Nevertheless, the failure consumed him. Never again did he achieve the kind of commercial or critical success he had once achieved, and he died of a heart attack in 1940, believing himself to be a disappointment, his work–and his name–having faded into obscurity. So little did Gatsby sell that, at the time of his death, Fitzgerald’s publisher still had copies of the book in its warehouse. And, at the outbreak of World War II, they agreed to send these copies overseas, hoping to boost troops morale.

And Gatsby’s revival was officially born.

By 1960—thirty-five years after the novel’s original publication—the book was steadily selling 100,000 copies per year. 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. It even entered into contention for the title of ‘The Great American Novel.’