50 Fun Facts About The Great Gatsby

Who wrote The Great Gatsby?

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it; his full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, after the distant cousin who wrote the words to The Star-Spangled Banner.

In which year was The Great Gatsby first published?

The Great Gatsby was first published in 1925, released by Charles Scribner's Sons on April 10 of that year; the story itself is set in the summer of 1922.

Who narrates The Great Gatsby?

Nick Carraway narrates; he is 29 when the story begins and turns 30 during it, a birthday he only remembers in the middle of the Chapter 7 quarrel.

Which fictional Long Island community does Gatsby live in?

Gatsby lives in West Egg, the 'new money' peninsula across the bay from the Buchanans' 'old money' East Egg; Fitzgerald modelled it on the North Shore village where he rented a house in 1922.

What colour is the light at the end of Daisy's dock that Gatsby stares at across the bay?

Green is the colour of the light at the end of Daisy's dock; Nick first sees Gatsby alone on his lawn reaching toward it, and it closes the book as the symbol of everything he cannot reach.

Where is Daisy Buchanan originally from?

Daisy is from Louisville, Kentucky, where Gatsby met her in October 1917 while stationed as a young officer at Camp Taylor, and never let go.

How is Nick related to Daisy?

Her second cousin once removed is how Nick describes Daisy in the first chapter; that distant kinship gets him invited to dinner in East Egg and later lets him arrange the reunion over tea.

Which sport did Tom Buchanan star in at Yale?

Football: Nick calls Tom one of the most powerful ends ever to play at New Haven, a man who reached such acute excellence at 21 that everything afterward savours of anticlimax.

What is Jordan Baker's sporting occupation?

Golfer: Jordan Baker is a tournament golf champion, and Nick recalls a rumour that she once moved her ball from a bad lie in a semi-final, one of the novel's many small dishonesties.

What does George Wilson do for a living?

Runs a garage: George Wilson's garage and filling station sits in the valley of ashes, where Tom stops for petrol and where Myrtle is later struck down on the road outside.

Whose eyes stare out from the faded billboard over the valley of ashes?

Doctor T. J. Eckleburg is the optometrist whose giant spectacled eyes, blue and a yard high, look down on the valley of ashes from a faded billboard; George Wilson later takes them for the eyes of God.

What was Gatsby's name at birth?

James Gatz was his name at birth; the son of shiftless farm people renamed himself at 17, the day he rowed out to a millionaire's yacht on Lake Superior.

In which state was Gatsby born?

North Dakota is where Gatsby was born to shiftless farm people; he later lasted only two weeks at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, dismayed by the janitor's work that paid his way.

Which copper magnate took the teenage Gatsby aboard his yacht?

Dan Cody, a product of the Montana copper booms, kept Gatsby aboard his yacht for five years; Cody's mistress Ella Kaye then cheated him out of the $25,000 he was left.

At which Oxford college did Gatsby briefly study after the war?

Trinity is the college in whose quad Gatsby's Oxford photograph was taken; he stayed only five months in 1919 under a scheme for officers, which makes 'an Oxford man' both true and misleading.

Which small European kingdom awarded Gatsby a medal for wartime valour?

Montenegro awarded it; Gatsby carries the Order of Danilo, inscribed 'Montenegro, Nicolas Rex', in his pocket to prove his stories, alongside a photograph of himself at Oxford.

What make of car does Gatsby drive?

A Rolls-Royce: Nick calls it a rich cream colour, Tom sneers at it as a 'circus wagon', and it is the big yellow car that kills Myrtle Wilson with Daisy at the wheel.

Which real-life gangster inspired Meyer Wolfsheim, the man Gatsby says fixed the 1919 World Series?

Arnold Rothstein, the New York gambler accused of fixing the 1919 World Series, was Fitzgerald's model; Wolfsheim wears cufflinks of human molars and declines to attend Gatsby's funeral.

Where does the climactic confrontation between Gatsby and Tom take place?

A suite at the Plaza Hotel: on the hottest day of the summer the party takes a parlour there, where Tom exposes Gatsby's bootlegging and Daisy admits she once loved her husband too.

Where is Gatsby when George Wilson shoots him?

In his swimming pool: it is the first time Gatsby has used the pool all summer; after shooting him, Wilson turns the gun on himself.

Who is Henry Gatz, who arrives several days after the murder?

Gatsby's father, Henry C. Gatz, arrives for the funeral; he shows Nick a boyhood schedule his son wrote in the back of a Hopalong Cassidy book, and almost nobody else attends.

Which title had Fitzgerald settled on in November 1924, before being talked out of it?

Trimalchio in West Egg was the title he settled on; Trimalchio is the vulgar, party-throwing freedman of Petronius's Satyricon, and other candidates included Gold-Hatted Gatsby and The High-Bouncing Lover.

Which patriotic-sounding title did Fitzgerald push weeks before Gatsby was published in 1925?

Under the Red, White, and Blue was the title Fitzgerald cabled from Capri that March, weeks before publication; the book had already gone to press, so it was too late.

Which legendary Scribner's editor persuaded Fitzgerald to revise the manuscript?

Maxwell Perkins, the Scribner's editor who later shepherded Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, urged the revisions; Fitzgerald rewrote heavily on the galley proofs in the winter before publication.

What is the name of Francis Cugat's cover painting for the first edition?

Celestial Eyes shows a disembodied face over a carnival skyline; Cugat finished it before the novel was done, and Fitzgerald told his editor he had taken the jacket into the book.

Roughly how many copies had The Great Gatsby sold by October 1925?

Fewer than 20,000 copies had sold by that October; the first printing of 20,870 moved so slowly that Fitzgerald died in 1940 with copies of the second printing unsold, believing the book forgotten.

Which wartime programme sent 155,000 free copies of Gatsby to US soldiers and revived its fortunes?

The Armed Services Editions, pocket-sized paperbacks produced by the Council on Books in Wartime, shipped 155,000 copies of Gatsby to servicemen during and after the Second World War and turned a forgotten flop into a classic.

On what date did The Great Gatsby enter the US public domain?

January 1, 2021 is when the novel entered the US public domain, 95 years after its first publication; a flood of new editions and prequels such as Michael Farris Smith's Nick followed almost immediately.

Roughly how many copies had The Great Gatsby sold worldwide by early 2020?

30 million copies had sold worldwide by early 2020; through the 2010s it sold around 500,000 copies a year, and it has been translated into 42 languages.

Under what pen name did Fitzgerald write the novel's epigraph himself?

Thomas Parke D'Invilliers is a poet character from Fitzgerald's first novel; the other three options are likewise his own creations, from that same novel, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Last Tycoon.

According to Zelda Fitzgerald, Gatsby was partly based on which mysterious Long Island neighbour?

Max Gerlach, a reputed bootlegger who lived nearby, is the neighbour Zelda named; a surviving note from him to Fitzgerald signs off with 'old sport', the phrase Gatsby uses on everyone.

Which Chicago socialite, whom Fitzgerald loved at 18, inspired the character of Daisy?

Ginevra King, a Chicago debutante Fitzgerald met in January 1915, was Daisy's model; her father reportedly told him that poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls, a line that echoes through the novel.

Fitzgerald finished the rough draft of Gatsby in 1924 after moving where?

The French Riviera: he wrote at the Villa Marie near Saint-Raphaël through the summer of 1924, while Zelda's flirtation with a French aviator, Edouard Jozan, soured the season.

Which poet was among the contemporaries who wrote to Fitzgerald praising the novel?

T. S. Eliot wrote that Gatsby was 'the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James'; Willa Cather and Edith Wharton wrote too, which made the poor sales all the more galling.

Which pre-Gatsby novel made Fitzgerald an overnight success in 1920?

This Side of Paradise, published in March 1920, sold out its first printing of 3,000 copies within three days; a week after publication Fitzgerald married Zelda at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York.

Fitzgerald died in 1940 at what age?

Fitzgerald was 44: born on September 24, 1896, he died of a heart attack in Hollywood on December 21, 1940, leaving The Last Tycoon unfinished for Edmund Wilson to edit.

Who played Gatsby in the 1949 Paramount film?

Alan Ladd played Gatsby in Elliott Nugent's 1949 film for Paramount, with Betty Field as Daisy and Macdonald Carey as Nick.

Who wrote the screenplay for the 1974 film starring Robert Redford?

Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay; Jack Clayton directed, Mia Farrow was Daisy, and the film won Oscars for Theoni V. Aldredge's costumes and Nelson Riddle's score adaptation.

Which Newport, Rhode Island mansion stood in for Gatsby's estate in the 1974 film?

Rosecliff, the 1902 Stanford White mansion on Newport's Bellevue Avenue, served as Gatsby's house; Marble House was used too, and the film took $26.5 million at the box office.

Who plays the narrator, Nick, in Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film?

Tobey Maguire plays Nick opposite Leonardo DiCaprio's Gatsby; Paul Rudd had played the role in the 2000 A&E television version with Toby Stephens and Mira Sorvino.

Where was Luhrmann's 2013 Great Gatsby filmed?

Sydney, Australia: Luhrmann, himself Australian, rebuilt 1922 New York on the Fox Studios Australia soundstages in Sydney and released the result in 3D.

Which rapper executive-produced the soundtrack of the 2013 film?

Jay-Z served as executive producer of the soundtrack; Lana Del Rey's Young and Beautiful was its breakout single, and the film won Oscars for Catherine Martin's costumes and production design.

Which composer's operatic Great Gatsby premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in December 1999?

John Harbison composed it and wrote his own libretto; the Met commissioned the opera to mark James Levine's 25th anniversary with the company, and it premiered on December 20, 1999.

Roughly how long does Gatz, the stage production that reads the entire novel aloud, run?

Eight hours, roughly, with a dinner break and two intermissions, while an office worker who finds a copy of the novel reads every word aloud in Elevator Repair Service's production.

Who starred as Gatsby and Daisy when the Broadway musical opened in April 2024?

Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada led the cast at the Broadway Theatre from April 2024, after the musical's premiere at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse in October 2023.

The Fitzgeralds' 1922 move to which Long Island town inspired the novel's West Egg?

Great Neck, where the Fitzgeralds rented a house from October 1922; their nouveau riche neighbours included Ring Lardner and Ed Wynn, while old-money Manhasset Neck across the bay became the Buchanans' East Egg.

Which sensational 1922 double murder likely influenced the plot of The Great Gatsby?

Hall–Mills: the Rev. Edward Hall and choir singer Eleanor Mills were found shot in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in September 1922, and the papers covered the case for months as Fitzgerald planned the novel.

Who directed the first stage adaptation of the novel, which opened on Broadway in 1926?

George Cukor, later a Hollywood director, staged it; Owen Davis wrote the script for producer William Brady, and the play ran 112 performances at the Ambassador Theatre from February 1926.

What is all that survives of the 1926 silent film of The Great Gatsby, a famous lost film?

A trailer at the National Archives, about a minute long, is all that remains of Herbert Brenon's silent film, which starred Warner Baxter and William Powell; Zelda wrote that the picture was 'rotten'.

By 1960, thirty-five years after publication, how many copies was the novel selling each year?

By 1960 the novel was selling 50,000 copies a year, a revival that prompted Arthur Mizener to proclaim it a masterwork of 20th-century American literature in The New York Times.