The Great Gatsby

I have been writing about the Weird Tales of one hundred years ago. In February, I wrote about The New Yorker at one hundred and its pretty tenuous connections to "The Unique Magazine." The Daily Cartoonist noticed. D.D. Degg wrote an article called "Reports: The New Yorker at 100" for that website and closed his or her article with mention of my own. You can find "Reports: The New Yorker at 100" by clicking here. I did not find until today an article in The New Yorker about H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Barlow. That one is called "The Complicated Friendship of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Barlow, One of His Biggest Fans." The author is Paul La Farge, and his article was published in The New Yorker on March 9, 2017.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was also published one hundred years ago. The date was April 10, 1925, and so the anniversary came last week. Although it arrived on the scene a century ago, The Great Gatsby is closer to us than it was to anything published one hundred years before it. Fitzgerald's short novel is still very modern. It could almost take place today. There are obsessions with money and status. Advertising, in the form of a billboard, figures pretty prominently. There is also a lot of driving in The Great Gatsby, and in fact the plot turns upon an automobile accident. There is also of course violence. This is after all an American novel and a novel of America. Near the end, the body of a murdered Gatsby is found in a swimming pool, like that of William Holden's character in Sunset Boulevard (1950).

I don't think of F. Scott Fitzgerald at all as an author of genre works, but there is an entry on him in The Internet Speculative Fiction Database. In 1991, Robert Hale, a British firm, published The Fantasy and Mystery Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Its contents:

• Introduction by Peter Haining
• "Tarquin of Cheapside" (1921)
• "His Russet Witch" (originally "O Russet Witch!" 1922)
• "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (1922)
• "The Dance" (1926)
• "A Short Trip Home" (1927)
• "Outside the Cabinet-Maker's" (originally "Outside the Cabinet-Makers" 1928)
• "The Fiend" (1935)

Early on, The Great Gatsby did not sell well. Its readership increased greatly after October 1945 when it was published as an Armed Services Editions. And now H.P. Lovecraft comes up again, for the publishers of Armed Services Editions also issued The Dunwich Horror and Other Weird Tales in June 1945. That was the first of the series with the word weird in the title. The second was The Great God Pan and Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen, from December 1945. Other tellers of weird tales who were published include Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany, H.G. Wells, Edison Marshall, Robert W. Chambers, and Wilbur Daniel Steele. By the way, The Great Gatsby was adapted to television in 1955 as an episode of Robert Montgomery Presents, with Robert Montgomery, Phyllis Kirk, and Lee Bowman. That episode was directed by Alvin Sapinsley, who also directed the first television adaptation of a story by H.P. Lovecraft, "Pickman's Model," broadcast on December 1, 1971, as an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery.

Fitzgerald is supposed to have been influenced by Joseph Conrad and Willa Cather in the writing of his novel. There are similarities between The Great Gatsby and My Ántonia (1918), specifically in the first-person narration of a friend of the title character in observation and praise of him or her. My Ántonia is set in the American West, a place far from Europe and depicted as clean and pure. It is also a positive and loving story. The Great Gatsby, of course, is set in the East, a place about as close as you can get to Europe and still be in the United States. That place is shown as being corrupt and even decadent, and the story itself is tragic. But this is an American kind of corruption, I think, based as it is on money, status, and self-improvement. Curiously, the main characters in The Great Gatsby are from the Midwest and the Plains, Gatsby himself from North Dakota, just two states (or one and half) away from the Nebraska of My Ántonia. They remind me of the characters in Seinfeld. (It's fitting that that series ended with all of them sitting in a jail cell.) Gatsby more than any of them is perhaps admirable. As for further similarities between The Great Gatsby and My Ántonia, you can decide for yourself whether one or both have homoerotic undertones. 

Jay Gatsby is like a weird-fictional character in that he oversteps his bounds and pays the price for doing so. Some of those bounds are of himself. Others are of the society, culture, and nation in which he lives. Gatsby may be called great, but he isn't a hero. Maybe after the Great War (which also wasn't great) and all of its devastations, there were no more heroes--or at least very few--in mainstream fiction. I would have to think on that for a while. But there were still heroes in genre fiction, in Westerns, crime and detective stories, and soon-to-be science fiction. I feel certain that that was one of the attractions in reading genre fiction. I will write shortly on heroism, courage, and their opposites. Some of that will also involve cars and driving, which, like violence, seem to go with our America.

Happy Anniversary to The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald!

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925), the original dust jacket illustration, executed in gouache, by Spanish artist Francis Cugat (1896-1981). This could easily be a cover of The New Yorker. It could almost work as a cover of Weird Tales, with the nudes in Daisy's eyes drawn by Margaret Brundage.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley