But he was a writer who needed recognition and money as much as booze, and if “Gatsby” had sold well it would likely have saved him from the lacerating public confessions of failure that he made in the nineteen-thirties, or, at least, would have kept him away from Hollywood. Fitzgerald was an alcoholic, and no doubt his health would have declined, whatever the commercial fate of his masterpiece. The tale of Fitzgerald’s woeful stumbles-no great writer ever hit the skids so publicly-is suffused with varying shades of irony, both forlorn and triumphal. Scribners did a second printing, of three thousand copies, but that was it, and when Fitzgerald died, in 1940, half-forgotten at the age of forty-four, the book was hard to find. Fitzgerald later complained to his friend Edmund Wilson that “of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about.” For a writer of Fitzgerald’s fame, sales were mediocre-about twenty thousand copies by the end of the year. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S LATEST A DUD,” a headline in the New York World ran) and others that were pleasant but patronizing. The book received some reviews that were dismissive (“ F. Scott Fitzgerald, living high in France after his early success, cabled Max Perkins, his editor at Scribners, and demanded to know if the news was good. When “The Great Gatsby” was published, on April 10, 1925, F. Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan in Baz Luhrmann’s new movie.
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