The Great Gatsby - Reception

Reception

The Great Gatsby received mostly positive reviews when it was first published and many of Fitzgerald's literary friends wrote him letters praising the novel. However, Gatsby did not experience the commercial success of Fitzgerald's previous two novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, and although the novel went through two initial printings, some of these copies remained unsold years later.

When Fitzgerald died in 1940, he had been largely forgotten. His obituary in The New York Times mentioned Gatsby as evidence of great potential that was never reached. Gatsby gained readers when Armed Services Editions gave away around 150,000 copies of the novel to the American military in World War II.

In 1951 Arthur Mizener published The Far Side of Paradise, a biography of Fitzgerald. By the 1960s, Gatsby's reputation was established, and it is frequently mentioned as one of the great American novels.

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