The Great Gatsby

Turns 100 Today, April 10, 2025

Today is very special in the literary world. 100 years ago today The Great Gatsby was published.

It sold poorly, despite F. Scott Fitzgerald’s belief it was the best thing he’d written. It never sold well during his lifetime and books were still in the warehouse when he died fifteen years later at age forty-four of a heart attack spurred on by alcoholism.

It wasn’t until WWII after his death, when the federal government sent 150,000 paperbacks to our fighting troops that it became popular (as did the light weight paperback that fit in their pockets). Its popularity exploded in the following years and because it is short and its themes universal, it became a mainstay of the high school English curriculum. Many Gatsby scholars preach it shouldn’t be taught until college because high schoolers miss so much of what is happening in the novel.

Today it sells about a half million copies a year. Not long ago it went out of copyright so you can pick up any number of versions at your local bookstore.

And remember the green light:

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter––tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther….And one fine morning–––

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

I hope you celebrate today by raising a glass (Fitzgerald would have loved that), or gather with book-loving friends. Tonight, I will celebrate at a Gatsby party with many of my fellow writers and authors. Bring on the flappers and the Roaring 20s. Fitzgerald’s “Jazz Age,” will be borne back again!

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer.

Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work and is currently shopping my next crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen