April 9, 2025 • 50 mins
When he published The Great Gatsby 100 years ago this week, F. Scott Fitzgerald thought he'd written the Great American Novel. But it was a commercial flop. The year Fitzgerald died, he received a royalty check for a paltry seven copies. It would take an unlikely series of events to posthumously pluck a masterpiece from obscurity.
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Very special thanks to Molly Guptill Manning. Go check out When Books Went to War.
Hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zaron Burnett, and Jason English
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
iHeart originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
F Scott Fitzgerald wanted something sweet. It was a Saturday afternoon,
four days before Christmas nineteen forty. Fitzgerald was staying at
the West Hollywood apartment of his girlfriend, Sheila Graham. Graham
was a prominent Hollywood gossip columnist who lived below Sunset Boulevard.
(00:44):
In Graham's kitchen, the one time literary it boy rustled
through the cupboards. No DUTs, I'm going to Schwabs to
get some ice cream, Fitzgerald said. Schwabs was a pharmacy
popular with Hollywood types right around the block. A couple
weeks earlier, Fitzgerald was in there buying cigarettes when suddenly
(01:07):
he got dizzy. His vision started going black. He nearly fainted.
The episode alarmed him. He had never felt like that before.
The Next morning, Fitzgerald's physician told him he'd had a
cardiac spasm, presumably induced by all those years of smoking
(01:28):
and alcoholism. The doc prescribed lots of rest, which is
what brought Fitzgerald to Graham's apartment. It was on the
ground floor, so he wouldn't have to climb any stairs.
Fitzgerald passed the days in Graham's care working on a
new novel. It had been fifteen years since Fitzgerald's third book,
(01:52):
The Great Gatsby, went down as a commercial flop. It
put a damper on the breakout success he'd found with
This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. By
nineteen four, Fitzgerald didn't have much of a career left
to speak of. He had recently received his latest royalty
(02:14):
check for forty copies of his books, including seven of
The Great Gatsby, the grand total thirteen dollars and thirteen cents.
Fitzgerald had moved to la He was trying to make
a living as a screenwriter, but books were Fitzgerald's first love,
(02:35):
and he hoped this new one would put him back
on the map. On December thirteenth, he wrote to his
estranged wife, Zelda, who was living on the other side
of the country, after being discharged from a psychiatric hospital.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
The novel is about three quarters through, and I think
I can go on till January twelfth without doing any
stories or going back to the studio.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Fitzgerald updated Zelda on his recovery.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
The cardiogram shows that my heart is repairing its but
it will be a gradual process. It will take some months.
It is odd that the heart is one of the
organs that does repair itself.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
Fitzgerald seemed to be getting better as far as Graham
could tell. Still, a doctor was coming to visit, and
she didn't want to risk Fitzgerald missing him. Instead of
schlepping two schwabs for ice cream, how about a couple
of the Hershey bars she kept in a box on
her bedside table. Good enough, Fitzgerald replied. He sank into
(03:39):
a green armchair with a copy of the Princeton Alumni Weekly.
Nibbling on the chocolate, he made notes in the margins
of an article about his old school's football team. Then,
out of nowhere, Fitzgerald sprung up, clutched the mantle above
the fireplace, and fell to the floor. He lay on
(04:00):
his back, eyes closed, making a sort of gasping sound.
Scott Graham pleaded, kneeling beside him. Scott a short while later,
as Graham cried hysterically, a white sheet covered Fitzgerald's body.
He had died of a heart attack at the age
(04:21):
of forty four. Fitzgerald was notable enough to marriage The
New York Times's lead obituary on Monday, December twenty third.
But the article had a decidedly has been tone brilliant
novelist of twenties inactive recently likened itself to cracked plate.
(04:43):
The headline declared Fitzgerald never got to finish the book
he had been writing. He'd hoped it would mark a
return to literary standing, that it would achieve for him
what The Great Gatsby hadn't. Gatsby, after all, was Fitzgerald's
most personally cherished work. He thought it had potential to
(05:06):
be the great American novel if only Fitzgerald had lived
just a few years longer, because against all odds, Gatsby
was on the verge of becoming just that. Welcome to
very special episodes and iHeart original podcast. I'm your host,
(05:30):
Danish Wartz, and this is happy one hundredth old sport
making Gatsby Great.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
Hello, thank you for joining us. She's Danish Wartz, He's
Aaron Burnett. I'm Jason English. Today we're celebrating a very
special anniversary one hundred years ago this week, April tenth,
nineteen twenty five, The Great Gatsby was first published. Do
either of you have any relationship with this book.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
I love it, I really do. Great Gatsby is one
of my favorite books. I really do think Scott, as
I call him from Scott, my good friend, Scott Fitzgerald
was right when he sent it to his editor when
he said, like, I think this is like the great
American novel, and I just wish I had a tenth
of his confidence and a fiftieth of his talent.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Right, oh my god. And also being able to know
that this is the great American novel getting done with it,
being like, this is it. I mean, come on, he
called his shot right, Oh dude, it was just a
killer shot too. And also this episode. I learned so
much from this one. I didn't know about any of
this with the Armed Services books. That was incredible.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
It makes me feel so much better about the possibility
of failure, knowing that posterity might change its mind.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
Yeah, someone might step in and send things you've written
to every soldier stationed abroad and.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Years after your death.
Speaker 4 (06:50):
Like, that's a lot of hope in that.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
That's posterity.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
F Scott Fitzgerald's literary sensibilities took hold in his teenage
years at a Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey.
They further blossomed at Princeton, where Fitzgerald palled around with
budding scholars like Edmund Wilson and wrote for the Princeton
Tiger and the Nassau Literary Magazine. But it was World
(07:19):
War One that kicked Fitzgerald's ambitions into high gear. In
nineteen seventeen, he dropped out of Princeton to join the Army,
which sent him to a training camp at Fort Levensworth
in Kansas. There, Fitzgerald began to work on what he
thought of as a quote immortal novel. Mortality nagged at
(07:43):
the aspiring twenty one year old author, laced up in
combat boots as a global conflagration raged. As he would later.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Recall, in those days, all infantry officers thought they only
had three months to live, and I had left no
mark on the world. But such consuming ambition was not
to be forwarded by a mere war.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
On Saturday, at one o'clock, Fitzgerald would dart over to
the smoky quarters of the Officers Club and write. After
three months, he was still alive, and he'd cranked out
a one hundred and twenty thousand word manuscript.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
He sent it to Charles Scribner's Sons, which was a
huge publisher at the time in New York City.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
That's author Molly Guptell Manning, whose excellent book will link
to in the show notes.
Speaker 5 (08:34):
And although they rejected it, it crossed the hands of
Max Perkins at Scribner's, and Perkins told Fitzgerald, you know,
maybe with some revisions, one day we would be able
to publish this.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
That was enough to keep Fitzgerald's dream alive. In the meantime,
now stationed near Montgomery, Alabama, he'd met a girl named
Zelda Sayer, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy Southern family.
Their relationship progressed quickly, coinciding with the end of the
war in November nineteen eighteen. Fitzgerald never did make it
(09:10):
to Europe during the war. After his discharge several months later,
Fitzgerald moved to New York, seeking fame and fortune, the
prerequisites for Zelda to marry him. He took a day
job writing ad copy and focused on his storytelling at night.
Speaker 5 (09:29):
He was trying to write magazine articles because he thought
that would be the most lucrative form of writing for him,
and he was rejected. I think over one hundred times,
and so he started to lose heart even with that.
And I think that it was through all of those
failures that he decided to finally sit down and try
to revise that manuscript that he had written during World
(09:51):
War One.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
In the summer of nineteen nineteen, Fitzgerald quit his advertising
job and went to live with his parents in his
native Saint Paul, Minnesota. Hold up on the top floor,
he wrote, and he edited, and he wrote and edited
some more, sustaining himself on Mel's mom or Dad would
deliver to his room bombing change from friends to buy
(10:16):
cigarettes and Coca cola. By the end of the summer,
Fitzgerald's revision was complete under the name This Side of Paradise.
He submitted it to Scribner's on September fourth. Twelve days later,
a letter from Max Perkins arrived.
Speaker 6 (10:34):
I am very glad personally to be able to write
to you that we are all for publishing your book,
This Side of Paradise. I think that you have improved
it enormously as the first manuscript did. It abounds in
energy and life, and it seems to me to be
in much better proportion. The book is so different that
it is hard to prophesy how it will sell, but
we are all for taking a chance and supporting it
(10:56):
with vigor.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
As the Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Brocoli later recalled, Fitzgerald had
found the editor who would back him for the rest
of him his life, and Perkins had made his first
great find and was launched on his career as America's
legendary literary editor. With scribners on board, Fitzgerald wanted the
(11:20):
novel to be published as soon as possible, He wrote
back to Perkins, emphasizing mistakes.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
I have so many things dependent on its success, including
of course a girl. Not that I expected to make
me a fortune, but it will have a psychological effect
on me and all my surroundings and open up new fields.
I'm in that stage where every month counts frantically and
seems a cudgel in a fight for happiness against time.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
This Side of Paradise was published on March twenty sixth,
nineteen twenty. A week later, Scott and Zelda got hitched
at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Midtown Manhattan. The ceremony represented
more than just a marriage. In retrospect, it had the
air of a coronation. A new era of unbridled decadence
(12:13):
had noted. The FitzGeralds would preside over this Babylon like
a king and queen. Lucky for them, this side of
Paradise became a runaway cultural phenomenon as soon as it
hit Shells, turning Fitzgerald into an overnight celebrity.
Speaker 5 (12:33):
It changes his life entirely. It proved to him that
he could make a living by writing all those magazine
articles he had written earlier that had been rejected. All
of a sudden, these magazines, like The Saturday Evening Post
were offering a lot of money.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
As Fitzgerald's fame skyrocketed. A second sensation followed in nineteen
twenty two with The Beautiful and Damned, of which the
author's pal Edmund Wilson later wrote, quote, the hero and
heroine are strange creatures without purpose or method, who give
themselves up to wildies and do not, from beginning to end,
(13:10):
perform a single serious act. But you somehow get the
impression that, in spite of their madness, they are the
most rational people in the book. In the real world,
the hero and heroin behind The Beautiful and Damned had
become avatars of the jazz age, captivating the nation with
their good looks, glamour and booze soaked antics.
Speaker 5 (13:33):
Ke and Zelder were described almost like children, like running
around in a candy store. They were invited to the
best parties. They looked like celebrities. You know, suntan, youthful,
very successful.
Speaker 7 (13:46):
People know this man well, you noise books for this
is Francis Scott Key Fitzguerro, better known as EB Scott Fitzgeral.
It's just nineteen twenty two and author is just twenty six.
Here's his wife, a llegedly model for his heroine, Joan
here B hamily read writer her Stilva, author The Great Gatsby.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
With two literary blockbusters under his belt, Fitzgerald got to
work on what he hoped would be a third. It
was about an elusive Long Island millionaire named Jay Gatsby
and his obsessive quest to reunite with a former flame,
Daisy Buchanan. The plot was inspired by Fitzgerald's own heartbreak
(14:36):
following a youthful romance with the Chicago socialite and heiress
Geneva King. Genev's father had delivered a fatal blow to
the relationship when he reportedly remarked in Fitzgerald's presence, poor
boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls. With the sting
(14:56):
of those words still fresh all these years later, the
writing of The Great Gatsby commenced in Europe, where the
FitzGeralds and their toddler daughter Frand took up residence. In
the summer of nineteen twenty four. Fitzgerald put the finishing
touches on the book the following February. Gatsby, as far
(15:18):
as Fitzgerald was concerned, was a masterpiece. As he told
Max Perkins, I think my novel is the best American
novel ever written.
Speaker 5 (15:30):
He really believed it was going to be the great
American novel. He really wanted to prove his literary medal
with this book. He takes all of the experiences he
had going to these really swanky parties on Long Island
in New York City in the preceding years, and he
used a lot of that to try to craft this
(15:50):
story and prove that he.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Was basically the best writer of the era.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
As with This Side of Paradise five years earlier, Fitzgerald
felt like there was so much writing on this book,
albeit not the acceptance of a marriage proposal this time,
but his stature in the literary pantheon, his confidence, and
his sense of self. In the days after Gatsby's April
(16:18):
tenth debut, Fitzgerald nervously cabled Perkins from Europe, asking how
it was doing. Perkins's reply on April twentieth wasn't exactly
what Fitzgerald wanted to hear. Sales situation doubtful, excellent reviews. Sure,
(16:38):
Fitzgerald was getting congratulatory letters from the likes of Willa Cather,
Edith Wharton, and T. S. Eliot, who wrote, quote, it
seems to me to be the first step American fiction
has taken since Henry James. The problem was the masses
didn't agree.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
The critics generally like it.
Speaker 5 (16:59):
He gets favorable reviews, but for some reason, the public
just wasn't that into it.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
It sold less than his books.
Speaker 5 (17:08):
And it just broke his heart because he had such
high hopes and expectations and it just fell so far
short of those. He considered the book and himself a failure.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Fitzgerald's charmed life began to unravel. For starters, there were
money issues. This side of Paradise and the beautiful and
Damned had subsidized his and a Zelda's extravagant lifestyle in
those first few years of marriage with Gatsby. The well
more or less dried up. In nineteen twenty seven, Fitzgerald
(17:42):
barely cracked one hundred and fifty dollars in royalties from
his three novels and three short story collections combined. To
stay afloat, he had to churn out magazine articles, which
zapped up all of his creative energy and kept him
in what one literary historian would later describe as a
(18:04):
quote cycle of debt and tees temporary wealth. Then, of course,
there was Fitzgerald's personal life.
Speaker 5 (18:13):
He was drinking a lot, and that really did not
help his writing career. He and Zelda had a lot
of drama in their marriage.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
They both thought.
Speaker 5 (18:20):
Each other was having an affair on and off, and
then Zelda's mental state was declining at the same time,
So his personal life was unraveling. He was drinking too much,
and his health was not good, and his writing career
seemed to be dead. Like he just did not think
that he was ever going to write anything that would
have the artistry and the quality that he thought he
(18:44):
could actually write but no one seemed to see it.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
In the nineteen thirties, Zelda would start spending more time institutionalized.
At one point, Fitzgerald jotted down the following observation in
a notebook.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
I'm living very cheaply. It was funny coming into the
hotel and a very deferential clerk, not knowing I was
not only thousands, nay tens of thousands in debt, but
had less than forty cents cash in the world, and
probably a thirteen dollars deficit at my bank.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
In nineteen thirty six, in an essay for Esquire titled
The Crack Up, the same essay that would be referenced
in the headline of his New York Times obituary, Fitzgerald
likened himself to a cracked plate.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Of course, all life is a process of breaking down.
But the blows that do the dramatic side of the work,
the big sudden blows that come or seem to come
from outside, the ones you remember and blame things on
and in moments of weakness tell your friends about, don't
show their effect all at once. There is another sort
of blow that comes from within that you don't feel
(19:54):
until it's too late to do anything about it until
you realized with finality that in some regard you will
never be as good a man again.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
One evening in nineteen forty, a few years into their relationship,
Fitzgerald and Sheila Graham were strolling along Hollywood Boulevard after
a film preview. They saw a small shop with a
sign that read make your own records, hear yourself speak.
The couple went inside and Fitzgerald recorded four readings, including
(20:26):
the scene from Act one of Othello, where Othello wins
Desdemona's love. It's one of the few known recordings of
Fitzgerald's voice that survives to this day.
Speaker 7 (20:39):
She baddened me, if I had a friend that loved us,
I should but teach him how to tell my story,
and that would work. Upon this hint, I state she
loved me for the danger's eyed past. I love her
that she did pity them. This only the witchcraft I
(20:59):
have viewed.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
Listening to the recording. Years later, Graham would remark that
she was quote surprised at the deep, professorial tone of
his voice, much lower than it was in real life.
Perhaps even then he was speaking for posterity. Months after
reciting those lines, Fitzgerald's heart stopped beating in Graham's apartment.
(21:25):
He died largely forgotten by the literary world, his repertoire
clouded by one unfinished novel and another consigned to the
dust bin.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
With The Great Gatsby.
Speaker 5 (21:37):
Part of what really doomed it was after it was published.
There was a great depression, so no one wanted to
read about Jay Gatsby's fancy parties. Nobody was having fancy parties.
Everybody was miserable. Fitzgerald very much fell out of favor
because the type of book that he was associated with
was not the type of book that people were reading,
(21:58):
and it didn't seem to reflect the state of American society.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
By nineteen forty, says Manning.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
No one remembered the Great Gatsby.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
But that, of course, wasn't the end of the story.
Fitzgerald's Great American Novel was destined for a comeback that
no one, especially not the author himself, could have predicted.
At the time of Fitzgerald's death, Pearl Harbor was still
(22:27):
a year away, but in America the drums of war
were getting louder. The fall of France to Nazi Germany
in June of nineteen forty rattled the US, awakening leaders
and civilians alike to the reality that they weren't immune
to the horrors unfolding in Europe. America needed to prepare,
(22:50):
and so in September nineteen forty, Congress passed the Selective
Training and Service Act, compelling sixteen point five million men
between the ages of twenty one and thirty five to
register for the.
Speaker 8 (23:05):
Draft, America's most ethical call to arms and preparedness. Millions
of men from twenty one to thirty six line up
and sign up throughout the nation. With the safety of
America threatening, all Americans, the humble and the mighty willingly
embrace selective service.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
The government set about the monumental task of building dozens
of training camps to house these conscripted recruits. But things
were moving fast, and the men began showing up before
the camps were completed. In the most dire scenarios, they
arrived to swathes of barren land. In other instances, the
(23:47):
facilities that had been erected were woefully inadequate. One camp
was described as a quote hellhole, dirty, stinking, and muddy.
Something needed to be done to lift the soldiers cratering
morale and fast. The answer the books.
Speaker 5 (24:08):
They had plans to build movie theaters and to offer
athletics and do things like that, but they didn't have
the chance to build barracks, so they didn't have time
to build facilities.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
And so librarians were.
Speaker 5 (24:20):
Watching what was happening, and they realized, if we could
just send boxes of books, a soldier could just grab
a book and read, and that would give them some entertainment,
especially at night when there was nothing to do.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Our friend Mollie Guptil Manning wrote about this in her
twenty fourteen New York Times bestseller When Books Went to War.
Speaker 5 (24:40):
That's where these book drives really started, and what the
military discovered was that soldiers actually did enjoy reading books,
and there was just never enough of them. So librarians
would host community book drives and just have people bring
whatever books they had purchased at some point and no
longer needed, They could bring them to these book drives.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
The book drives became even more crucial once America entered
the war in nineteen forty two. Troops were being deployed
all over the world, including to places where there wasn't
really well much of anything. US officials saw books as
a vital tool for lifting spirits.
Speaker 5 (25:24):
The government ended up sanctioning a nationwide book drive called
the Victory Book Campaign that began in nineteen forty two.
They collected ten million donated books from the public, and
it was renewed to nineteen forty three and another eight
million books were donated, and all of them went to
the Army and the Navy and the Marine Corps.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
The work of the Victory Book.
Speaker 5 (25:45):
Campaign was really important because these books became a lifeline.
It was really comforting to actually have something tangible that
they could hold in their hands that reminded them of home.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
While everyday Americans were hauling their used hardcovers to donation sites,
a kindred effort was unfolding among New York's intelligensia. A
group called the Council on Books in Wartime began meeting
in spring of nineteen forty two. Members ranged from librarians
(26:17):
and booksellers to the editor of Publishers Weekly and Cyrus
Sulzberger of The New York Times, two representatives from Random House, W. W.
Norton and Co. And all the other major imprints. Their
stated goal was quote to bring before the public the
concept of books as weapons in the war of ideas.
(26:40):
In other words, if the Nazis were going to burn books,
America was going to champion them.
Speaker 5 (26:47):
Exercising the freedom to read. That's actually practicing democracy, and
so reading really was a sign of protest, and it
was a way for people to show that they practiced
freedom and that they resisted the Nazis.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
By the fall of nineteen forty two, the Council on
Books in Wartime was starting to put its ideas into practice.
This quote. Plans are on foot to make it the
focal point for cooperation between the book publishers and the
various government information agencies, the group said in a statement.
The cooperation of the Office of War Information has already
(27:22):
been secured. The Washington Committee recently spent a most successful
day discussing with ten government agencies problems relating to books
in the war effort. One problem was the perception that
the books being donated to the soldiers were throwaways, stuff
that no one else wanted to read. But the main
(27:44):
issue was practical in nature.
Speaker 5 (27:46):
For troops, like, for example, in North Africa, they would
be marching for miles a day, and so if they
had a book and it was a hardcover book. The
weight of it and the amount of space that it
would take up in their pack.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
It wasn't negligible.
Speaker 5 (28:03):
There's reports of troops just begrudgingly putting it out on
the ground and walking.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
On because it was just too heavy to carry.
Speaker 5 (28:12):
Even though they really wanted to have the distraction of
a story when they had downtime.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
A young officer named Ray Troutman, who headed the Army's
Library section, had an idea. What if the military could
convince publishers to reprint titles from their back catalogs in
a paperback format small enough that it could be tucked
away inside the pockets of a standard uniform. Troutman pitched
(28:40):
it to the Council, which was keen on the notion
of mass producing miniature, inexpensive paperbacks to American troops overseas.
In fact, the Council liked the idea so much that
it proposed spearheading the entire project. William Warder Norton, the
president of W. W. Norton in Company, put together a
(29:03):
detailed operational plan that he negotiated with the Armed Forces
and among the publishers themselves. In addition to the Army
Navy and War Production Board, some seventy publishing companies and
more than a dozen printing houses and suppliers joined the fight.
As Norton put it, quote, this is the most valuable
(29:27):
thing that bookmen can undertake in the conduct of the war.
Speaker 5 (29:31):
The Council on Books in Wartime consisted of every major
and minor publisher in the United States, and so all
of the publishers were asked to submit lists of titles
that would be appealing to young men. You had a
lot of best sellers, you had short story collections, you
had books on sports, really a smattering of everything.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Publishers agreed to sell books to the military at the
cost of manufacturing them about six cents a volume, plus
ten percent for overhead. The books would be kept out
of the civilian market and exclusive distributed overseas. Authors and
publishers each received royalties of one half cent per copy.
(30:16):
The books were printed on magazine presses and then cut
in half so you could make two with each printing.
The organizers came up with a name for these pint
sized paperbacks. Armed Services Editions thousands of popular books to
be given out to servicemen. The Associated Press reported in
(30:37):
a story announcing the program. These special paper bound, pocket
sized editions will be manufactured by various printing plants throughout
the country on presses not normally employed in the printing
of books on paper supplied from Armed Services requirements, so
that the cost will be the lowest in the history
(30:58):
of the industry. The initial Armed Services editions started going
out in September nineteen forty three, and they reached troops
a couple months later.
Speaker 5 (31:10):
The reaction generally was that soldiers could not believe that
they were publishers back home who were bothering to create
these specially sized paperback books that would fit their uniform
pockets so that they would have something to do in
all of their downtime.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Immediately, reading just took off within the US military.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
The very first title to roll off the presses was
The Education of Hyman Kaplan, a collection of stories published
in The New Yorker by the humorist Leo Roston. Letters
from grateful servicemen filled his mailbox.
Speaker 6 (31:49):
I want to thank you profoundly for myself and more importantly,
for the men here in this god forsaken part of
the globe. Last week we received your book. I read
it and simply roared with laughter. As an experiment, I
read it one night at campfire. The men howled. I
have not heard so laughs in months.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
Another popular Armed Services edition, perhaps the most popular of all,
was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. After
it arrived overseas, Smith received thousands of letters of appreciation.
One Service member called it a quote source of never
ending enjoyment. Another told Smith that because of the book quote,
(32:32):
this heart of mine turned over and became alive again.
Speaker 5 (32:36):
Obviously, the book takes place in Brooklyn, but you'd have
people who grew up on a farm and they would
just say, you know, the way that family was, it
reminded me of my family, or the description of her
walking down the street reminded what it was like for
me to walk down the street in my hometown. It
was like troops just transplanted themselves into that book, and
it was such a precious reminder of home that it
(32:58):
just made them nostalgic and also hopeful, I think, to
one day return back to their families and see those hometowns.
In some ways made them understand what they were fighting for.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Overall, the Armed Services editions became so popular that the
Council was producing forty of them a month, at one
hundred and fifty five thousand copies each. That's six point
two million books every month. Books of all sorts, from
sports and other nonfiction titles to mysteries, westerns and adventure
(33:32):
novels to classic literature by the likes of Charles Dickens
At Garland, Poe Herman, Melville, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Jack London,
Henry David Thoreau, and Leo Tolstoy. The Council received bags
of mail lauding the efforts. Armed services. Editions continued to
play a role even after the war was won. By
(33:54):
the end of nineteen forty five, Germany and Japan had
both surrendered, and yet there were still a whole lot
of troops stationed abroad, celebrating victory, happy to be alive,
but mostly just sitting around waiting to come home. They
were bored, and the armed forces needed more books to
(34:15):
keep them occupied. The problem was publishers were getting a
little desperate. They'd gone through so many popular titles over
the past two years that there wasn't all that much
left to choose from, and so they started scraping the
bottom of the barrel. Digging deeper into their backlists. It's
(34:36):
a good thing they did, because they were about to
pluck a masterpiece from obscurity. In September of nineteen forty five,
the Council on Books in Wartime issued a list of
the seven hundred and forty four Armed Services editions it
(34:58):
had published to date. Contemporary fiction comprised the line share
with one hundred and twenty seven titles, followed by ninety
one humor titles, eighty nine historical novels, and eighty eight westerns.
In total, more than ninety million copies had been delivered
into the hands of servicemen. Around this time, editors at
(35:20):
Charles Scribner's Sons were scrounging around for additional works to
submit to the program. There are no records indicating why
they chose The Great Gatsby, but it's been noted that
one of the librarians who worked for the Council in
nineteen forty five was a Fitzgerald fan. He had corresponded
(35:41):
with the author in the nineteen thirties. Maybe he had
a hand in it. Here's what Molly Guptel Manning thinks.
Speaker 5 (35:49):
Scribners must have gone back to look at books that
it had produced in the twenties, because it had already
exhausted the books from the forties and the thirties.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
The name recognition of f.
Speaker 5 (36:00):
Scott Fitzgerald was still very much a thing, and troops
loved magazines. They definitely read the Saturday Evening posts and
would have been familiar with Scott Fitzgerald's stories, and so
I think that's why scribners ended up choosing The Great Gatsby.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
The Armed Services edition of The Great Gatsby was printed
in October nineteen forty five. More than one hundred and
twenty five thousand copies were shipped to servicemen awaiting their homecomings.
That's more than four times the number of copies that
had ever been sold, including the mere one hundred and
(36:37):
twenty copies sold in nineteen forty four. You also have
to take into account the extent to which Armed Services
editions got passed around, as troops traded titles after reading
them during periods of combat. It was estimated that each
edition would be read three or four times. When conditions
(36:59):
were peaceful, say like if you were sitting around on
an occupied island in the Pacific, the book could make
it to ten or more readings as they changed hands.
Troops waiting to come home in the fall of nineteen
forty five had very little to do, at least compared
to their service during the war, and they were reading
(37:21):
more than ever.
Speaker 5 (37:22):
You could say, the one hundred and twenty five thousand
copies of The Great Gatsby in Armed Services Edition format
were probably read by maybe even a million soldiers, because
it was a policy that you read the book and
then you shared it with the next guy who wanted
to read it.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
Twenty years after The Great gats We failed to catch
fire with the masses. It now had a captive audience
of predominantly young men who were enthralled by its subject matter.
Speaker 5 (37:49):
Their whole time away at war, they were fantasizing about
going home, and there's such a great sense of fantasy
in that book. You know, a version of life where
you can strike it rich and you can go to
great parties and you can have this incredible life. And
I think that was really appealing to Soul series.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
The timing was fortuitous. Literary critics had recently begun to
reconsider Fitzgerald. In nineteen forty four, Charles Weir Junior published
an essay in the Virginia Quarterly Review, which he posited
that quote. Only in The Great Gatsby did Fitzgerald succeed
in putting any amount of material into a form which
(38:30):
was truly significant and expressive. In July nineteen forty, five
months before Gatsby's Armed Services Edition debut, Edmund Wilson edited
a posthumous essay collection of Fitzgerald's works for Esquire, including
The Crackup. Around the same time, a reprint of The
(38:51):
Great Gatsby hit shelves from New Directions Publishing. In the introduction,
Lionel Trilling wrote, quote, Fitzgerald is now beginning to take
his place in our literary tradition. Other reprints came from
Viking and Bantam Books, but Gatsby's popularity among soldiers helped
(39:13):
spark its mass market revival. In their letters to left Ones,
soldiers would talk about books they were reading. Their gats
Be raves jibed with the post war optimism that was
now coursing through the American populace. Ordinary readers in the
US started seeking out the book.
Speaker 5 (39:34):
It takes a little while for the traction to start building,
but it's noticeable the book is starting to appear on shelves.
Critics revisited it and reviewed it again, even though it
had been published, you know, almost twenty years earlier. The
war is over, people have a lot of money to spend.
The economy is booming, like it's a good time, and
(39:56):
so having this story about, you know, this fantastic mansion
on Long Island and these parties and things like that,
the public is very receptive to this. So now they're
starting to buy the book, and they're also enjoying it.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
By nineteen sixty, Gatsby was selling one hundred thousand copies annually.
For the novel's thirty fifth anniversary that year, the literary
scholar Arthur Meisner wrote in The New York Times quote,
the obvious values of the book have been reasonably established.
Fitzgerald created an image of the good American of our time,
(40:35):
in all his complexity of human sympathy, firm moral judgment,
and ironic self possession. We can now afford to turn
our attention to such things, because whatever disagreements we may
have over Fitzgerald's work as a whole, there remain few
doubts of the greatness of Gatsby, or of its imaginative
(40:58):
relevance to American experience. Over the decades, the Great Gatsby
has taken on forms that Fitzgerald never would have thought
possible at the time of his death, like the musical
adaptation now playing on Broadway, or the twenty thirteen film
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which grossed three hundred and fifty three
(41:19):
point six million dollars at the global box office. Manning
believes that we're not for the Council on Books. In wartime,
we wouldn't be talking about Gatsby one hundred years after
its ill fated debut.
Speaker 5 (41:34):
There was nothing else that would infuse the book and
get it to start selling, you know, almost twenty years
after it was originally published, except for the fact that
one hundred and twenty five thousand free copies were distributed.
I mean that just lit a fire under the book.
I think every single way that the Great Gatsby has
(41:56):
re emerged since then, it's due to the Armed Services editions.
Speaker 3 (42:01):
Today, copies of Gatsby's Armed Services edition can sell for
thousands of dollars. Manning was lucky enough to snag hers
before the market soared.
Speaker 5 (42:13):
This is going to pain anybody who is a collector
of Armed Services editions today, But I started collecting the
books before I wrote one books, Front to War, because
I just wanted to see what these things looked like.
I think it took me about five years to write
that book, so that's five years of collecting. And I
would buy Armed Services editions for less than a dollar
(42:36):
because no one knew what they were and they just
look like these really kind of grubby little paperbacks that
don't seem all of that attractive.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
So I think I.
Speaker 5 (42:47):
Purchased my copy of The Great Gatsby for about ten dollars.
Speaker 3 (42:50):
At the time of this recording, there were two copies
of Gatsby's Armed Services Edition available on ABE Books, which
specializes in rare and collectible texts. One was listed for
nine hundred and ninety nine dollars, the other for fourth thousand,
two hundred. You got to wonder what Fitzgerald would have
(43:11):
made of that if he had a crystal ball in
nineteen forty, back when he got that last royalty check
for a paltry thirteen dollars and thirteen cents. That's the
tragedy in all of this. Like many great authors before him,
Fitzgerald never got to enjoy the smashing success of his
(43:32):
landmark work, or to reap the financial rewards. Gatsby's initial
failure haunted him until that fateful afternoon in Sheila Graham's
apartment when he collapsed while eating Hershey Bars and reading
about the latest happenings at Princeton. He didn't know it,
or maybe he only knew it deep within the heart
(43:54):
that failed him.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
But he was right.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
He had written the great American novel, one that generations
of readers would treasure for all time.
Speaker 5 (44:05):
I think if Fitzgerald that it would still be around
one hundred.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
Years later, he would be smiling from his grave.
Speaker 5 (44:11):
If he had known that it was going to be
as successful as it was, I think he would have
died a happy man.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
I have a bit of a sad story now that
the episode's over. Really, after learning about this story and
this episode, I became obsessed. I was like, I just
I have to have an Armed Services edition of The
Great Gatsby just in my heart. I was like, I
need one as an item. I need it in my home.
I will spend money on it. And I scoured used
book websites. I found one copy left what I bought it,
(44:47):
and I bought it, and I was so happy, and
I like went about my day and I had like
two hours of feeling so satisfied. And then I got
an email from the bookseller saying, I'm so sorry I
had to cancel your order. I sold this yesterday.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
Oh no, do you think that they really sold it yesterday?
Or they looked it up and saw how much they're
worth and they're like to hell with that? Yeah, bring
it on eBay, I know.
Speaker 3 (45:12):
Or they just figured out that this episode was about
to come out and they could check the price up later. Seriously,
But now I can't find any. Now I can't find
any for any price.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
I was astounded. I looked online too. The price is
like they were prohibitive. I was blown away.
Speaker 4 (45:26):
Yeah, do we need one?
Speaker 1 (45:27):
Can we expense one? Be on the look out.
Speaker 3 (45:31):
The problem is even if you expense one, I just
can't find one.
Speaker 8 (45:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:35):
Now they're all gone.
Speaker 4 (45:37):
If you are sitting on a copy and would like
to sell it very Special Episodes at gmail dot com,
hit us up.
Speaker 3 (45:43):
I'll make you an offer. I will slide you a
piece of paper with a dollar amount written on it.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
I know. We talked a lot about the We were
talking about the book and this episode's focused on the book.
But I got to ask you, guys. Did you guys
see the twenty thirteen Leonardo DiCaprio movie version of this?
Speaker 3 (45:57):
Yeah?
Speaker 7 (45:57):
I liked it.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
Have you seen the nineteen seventies version with Mia Pharaoh
and Robert Redford?
Speaker 7 (46:02):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (46:03):
I like that one too.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
I'm glad. Which one do you prefer? Did you have
a preference?
Speaker 3 (46:08):
You know what I'm going to say, I think the
Robert maybe because I saw it when I was younger,
But I kind of think the Robert Rudsborre one might
be a little boring. And I'm going to say I
like the Leonardo one because even though I know people
had their critiques of it, I'm like, it's fun, it moves.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
It's poppy.
Speaker 4 (46:23):
I just watched it again on a plane last week
and felt like a real influencer because I put it on.
The person sitting next to me I could tell was
looking at me, seeing and then all of a sudden,
was just five minutes behind me watching the same movie.
Whoa communal experience?
Speaker 1 (46:39):
My only influencing, true influencing. That's incredible influencing in the wild.
That has to be one of the most satisfying things Honestly,
if you're sitting there watching a movie on a plane
and the person next to you goes, you know what,
I want to watch that too. I don't know why.
It's like a book recommendation someone. You see them actually
reading the book, you're like, hell yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:55):
I mean that's basically how The Great Gatsby became popular.
All these soldiers sitting around after World War Two being
like that book looks good.
Speaker 4 (47:02):
Yeah, you gotta check this one, Sarah. There's not a
ton of characters in this one. But if you were
gonna cast Fitzgerald, who's your actor?
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Okay? I thought about this one a bunch because it's
like there's a good range. I picked him right towards
the end of his life, so I thought, then we
get some actor who play I'm younger. So I picked
for f Scott Fitzgerald. This is a wild call, but
he has the broken heartedness for this role. Will Arnett
don't like that. If you don't like that one, I've
got a second will for you, Will Forte. He's a
(47:31):
little safer choice, but both of them have that broken heartedness.
They can get to the essence of f Scott Fitzgerald.
I thought, what do you think.
Speaker 3 (47:38):
My mind just might be distorted by the movie Midnight
in Paris. But there's a great performance in that movie
by Tom Hindleston as Scott. I call him Scott totally
as you could, So I just I think Tom Hidleston
does a great job. And now that Tom Hidleston is
a little older, I'm like, great, he should just run
it back and play an older, broken down Scott Fitzgerald.
I also saw Tom Hidleston in a pinter play in London,
(48:02):
which is a brag that I'm saying. I got to
see him in portrayal in London, but he was great, So.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
That's my vote. I'm duly impressed, like really doly impressed.
Speaker 3 (48:10):
Oh yeah, I'm very sophisticated. I'm a very sophisticated person.
I attempt to collect a rare books and I see
plays occasionally.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
The effort that counts outside of America no less, did
you guys have very special characters for this one?
Speaker 3 (48:22):
You know what? I think my very special character is
the person who was a fan of f Scott Fitzgerald,
who was the one that they can't like prove that
it was them who decided that this should be the addition.
But the one who was like a fan, who was
part of the decision making process and what these books
would be, who decided that The Great Gatsby should be
printed as an arm Services edition.
Speaker 4 (48:44):
It's just so crazy that that's how life works. That
were probably one person. That's why we all read this
in tenth grade or whatever.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
It's back on Broadway.
Speaker 4 (48:54):
A couple very special character nominees for me, Molly Manning,
who wrote the book about went to war, Just thank
you very much for talking to us and giving us
all the great background and little pull back the curtain here.
Most of these episodes are not timely in any way.
We could release them in you know, next week or
(49:14):
in two months, and they're going to be just as enjoyable.
This one, because we're trying to hit this anniversary. Came
together very quickly, So shout out to Joe Pompeo and
Mary Doo and Josh and John and everyone who jumped
in to turn this around very quickly.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
Thank you to all you very special people. Nice work, y'all.
Speaker 4 (49:35):
Very special episodes is made by some very special people.
Today's episode was written by Joe Pompeo. Joe previously worked
on our Agatha Christy episode The Case of the Missing Novelist.
It was one of our top performers last year.
Speaker 7 (49:49):
Go check it out.
Speaker 4 (49:51):
He'll be back in two weeks with a good old
fashioned spy story. This podcast is hosted by Danis Schwartz,
Zaron Burnett, and Jason English. Our producer is Josh Fisher.
Editing and sound design by Jonathan Washington, editing by Mary Doo,
mixing and mastering by Josh Fisher. Original music by Alise McCoy.
(50:15):
Research and fact checking by Joe Pompeo and Austin Thompson.
Show logo by Lucy Quintania. Our executive producer is Jason English.
If you'd like to email the show, you can reach
us at Very Special Episodes at gmail dot com. Very
Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
iHeart originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
F Scott Fitzgerald wanted something sweet. It was a Saturday afternoon,
four days before Christmas nineteen forty. Fitzgerald was staying at
the West Hollywood apartment of his girlfriend, Sheila Graham. Graham
was a prominent Hollywood gossip columnist who lived below Sunset Boulevard.
(00:44):
In Graham's kitchen, the one time literary it boy rustled
through the cupboards. No DUTs, I'm going to Schwabs to
get some ice cream, Fitzgerald said. Schwabs was a pharmacy
popular with Hollywood types right around the block. A couple
weeks earlier, Fitzgerald was in there buying cigarettes when suddenly
(01:07):
he got dizzy. His vision started going black. He nearly fainted.
The episode alarmed him. He had never felt like that before.
The Next morning, Fitzgerald's physician told him he'd had a
cardiac spasm, presumably induced by all those years of smoking
(01:28):
and alcoholism. The doc prescribed lots of rest, which is
what brought Fitzgerald to Graham's apartment. It was on the
ground floor, so he wouldn't have to climb any stairs.
Fitzgerald passed the days in Graham's care working on a
new novel. It had been fifteen years since Fitzgerald's third book,
(01:52):
The Great Gatsby, went down as a commercial flop. It
put a damper on the breakout success he'd found with
This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. By
nineteen four, Fitzgerald didn't have much of a career left
to speak of. He had recently received his latest royalty
(02:14):
check for forty copies of his books, including seven of
The Great Gatsby, the grand total thirteen dollars and thirteen cents.
Fitzgerald had moved to la He was trying to make
a living as a screenwriter, but books were Fitzgerald's first love,
(02:35):
and he hoped this new one would put him back
on the map. On December thirteenth, he wrote to his
estranged wife, Zelda, who was living on the other side
of the country, after being discharged from a psychiatric hospital.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
The novel is about three quarters through, and I think
I can go on till January twelfth without doing any
stories or going back to the studio.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Fitzgerald updated Zelda on his recovery.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
The cardiogram shows that my heart is repairing its but
it will be a gradual process. It will take some months.
It is odd that the heart is one of the
organs that does repair itself.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
Fitzgerald seemed to be getting better as far as Graham
could tell. Still, a doctor was coming to visit, and
she didn't want to risk Fitzgerald missing him. Instead of
schlepping two schwabs for ice cream, how about a couple
of the Hershey bars she kept in a box on
her bedside table. Good enough, Fitzgerald replied. He sank into
(03:39):
a green armchair with a copy of the Princeton Alumni Weekly.
Nibbling on the chocolate, he made notes in the margins
of an article about his old school's football team. Then,
out of nowhere, Fitzgerald sprung up, clutched the mantle above
the fireplace, and fell to the floor. He lay on
(04:00):
his back, eyes closed, making a sort of gasping sound.
Scott Graham pleaded, kneeling beside him. Scott a short while later,
as Graham cried hysterically, a white sheet covered Fitzgerald's body.
He had died of a heart attack at the age
(04:21):
of forty four. Fitzgerald was notable enough to marriage The
New York Times's lead obituary on Monday, December twenty third.
But the article had a decidedly has been tone brilliant
novelist of twenties inactive recently likened itself to cracked plate.
(04:43):
The headline declared Fitzgerald never got to finish the book
he had been writing. He'd hoped it would mark a
return to literary standing, that it would achieve for him
what The Great Gatsby hadn't. Gatsby, after all, was Fitzgerald's
most personally cherished work. He thought it had potential to
(05:06):
be the great American novel if only Fitzgerald had lived
just a few years longer, because against all odds, Gatsby
was on the verge of becoming just that. Welcome to
very special episodes and iHeart original podcast. I'm your host,
(05:30):
Danish Wartz, and this is happy one hundredth old sport
making Gatsby Great.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
Hello, thank you for joining us. She's Danish Wartz, He's
Aaron Burnett. I'm Jason English. Today we're celebrating a very
special anniversary one hundred years ago this week, April tenth,
nineteen twenty five, The Great Gatsby was first published. Do
either of you have any relationship with this book.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
I love it, I really do. Great Gatsby is one
of my favorite books. I really do think Scott, as
I call him from Scott, my good friend, Scott Fitzgerald
was right when he sent it to his editor when
he said, like, I think this is like the great
American novel, and I just wish I had a tenth
of his confidence and a fiftieth of his talent.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Right, oh my god. And also being able to know
that this is the great American novel getting done with it,
being like, this is it. I mean, come on, he
called his shot right, Oh dude, it was just a
killer shot too. And also this episode. I learned so
much from this one. I didn't know about any of
this with the Armed Services books. That was incredible.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
It makes me feel so much better about the possibility
of failure, knowing that posterity might change its mind.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
Yeah, someone might step in and send things you've written
to every soldier stationed abroad and.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Years after your death.
Speaker 4 (06:50):
Like, that's a lot of hope in that.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
That's posterity.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
F Scott Fitzgerald's literary sensibilities took hold in his teenage
years at a Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey.
They further blossomed at Princeton, where Fitzgerald palled around with
budding scholars like Edmund Wilson and wrote for the Princeton
Tiger and the Nassau Literary Magazine. But it was World
(07:19):
War One that kicked Fitzgerald's ambitions into high gear. In
nineteen seventeen, he dropped out of Princeton to join the Army,
which sent him to a training camp at Fort Levensworth
in Kansas. There, Fitzgerald began to work on what he
thought of as a quote immortal novel. Mortality nagged at
(07:43):
the aspiring twenty one year old author, laced up in
combat boots as a global conflagration raged. As he would later.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Recall, in those days, all infantry officers thought they only
had three months to live, and I had left no
mark on the world. But such consuming ambition was not
to be forwarded by a mere war.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
On Saturday, at one o'clock, Fitzgerald would dart over to
the smoky quarters of the Officers Club and write. After
three months, he was still alive, and he'd cranked out
a one hundred and twenty thousand word manuscript.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
He sent it to Charles Scribner's Sons, which was a
huge publisher at the time in New York City.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
That's author Molly Guptell Manning, whose excellent book will link
to in the show notes.
Speaker 5 (08:34):
And although they rejected it, it crossed the hands of
Max Perkins at Scribner's, and Perkins told Fitzgerald, you know,
maybe with some revisions, one day we would be able
to publish this.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
That was enough to keep Fitzgerald's dream alive. In the meantime,
now stationed near Montgomery, Alabama, he'd met a girl named
Zelda Sayer, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy Southern family.
Their relationship progressed quickly, coinciding with the end of the
war in November nineteen eighteen. Fitzgerald never did make it
(09:10):
to Europe during the war. After his discharge several months later,
Fitzgerald moved to New York, seeking fame and fortune, the
prerequisites for Zelda to marry him. He took a day
job writing ad copy and focused on his storytelling at night.
Speaker 5 (09:29):
He was trying to write magazine articles because he thought
that would be the most lucrative form of writing for him,
and he was rejected. I think over one hundred times,
and so he started to lose heart even with that.
And I think that it was through all of those
failures that he decided to finally sit down and try
to revise that manuscript that he had written during World
(09:51):
War One.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
In the summer of nineteen nineteen, Fitzgerald quit his advertising
job and went to live with his parents in his
native Saint Paul, Minnesota. Hold up on the top floor,
he wrote, and he edited, and he wrote and edited
some more, sustaining himself on Mel's mom or Dad would
deliver to his room bombing change from friends to buy
(10:16):
cigarettes and Coca cola. By the end of the summer,
Fitzgerald's revision was complete under the name This Side of Paradise.
He submitted it to Scribner's on September fourth. Twelve days later,
a letter from Max Perkins arrived.
Speaker 6 (10:34):
I am very glad personally to be able to write
to you that we are all for publishing your book,
This Side of Paradise. I think that you have improved
it enormously as the first manuscript did. It abounds in
energy and life, and it seems to me to be
in much better proportion. The book is so different that
it is hard to prophesy how it will sell, but
we are all for taking a chance and supporting it
(10:56):
with vigor.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
As the Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Brocoli later recalled, Fitzgerald had
found the editor who would back him for the rest
of him his life, and Perkins had made his first
great find and was launched on his career as America's
legendary literary editor. With scribners on board, Fitzgerald wanted the
(11:20):
novel to be published as soon as possible, He wrote
back to Perkins, emphasizing mistakes.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
I have so many things dependent on its success, including
of course a girl. Not that I expected to make
me a fortune, but it will have a psychological effect
on me and all my surroundings and open up new fields.
I'm in that stage where every month counts frantically and
seems a cudgel in a fight for happiness against time.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
This Side of Paradise was published on March twenty sixth,
nineteen twenty. A week later, Scott and Zelda got hitched
at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Midtown Manhattan. The ceremony represented
more than just a marriage. In retrospect, it had the
air of a coronation. A new era of unbridled decadence
(12:13):
had noted. The FitzGeralds would preside over this Babylon like
a king and queen. Lucky for them, this side of
Paradise became a runaway cultural phenomenon as soon as it
hit Shells, turning Fitzgerald into an overnight celebrity.
Speaker 5 (12:33):
It changes his life entirely. It proved to him that
he could make a living by writing all those magazine
articles he had written earlier that had been rejected. All
of a sudden, these magazines, like The Saturday Evening Post
were offering a lot of money.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
As Fitzgerald's fame skyrocketed. A second sensation followed in nineteen
twenty two with The Beautiful and Damned, of which the
author's pal Edmund Wilson later wrote, quote, the hero and
heroine are strange creatures without purpose or method, who give
themselves up to wildies and do not, from beginning to end,
(13:10):
perform a single serious act. But you somehow get the
impression that, in spite of their madness, they are the
most rational people in the book. In the real world,
the hero and heroin behind The Beautiful and Damned had
become avatars of the jazz age, captivating the nation with
their good looks, glamour and booze soaked antics.
Speaker 5 (13:33):
Ke and Zelder were described almost like children, like running
around in a candy store. They were invited to the
best parties. They looked like celebrities. You know, suntan, youthful,
very successful.
Speaker 7 (13:46):
People know this man well, you noise books for this
is Francis Scott Key Fitzguerro, better known as EB Scott Fitzgeral.
It's just nineteen twenty two and author is just twenty six.
Here's his wife, a llegedly model for his heroine, Joan
here B hamily read writer her Stilva, author The Great Gatsby.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
With two literary blockbusters under his belt, Fitzgerald got to
work on what he hoped would be a third. It
was about an elusive Long Island millionaire named Jay Gatsby
and his obsessive quest to reunite with a former flame,
Daisy Buchanan. The plot was inspired by Fitzgerald's own heartbreak
(14:36):
following a youthful romance with the Chicago socialite and heiress
Geneva King. Genev's father had delivered a fatal blow to
the relationship when he reportedly remarked in Fitzgerald's presence, poor
boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls. With the sting
(14:56):
of those words still fresh all these years later, the
writing of The Great Gatsby commenced in Europe, where the
FitzGeralds and their toddler daughter Frand took up residence. In
the summer of nineteen twenty four. Fitzgerald put the finishing
touches on the book the following February. Gatsby, as far
(15:18):
as Fitzgerald was concerned, was a masterpiece. As he told
Max Perkins, I think my novel is the best American
novel ever written.
Speaker 5 (15:30):
He really believed it was going to be the great
American novel. He really wanted to prove his literary medal
with this book. He takes all of the experiences he
had going to these really swanky parties on Long Island
in New York City in the preceding years, and he
used a lot of that to try to craft this
(15:50):
story and prove that he.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Was basically the best writer of the era.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
As with This Side of Paradise five years earlier, Fitzgerald
felt like there was so much writing on this book,
albeit not the acceptance of a marriage proposal this time,
but his stature in the literary pantheon, his confidence, and
his sense of self. In the days after Gatsby's April
(16:18):
tenth debut, Fitzgerald nervously cabled Perkins from Europe, asking how
it was doing. Perkins's reply on April twentieth wasn't exactly
what Fitzgerald wanted to hear. Sales situation doubtful, excellent reviews. Sure,
(16:38):
Fitzgerald was getting congratulatory letters from the likes of Willa Cather,
Edith Wharton, and T. S. Eliot, who wrote, quote, it
seems to me to be the first step American fiction
has taken since Henry James. The problem was the masses
didn't agree.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
The critics generally like it.
Speaker 5 (16:59):
He gets favorable reviews, but for some reason, the public
just wasn't that into it.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
It sold less than his books.
Speaker 5 (17:08):
And it just broke his heart because he had such
high hopes and expectations and it just fell so far
short of those. He considered the book and himself a failure.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Fitzgerald's charmed life began to unravel. For starters, there were
money issues. This side of Paradise and the beautiful and
Damned had subsidized his and a Zelda's extravagant lifestyle in
those first few years of marriage with Gatsby. The well
more or less dried up. In nineteen twenty seven, Fitzgerald
(17:42):
barely cracked one hundred and fifty dollars in royalties from
his three novels and three short story collections combined. To
stay afloat, he had to churn out magazine articles, which
zapped up all of his creative energy and kept him
in what one literary historian would later describe as a
(18:04):
quote cycle of debt and tees temporary wealth. Then, of course,
there was Fitzgerald's personal life.
Speaker 5 (18:13):
He was drinking a lot, and that really did not
help his writing career. He and Zelda had a lot
of drama in their marriage.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
They both thought.
Speaker 5 (18:20):
Each other was having an affair on and off, and
then Zelda's mental state was declining at the same time,
So his personal life was unraveling. He was drinking too much,
and his health was not good, and his writing career
seemed to be dead. Like he just did not think
that he was ever going to write anything that would
have the artistry and the quality that he thought he
(18:44):
could actually write but no one seemed to see it.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
In the nineteen thirties, Zelda would start spending more time institutionalized.
At one point, Fitzgerald jotted down the following observation in
a notebook.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
I'm living very cheaply. It was funny coming into the
hotel and a very deferential clerk, not knowing I was
not only thousands, nay tens of thousands in debt, but
had less than forty cents cash in the world, and
probably a thirteen dollars deficit at my bank.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
In nineteen thirty six, in an essay for Esquire titled
The Crack Up, the same essay that would be referenced
in the headline of his New York Times obituary, Fitzgerald
likened himself to a cracked plate.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Of course, all life is a process of breaking down.
But the blows that do the dramatic side of the work,
the big sudden blows that come or seem to come
from outside, the ones you remember and blame things on
and in moments of weakness tell your friends about, don't
show their effect all at once. There is another sort
of blow that comes from within that you don't feel
(19:54):
until it's too late to do anything about it until
you realized with finality that in some regard you will
never be as good a man again.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
One evening in nineteen forty, a few years into their relationship,
Fitzgerald and Sheila Graham were strolling along Hollywood Boulevard after
a film preview. They saw a small shop with a
sign that read make your own records, hear yourself speak.
The couple went inside and Fitzgerald recorded four readings, including
(20:26):
the scene from Act one of Othello, where Othello wins
Desdemona's love. It's one of the few known recordings of
Fitzgerald's voice that survives to this day.
Speaker 7 (20:39):
She baddened me, if I had a friend that loved us,
I should but teach him how to tell my story,
and that would work. Upon this hint, I state she
loved me for the danger's eyed past. I love her
that she did pity them. This only the witchcraft I
(20:59):
have viewed.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
Listening to the recording. Years later, Graham would remark that
she was quote surprised at the deep, professorial tone of
his voice, much lower than it was in real life.
Perhaps even then he was speaking for posterity. Months after
reciting those lines, Fitzgerald's heart stopped beating in Graham's apartment.
(21:25):
He died largely forgotten by the literary world, his repertoire
clouded by one unfinished novel and another consigned to the
dust bin.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
With The Great Gatsby.
Speaker 5 (21:37):
Part of what really doomed it was after it was published.
There was a great depression, so no one wanted to
read about Jay Gatsby's fancy parties. Nobody was having fancy parties.
Everybody was miserable. Fitzgerald very much fell out of favor
because the type of book that he was associated with
was not the type of book that people were reading,
(21:58):
and it didn't seem to reflect the state of American society.
Speaker 3 (22:02):
By nineteen forty, says Manning.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
No one remembered the Great Gatsby.
Speaker 3 (22:07):
But that, of course, wasn't the end of the story.
Fitzgerald's Great American Novel was destined for a comeback that
no one, especially not the author himself, could have predicted.
At the time of Fitzgerald's death, Pearl Harbor was still
(22:27):
a year away, but in America the drums of war
were getting louder. The fall of France to Nazi Germany
in June of nineteen forty rattled the US, awakening leaders
and civilians alike to the reality that they weren't immune
to the horrors unfolding in Europe. America needed to prepare,
(22:50):
and so in September nineteen forty, Congress passed the Selective
Training and Service Act, compelling sixteen point five million men
between the ages of twenty one and thirty five to
register for the.
Speaker 8 (23:05):
Draft, America's most ethical call to arms and preparedness. Millions
of men from twenty one to thirty six line up
and sign up throughout the nation. With the safety of
America threatening, all Americans, the humble and the mighty willingly
embrace selective service.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
The government set about the monumental task of building dozens
of training camps to house these conscripted recruits. But things
were moving fast, and the men began showing up before
the camps were completed. In the most dire scenarios, they
arrived to swathes of barren land. In other instances, the
(23:47):
facilities that had been erected were woefully inadequate. One camp
was described as a quote hellhole, dirty, stinking, and muddy.
Something needed to be done to lift the soldiers cratering
morale and fast. The answer the books.
Speaker 5 (24:08):
They had plans to build movie theaters and to offer
athletics and do things like that, but they didn't have
the chance to build barracks, so they didn't have time
to build facilities.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
And so librarians were.
Speaker 5 (24:20):
Watching what was happening, and they realized, if we could
just send boxes of books, a soldier could just grab
a book and read, and that would give them some entertainment,
especially at night when there was nothing to do.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Our friend Mollie Guptil Manning wrote about this in her
twenty fourteen New York Times bestseller When Books Went to War.
Speaker 5 (24:40):
That's where these book drives really started, and what the
military discovered was that soldiers actually did enjoy reading books,
and there was just never enough of them. So librarians
would host community book drives and just have people bring
whatever books they had purchased at some point and no
longer needed, They could bring them to these book drives.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
The book drives became even more crucial once America entered
the war in nineteen forty two. Troops were being deployed
all over the world, including to places where there wasn't
really well much of anything. US officials saw books as
a vital tool for lifting spirits.
Speaker 5 (25:24):
The government ended up sanctioning a nationwide book drive called
the Victory Book Campaign that began in nineteen forty two.
They collected ten million donated books from the public, and
it was renewed to nineteen forty three and another eight
million books were donated, and all of them went to
the Army and the Navy and the Marine Corps.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
The work of the Victory Book.
Speaker 5 (25:45):
Campaign was really important because these books became a lifeline.
It was really comforting to actually have something tangible that
they could hold in their hands that reminded them of home.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
While everyday Americans were hauling their used hardcovers to donation sites,
a kindred effort was unfolding among New York's intelligensia. A
group called the Council on Books in Wartime began meeting
in spring of nineteen forty two. Members ranged from librarians
(26:17):
and booksellers to the editor of Publishers Weekly and Cyrus
Sulzberger of The New York Times, two representatives from Random House, W. W.
Norton and Co. And all the other major imprints. Their
stated goal was quote to bring before the public the
concept of books as weapons in the war of ideas.
(26:40):
In other words, if the Nazis were going to burn books,
America was going to champion them.
Speaker 5 (26:47):
Exercising the freedom to read. That's actually practicing democracy, and
so reading really was a sign of protest, and it
was a way for people to show that they practiced
freedom and that they resisted the Nazis.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
By the fall of nineteen forty two, the Council on
Books in Wartime was starting to put its ideas into practice.
This quote. Plans are on foot to make it the
focal point for cooperation between the book publishers and the
various government information agencies, the group said in a statement.
The cooperation of the Office of War Information has already
(27:22):
been secured. The Washington Committee recently spent a most successful
day discussing with ten government agencies problems relating to books
in the war effort. One problem was the perception that
the books being donated to the soldiers were throwaways, stuff
that no one else wanted to read. But the main
(27:44):
issue was practical in nature.
Speaker 5 (27:46):
For troops, like, for example, in North Africa, they would
be marching for miles a day, and so if they
had a book and it was a hardcover book. The
weight of it and the amount of space that it
would take up in their pack.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
It wasn't negligible.
Speaker 5 (28:03):
There's reports of troops just begrudgingly putting it out on
the ground and walking.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
On because it was just too heavy to carry.
Speaker 5 (28:12):
Even though they really wanted to have the distraction of
a story when they had downtime.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
A young officer named Ray Troutman, who headed the Army's
Library section, had an idea. What if the military could
convince publishers to reprint titles from their back catalogs in
a paperback format small enough that it could be tucked
away inside the pockets of a standard uniform. Troutman pitched
(28:40):
it to the Council, which was keen on the notion
of mass producing miniature, inexpensive paperbacks to American troops overseas.
In fact, the Council liked the idea so much that
it proposed spearheading the entire project. William Warder Norton, the
president of W. W. Norton in Company, put together a
(29:03):
detailed operational plan that he negotiated with the Armed Forces
and among the publishers themselves. In addition to the Army
Navy and War Production Board, some seventy publishing companies and
more than a dozen printing houses and suppliers joined the fight.
As Norton put it, quote, this is the most valuable
(29:27):
thing that bookmen can undertake in the conduct of the war.
Speaker 5 (29:31):
The Council on Books in Wartime consisted of every major
and minor publisher in the United States, and so all
of the publishers were asked to submit lists of titles
that would be appealing to young men. You had a
lot of best sellers, you had short story collections, you
had books on sports, really a smattering of everything.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Publishers agreed to sell books to the military at the
cost of manufacturing them about six cents a volume, plus
ten percent for overhead. The books would be kept out
of the civilian market and exclusive distributed overseas. Authors and
publishers each received royalties of one half cent per copy.
(30:16):
The books were printed on magazine presses and then cut
in half so you could make two with each printing.
The organizers came up with a name for these pint
sized paperbacks. Armed Services Editions thousands of popular books to
be given out to servicemen. The Associated Press reported in
(30:37):
a story announcing the program. These special paper bound, pocket
sized editions will be manufactured by various printing plants throughout
the country on presses not normally employed in the printing
of books on paper supplied from Armed Services requirements, so
that the cost will be the lowest in the history
(30:58):
of the industry. The initial Armed Services editions started going
out in September nineteen forty three, and they reached troops
a couple months later.
Speaker 5 (31:10):
The reaction generally was that soldiers could not believe that
they were publishers back home who were bothering to create
these specially sized paperback books that would fit their uniform
pockets so that they would have something to do in
all of their downtime.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
Immediately, reading just took off within the US military.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
The very first title to roll off the presses was
The Education of Hyman Kaplan, a collection of stories published
in The New Yorker by the humorist Leo Roston. Letters
from grateful servicemen filled his mailbox.
Speaker 6 (31:49):
I want to thank you profoundly for myself and more importantly,
for the men here in this god forsaken part of
the globe. Last week we received your book. I read
it and simply roared with laughter. As an experiment, I
read it one night at campfire. The men howled. I
have not heard so laughs in months.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
Another popular Armed Services edition, perhaps the most popular of all,
was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. After
it arrived overseas, Smith received thousands of letters of appreciation.
One Service member called it a quote source of never
ending enjoyment. Another told Smith that because of the book quote,
(32:32):
this heart of mine turned over and became alive again.
Speaker 5 (32:36):
Obviously, the book takes place in Brooklyn, but you'd have
people who grew up on a farm and they would
just say, you know, the way that family was, it
reminded me of my family, or the description of her
walking down the street reminded what it was like for
me to walk down the street in my hometown. It
was like troops just transplanted themselves into that book, and
it was such a precious reminder of home that it
(32:58):
just made them nostalgic and also hopeful, I think, to
one day return back to their families and see those hometowns.
In some ways made them understand what they were fighting for.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Overall, the Armed Services editions became so popular that the
Council was producing forty of them a month, at one
hundred and fifty five thousand copies each. That's six point
two million books every month. Books of all sorts, from
sports and other nonfiction titles to mysteries, westerns and adventure
(33:32):
novels to classic literature by the likes of Charles Dickens
At Garland, Poe Herman, Melville, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Jack London,
Henry David Thoreau, and Leo Tolstoy. The Council received bags
of mail lauding the efforts. Armed services. Editions continued to
play a role even after the war was won. By
(33:54):
the end of nineteen forty five, Germany and Japan had
both surrendered, and yet there were still a whole lot
of troops stationed abroad, celebrating victory, happy to be alive,
but mostly just sitting around waiting to come home. They
were bored, and the armed forces needed more books to
(34:15):
keep them occupied. The problem was publishers were getting a
little desperate. They'd gone through so many popular titles over
the past two years that there wasn't all that much
left to choose from, and so they started scraping the
bottom of the barrel. Digging deeper into their backlists. It's
(34:36):
a good thing they did, because they were about to
pluck a masterpiece from obscurity. In September of nineteen forty five,
the Council on Books in Wartime issued a list of
the seven hundred and forty four Armed Services editions it
(34:58):
had published to date. Contemporary fiction comprised the line share
with one hundred and twenty seven titles, followed by ninety
one humor titles, eighty nine historical novels, and eighty eight westerns.
In total, more than ninety million copies had been delivered
into the hands of servicemen. Around this time, editors at
(35:20):
Charles Scribner's Sons were scrounging around for additional works to
submit to the program. There are no records indicating why
they chose The Great Gatsby, but it's been noted that
one of the librarians who worked for the Council in
nineteen forty five was a Fitzgerald fan. He had corresponded
(35:41):
with the author in the nineteen thirties. Maybe he had
a hand in it. Here's what Molly Guptel Manning thinks.
Speaker 5 (35:49):
Scribners must have gone back to look at books that
it had produced in the twenties, because it had already
exhausted the books from the forties and the thirties.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
The name recognition of f.
Speaker 5 (36:00):
Scott Fitzgerald was still very much a thing, and troops
loved magazines. They definitely read the Saturday Evening posts and
would have been familiar with Scott Fitzgerald's stories, and so
I think that's why scribners ended up choosing The Great Gatsby.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
The Armed Services edition of The Great Gatsby was printed
in October nineteen forty five. More than one hundred and
twenty five thousand copies were shipped to servicemen awaiting their homecomings.
That's more than four times the number of copies that
had ever been sold, including the mere one hundred and
(36:37):
twenty copies sold in nineteen forty four. You also have
to take into account the extent to which Armed Services
editions got passed around, as troops traded titles after reading
them during periods of combat. It was estimated that each
edition would be read three or four times. When conditions
(36:59):
were peaceful, say like if you were sitting around on
an occupied island in the Pacific, the book could make
it to ten or more readings as they changed hands.
Troops waiting to come home in the fall of nineteen
forty five had very little to do, at least compared
to their service during the war, and they were reading
(37:21):
more than ever.
Speaker 5 (37:22):
You could say, the one hundred and twenty five thousand
copies of The Great Gatsby in Armed Services Edition format
were probably read by maybe even a million soldiers, because
it was a policy that you read the book and
then you shared it with the next guy who wanted
to read it.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
Twenty years after The Great gats We failed to catch
fire with the masses. It now had a captive audience
of predominantly young men who were enthralled by its subject matter.
Speaker 5 (37:49):
Their whole time away at war, they were fantasizing about
going home, and there's such a great sense of fantasy
in that book. You know, a version of life where
you can strike it rich and you can go to
great parties and you can have this incredible life. And
I think that was really appealing to Soul series.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
The timing was fortuitous. Literary critics had recently begun to
reconsider Fitzgerald. In nineteen forty four, Charles Weir Junior published
an essay in the Virginia Quarterly Review, which he posited
that quote. Only in The Great Gatsby did Fitzgerald succeed
in putting any amount of material into a form which
(38:30):
was truly significant and expressive. In July nineteen forty, five
months before Gatsby's Armed Services Edition debut, Edmund Wilson edited
a posthumous essay collection of Fitzgerald's works for Esquire, including
The Crackup. Around the same time, a reprint of The
(38:51):
Great Gatsby hit shelves from New Directions Publishing. In the introduction,
Lionel Trilling wrote, quote, Fitzgerald is now beginning to take
his place in our literary tradition. Other reprints came from
Viking and Bantam Books, but Gatsby's popularity among soldiers helped
(39:13):
spark its mass market revival. In their letters to left Ones,
soldiers would talk about books they were reading. Their gats
Be raves jibed with the post war optimism that was
now coursing through the American populace. Ordinary readers in the
US started seeking out the book.
Speaker 5 (39:34):
It takes a little while for the traction to start building,
but it's noticeable the book is starting to appear on shelves.
Critics revisited it and reviewed it again, even though it
had been published, you know, almost twenty years earlier. The
war is over, people have a lot of money to spend.
The economy is booming, like it's a good time, and
(39:56):
so having this story about, you know, this fantastic mansion
on Long Island and these parties and things like that,
the public is very receptive to this. So now they're
starting to buy the book, and they're also enjoying it.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
By nineteen sixty, Gatsby was selling one hundred thousand copies annually.
For the novel's thirty fifth anniversary that year, the literary
scholar Arthur Meisner wrote in The New York Times quote,
the obvious values of the book have been reasonably established.
Fitzgerald created an image of the good American of our time,
(40:35):
in all his complexity of human sympathy, firm moral judgment,
and ironic self possession. We can now afford to turn
our attention to such things, because whatever disagreements we may
have over Fitzgerald's work as a whole, there remain few
doubts of the greatness of Gatsby, or of its imaginative
(40:58):
relevance to American experience. Over the decades, the Great Gatsby
has taken on forms that Fitzgerald never would have thought
possible at the time of his death, like the musical
adaptation now playing on Broadway, or the twenty thirteen film
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which grossed three hundred and fifty three
(41:19):
point six million dollars at the global box office. Manning
believes that we're not for the Council on Books. In wartime,
we wouldn't be talking about Gatsby one hundred years after
its ill fated debut.
Speaker 5 (41:34):
There was nothing else that would infuse the book and
get it to start selling, you know, almost twenty years
after it was originally published, except for the fact that
one hundred and twenty five thousand free copies were distributed.
I mean that just lit a fire under the book.
I think every single way that the Great Gatsby has
(41:56):
re emerged since then, it's due to the Armed Services editions.
Speaker 3 (42:01):
Today, copies of Gatsby's Armed Services edition can sell for
thousands of dollars. Manning was lucky enough to snag hers
before the market soared.
Speaker 5 (42:13):
This is going to pain anybody who is a collector
of Armed Services editions today, But I started collecting the
books before I wrote one books, Front to War, because
I just wanted to see what these things looked like.
I think it took me about five years to write
that book, so that's five years of collecting. And I
would buy Armed Services editions for less than a dollar
(42:36):
because no one knew what they were and they just
look like these really kind of grubby little paperbacks that
don't seem all of that attractive.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
So I think I.
Speaker 5 (42:47):
Purchased my copy of The Great Gatsby for about ten dollars.
Speaker 3 (42:50):
At the time of this recording, there were two copies
of Gatsby's Armed Services Edition available on ABE Books, which
specializes in rare and collectible texts. One was listed for
nine hundred and ninety nine dollars, the other for fourth thousand,
two hundred. You got to wonder what Fitzgerald would have
(43:11):
made of that if he had a crystal ball in
nineteen forty, back when he got that last royalty check
for a paltry thirteen dollars and thirteen cents. That's the
tragedy in all of this. Like many great authors before him,
Fitzgerald never got to enjoy the smashing success of his
(43:32):
landmark work, or to reap the financial rewards. Gatsby's initial
failure haunted him until that fateful afternoon in Sheila Graham's
apartment when he collapsed while eating Hershey Bars and reading
about the latest happenings at Princeton. He didn't know it,
or maybe he only knew it deep within the heart
(43:54):
that failed him.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
But he was right.
Speaker 3 (43:57):
He had written the great American novel, one that generations
of readers would treasure for all time.
Speaker 5 (44:05):
I think if Fitzgerald that it would still be around
one hundred.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
Years later, he would be smiling from his grave.
Speaker 5 (44:11):
If he had known that it was going to be
as successful as it was, I think he would have
died a happy man.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
I have a bit of a sad story now that
the episode's over. Really, after learning about this story and
this episode, I became obsessed. I was like, I just
I have to have an Armed Services edition of The
Great Gatsby just in my heart. I was like, I
need one as an item. I need it in my home.
I will spend money on it. And I scoured used
book websites. I found one copy left what I bought it,
(44:47):
and I bought it, and I was so happy, and
I like went about my day and I had like
two hours of feeling so satisfied. And then I got
an email from the bookseller saying, I'm so sorry I
had to cancel your order. I sold this yesterday.
Speaker 1 (45:02):
Oh no, do you think that they really sold it yesterday?
Or they looked it up and saw how much they're
worth and they're like to hell with that? Yeah, bring
it on eBay, I know.
Speaker 3 (45:12):
Or they just figured out that this episode was about
to come out and they could check the price up later. Seriously,
But now I can't find any. Now I can't find
any for any price.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
I was astounded. I looked online too. The price is
like they were prohibitive. I was blown away.
Speaker 4 (45:26):
Yeah, do we need one?
Speaker 1 (45:27):
Can we expense one? Be on the look out.
Speaker 3 (45:31):
The problem is even if you expense one, I just
can't find one.
Speaker 8 (45:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:35):
Now they're all gone.
Speaker 4 (45:37):
If you are sitting on a copy and would like
to sell it very Special Episodes at gmail dot com,
hit us up.
Speaker 3 (45:43):
I'll make you an offer. I will slide you a
piece of paper with a dollar amount written on it.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
I know. We talked a lot about the We were
talking about the book and this episode's focused on the book.
But I got to ask you, guys. Did you guys
see the twenty thirteen Leonardo DiCaprio movie version of this?
Speaker 3 (45:57):
Yeah?
Speaker 7 (45:57):
I liked it.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
Have you seen the nineteen seventies version with Mia Pharaoh
and Robert Redford?
Speaker 7 (46:02):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (46:03):
I like that one too.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
I'm glad. Which one do you prefer? Did you have
a preference?
Speaker 3 (46:08):
You know what I'm going to say, I think the
Robert maybe because I saw it when I was younger,
But I kind of think the Robert Rudsborre one might
be a little boring. And I'm going to say I
like the Leonardo one because even though I know people
had their critiques of it, I'm like, it's fun, it moves.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
It's poppy.
Speaker 4 (46:23):
I just watched it again on a plane last week
and felt like a real influencer because I put it on.
The person sitting next to me I could tell was
looking at me, seeing and then all of a sudden,
was just five minutes behind me watching the same movie.
Whoa communal experience?
Speaker 1 (46:39):
My only influencing, true influencing. That's incredible influencing in the wild.
That has to be one of the most satisfying things Honestly,
if you're sitting there watching a movie on a plane
and the person next to you goes, you know what,
I want to watch that too. I don't know why.
It's like a book recommendation someone. You see them actually
reading the book, you're like, hell yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:55):
I mean that's basically how The Great Gatsby became popular.
All these soldiers sitting around after World War Two being
like that book looks good.
Speaker 4 (47:02):
Yeah, you gotta check this one, Sarah. There's not a
ton of characters in this one. But if you were
gonna cast Fitzgerald, who's your actor?
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Okay? I thought about this one a bunch because it's
like there's a good range. I picked him right towards
the end of his life, so I thought, then we
get some actor who play I'm younger. So I picked
for f Scott Fitzgerald. This is a wild call, but
he has the broken heartedness for this role. Will Arnett
don't like that. If you don't like that one, I've
got a second will for you, Will Forte. He's a
(47:31):
little safer choice, but both of them have that broken heartedness.
They can get to the essence of f Scott Fitzgerald.
I thought, what do you think.
Speaker 3 (47:38):
My mind just might be distorted by the movie Midnight
in Paris. But there's a great performance in that movie
by Tom Hindleston as Scott. I call him Scott totally
as you could, So I just I think Tom Hidleston
does a great job. And now that Tom Hidleston is
a little older, I'm like, great, he should just run
it back and play an older, broken down Scott Fitzgerald.
I also saw Tom Hidleston in a pinter play in London,
(48:02):
which is a brag that I'm saying. I got to
see him in portrayal in London, but he was great, So.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
That's my vote. I'm duly impressed, like really doly impressed.
Speaker 3 (48:10):
Oh yeah, I'm very sophisticated. I'm a very sophisticated person.
I attempt to collect a rare books and I see
plays occasionally.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
The effort that counts outside of America no less, did
you guys have very special characters for this one?
Speaker 3 (48:22):
You know what? I think my very special character is
the person who was a fan of f Scott Fitzgerald,
who was the one that they can't like prove that
it was them who decided that this should be the addition.
But the one who was like a fan, who was
part of the decision making process and what these books
would be, who decided that The Great Gatsby should be
printed as an arm Services edition.
Speaker 4 (48:44):
It's just so crazy that that's how life works. That
were probably one person. That's why we all read this
in tenth grade or whatever.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
It's back on Broadway.
Speaker 4 (48:54):
A couple very special character nominees for me, Molly Manning,
who wrote the book about went to war, Just thank
you very much for talking to us and giving us
all the great background and little pull back the curtain here.
Most of these episodes are not timely in any way.
We could release them in you know, next week or
(49:14):
in two months, and they're going to be just as enjoyable.
This one, because we're trying to hit this anniversary. Came
together very quickly, So shout out to Joe Pompeo and
Mary Doo and Josh and John and everyone who jumped
in to turn this around very quickly.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
Thank you to all you very special people. Nice work, y'all.
Speaker 4 (49:35):
Very special episodes is made by some very special people.
Today's episode was written by Joe Pompeo. Joe previously worked
on our Agatha Christy episode The Case of the Missing Novelist.
It was one of our top performers last year.
Speaker 7 (49:49):
Go check it out.
Speaker 4 (49:51):
He'll be back in two weeks with a good old
fashioned spy story. This podcast is hosted by Danis Schwartz,
Zaron Burnett, and Jason English. Our producer is Josh Fisher.
Editing and sound design by Jonathan Washington, editing by Mary Doo,
mixing and mastering by Josh Fisher. Original music by Alise McCoy.
(50:15):
Research and fact checking by Joe Pompeo and Austin Thompson.
Show logo by Lucy Quintania. Our executive producer is Jason English.
If you'd like to email the show, you can reach
us at Very Special Episodes at gmail dot com. Very
Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Zaron Burnett
Dana Schwartz
Jason English
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