The Great Gatsby (Annotated): With historical introduction by Andrew Hole

By F. Scott Fitzgerald and Andrew Hole

Haven't read The Great Gatsby yet?
Here are 3 good reasons to do it (and to suggest it to your friends)

1 - You won't get bored
If boredom is not your thing, this is the book for you. Given its age (the first edition came out in 1925) you might be led to think of this work as "a boulder", a heavy piece of writing, but this is not the case. Fitzgerald's style is dynamic, the writing brilliant and expressive. Do not be bored!

2 - You'll Get Richer
No, you won't make a ton of money reading The Great Gatsby, but you will enrich your knowledge by immersing yourself up to the tip of your hair in the unrepeatable era that was "The Roaring Twenties." Jay Gatsby will take you to a New York of parties, alcohol, beautiful women, and jazz music. You'll take a ride on the merry-go-round of the American dream... before it breaks down.

3 - You'll be able to say you've read "A Real Disaster".
Yep, it's not all gold that glitters. If it is true that today The Great Gatsby is considered a masterpiece of American literature, it is equally true that when it was released in bookstores (on April 10, 1925) the reception was not at all what was expected. Most critics agreed that it was "A Real Disaster". The first review ever to be written in New York, just two days after publication, was titled "F. Scott Fitzgerald's Last Disaster."

Not Just Gatsby
What you will find in this volume is the original 1925 edition. No changes of any kind have been made to Fitzgerald's text, not even a small correction! We think that's only fair: to respect originality!

but...

We have enhanced the work by adding a historical introduction by Andrew Hole. Andrew will take you hand in hand and accompany you in the 20's. He will make you understand why that period was extraordinary and for many reasons unrepeatable. A real journey into the heart of the problems that Fitzgerald's American generation had to face.

Here's what you'll find in this volume:

• The original work The Great Gatsby from 1925
• The Birth of Consumerism
• Women's Emancipation
• The Discovery of Jazz
• The Prohibition
• American Isolationism
• The Great Depression

...all illustrated with original period photos!

Behind every great work are often hidden curiosities and anecdotes. The Great Gatsby is no exception.
I want to tell you a few:

A masterpiece born of failure
Before writing his spiritual legacy to humanity, Fitzgerald worked for about a year and a half on writing a play that he believed would make him Broadway's most popular playwright. The play was titled The Vegetable, or from President to Postman. In September 1923 The Vegetable was staged for the first time in Atlantic City: it was a total fiasco. The show was considered mediocre and poorly written. The author had entered the spiral of alcoholism and was in desperate need of money, so he decided to concentrate on writing the novel.

Hemingway Disgusted
Ernest Hemingway called the cover of The Great Gatsby "the ugliest cover I have ever seen."

The Title is to be Changed
Francis Scott Fitzgerald did not like the title The Great Gatsby. Before its publication he tried many times to change the publisher's mind. His proposals were: Among the Ash-Heaps and Millionaires, Trimalchio in West Egg, Gold-Hatted Gatsby, The High-Bouncing Lover, On the Road to West Egg or, simply, Gatsby. No dice, the publisher wasn't convinced even when Fitzgerald suggested Under the Red, White and Blue... Lucky for us!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oldpress
• Release date: Oct 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9791220861106

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) is regarded as one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century. His short stories and novels are set in the American ‘Jazz Age’ of the Roaring Twenties and include This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night, The Great Gatsby, The Last Tycoon, and Tales of the Jazz Age.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

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Roaring were the years, as roaring was the spirit of the character of James Gatz, the real name of Jay Gatsby, whimsical and contradictory character of this revolutionary novel by Francis Scott Fitzgerald.

Novel defined by T. S. Eliot - The first step forward made by American fiction since Henry James.

But what were " The Roaring Twenties"?

With this locution are defined the years that pass from the first post-war period until the end of the decade. This historical period saw the United States, and in tow also part of Europe, implement changes that affected various aspects of economic, social, artistic, and cultural life.

An extraordinary period, for some aspects, is considered unrepeatable and that will tragically culminate in the Great Depression of 1929. A historical season that cannot be ignored if one wants to savor Fitzgerald's work intensely.

I wanted to write this preface in order to immerse the reader in this fascinating period of reconstruction, discovery, escape, and revolution.

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Original cover of the first edition

THE CONSUMER ECONOMY

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Europe had just emerged battered from the previous decade and was seriously busy licking its wounds. The United States took the opportunity to pay off the debts of a Germany that was completely on its knees. An economic aid that also served to preserve a large consumer market for goods that the United States was going to produce massively.

For the US, growth was exponential and they consolidated their position as the richest country in the world. They quickly transformed their economy from warlike to peaceful by subjecting their citizens to mass consumerism. Suffice it to say that between 1922 and 1928 the industrial economy of the United States grew by 68%.

To ensure that consumers were reached and helped to buy, it was during this decade that new tools to support consumption were born in the United States as:

- Innovative advertising techniques

- New media

- New forms of distribution, such as department stores

- Credit facilitation, such as installment payments

And everyone was buying!

Towards the end of the 1920s, 1 in 5 Americans owned a car, half the population owned an iron and 15% owned a washing machine, fan, toaster...

A great incentive to purchase, as mentioned above, was given by the new media, one above all: the radio. This tool had a great communicative impact and not only related to consumerism but also and above all to culture and art.

If in previous decades owning a radio meant being rich, it was from the '20s that this tool became available to everyone (or almost). The 400,000 receivers of 1922 became about 8,000,000 in 1928.

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1920s advertising aimed at the middle class.

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One of the first department stores of the 1920s

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A radio play, The Great Divide, being broadcast at the studio of early AM radio station WGY in Schenectady, New York in 1923

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Woman tuning early radio, from 1923 radio magazine

FROM JAZZ TO EMANCIPATION

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The growth of the United States in the 1920s was unstoppable, and not only from an economic point of view.

There are many, in fact, areas that were influenced by the well-being and carefree attitude of the first post-war period. Thanks to the strong development of technologies and the mass diffusion of music, for example, had its highest expression in Jazz which, starting from New Orleans and passing through Chicago, landed in the early '20s in New York, determining the beginning of the Jazz Age.

Jazz became more and more popular and established itself as dance music and in nightclubs. And the Charleston is the dance that best represents those years. The dance of the epileptics, as it was defined by the well-wishers, represented a revolution of gender because it changed not only the costume but the way of thinking.

The female figure in the society of those years lived, in fact, one of the most obvious transformations, both from a political point of view and socio-cultural emancipation. While the movement of the suffragettes continued its battle, which had begun several years earlier in Great Britain and which saw an important turning point on 26 August 1920 with the approval in the United States of the 19th amendment to the American Constitution, which for the first time introduced the right to vote for women, the female figure transformed her image in her look and attitudes, influenced by the European movement called Flappers.

The word Flapper, the slang of the British language, in the beginning, referred to novice prostitutes. Later this term was used to indicate a young woman who passed to more adult age. In the '20s the word Flappers was used to indicate those emancipated women who had attitudes and behaviors that, until then, had been of male dominance.

The Flappers wore dresses and short skirts showing for the first time their ankles. They cut their hair short, listened to jazz, and danced the Charleston, but not only that, they smoked, drank alcohol, drove cars, and broke away clearly and unequivocally from any behavior good girl, well educated. A revolution excellently represented in Fitzgerald's work.

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Carter And King Jazzing Orchestra

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A couple dances the Charleston in 1920s New York

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Mary Louise Brooks Flappers sex symbol

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A flapper driving a car

ISOLATIONISM AND PROHIBITIONISM

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As we have already seen, the United States was consolidating its primacy as an economic power on a global level. Americans felt rich (although this was not true for everyone) and, as often happens, the rich want to defend their achievements. And so it is that, in those years, a paranoid defense of wealth is established at the political level. If we look at the other side of the coin in Europe, where prosperity was slow in arriving, many people left to try to reach the goal that could change their lives. On the other side of the ocean, many visualized the American dream.

And so it was that the political rejection of intervention in favor of Europe grew among many American citizens. And this desire found its highest expression in the 29th President of the United States, Warren Harding, who not only accepted this popular sentiment but amplified its demands.

In the so-called Roaring Twenties, therefore, lives a policy of isolationism that sees rapid growth of intolerance towards foreigners and an all too superficial combination of the words European = subversive.

And this is how hostility towards immigrants increased, just think that in 1924 a law established that only 2% of the population of that specific ethnic group, already resident in the United States, would be admitted to the country. The larger the national community already present in the country, the greater the number of compatriots who could enter the New World. In this way, the entry of individuals from Southern and Eastern Europe was limited, since from here departures had begun at a later date and had not yet reached the scale of those that had taken place in the countries of Northern Europe, Germany, and Great Britain.

It was in this climate of intolerance that the moralism and fundamentalism of certain religious groups succeeded in putting political pressure on issues they strongly supported. This is how the seventeenth amendment of the United States of America on January 16, 1920, begins the season of prohibition, from that day on, in the whole country, it was forbidden the production, transportation, and the sale of any alcoholic beverage.

The consumption of alcohol was a serious problem for the growing country, it created damages in particular at a social level. To give an idea of the dimensions of this phenomenon, it is enough to think that on the evening of January 15, thousands of people attacked the stores to try to get the last bottles legally on sale.

But this measure did not stop the thirst. Americans wanted to continue drinking. What satisfied them was the black market, almost always run by gangsters, who put alcohol back into circulation charging up to 10 times more than before.

Thus began a season of smuggling, production, and illegal sales. At first, the distribution was done under the counter through common food stores. As soon as the illegal trade became extraordinary, the underworld got organized and started to open real clubs where it was possible to freely consume alcohol: the so-called Speakeasy.

Only in New York, there were 32,000 speakeasies, whereas the legal bars before prohibition were less than half.

It can be said that the desire for freedom and fun of the Roaring Twenties and the moralism of prohibition were complicit in making another phenomenon of that period explode: gangsterism.

One of the leading exponents of this phenomenon was undoubtedly Al Capone who, by illegally exploiting prohibition, was able to create a business of several billion dollars at the time.

Prohibition was a period of strong contradictions as well as failures. It did not help at all to mitigate the plague of alcoholism, but rather was complicit in its expansion and fed the financial growth and power of the businessmen of the organized underworld.

It was Al Capone himself, during an interview to make this statement: I made money by providing a product that people wanted. If this is illegal, then my customers, hundreds of people in good society, are also breaking the law. The only difference between us is that I sell and they buy. Everyone calls me a gangster. I call myself a businessman.

On December 5, 1933, the prohibition period came to an end. Millions of American citizens were once again able to legally purchase and consume alcohol. The government had a renewed economic improvement due to taxes on alcohol consumption and many criminal gangs were weakened as a billion-dollar business collapsed overnight.

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The immigration act 1924

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Seizure and sewer spillage of a barrel of alcohol during Prohibition

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Interior of a crowded bar shortly before prohibition went into effect

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Policeman standing alongside wrecked car and cases of moonshine

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Prohibition officers raiding the lunch room

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Al Capone 1929

THE END OF THE ROARING YEARS

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Just as the end of Jay Gatsby is tragic, the end of the decade sees the dream turn into tragedy.

The America of easy consumption, of building development, of superficial carefreeness accompanied by jazz music and by the frenetic rhythms of the Charleston, breaks down on a Tuesday in 1929 when the Wall Street stock exchange, a mirror of that embellished country, collapses replacing the dreams of progress and well-being with smoke and rubble. American citizens realize in a single day that they have lived a lifestyle beyond their means.

The credits too easily granted to citizens and investors now had to be repaid, but the money was not there. The stock market reports a loss of about 10 billion dollars. The speculative bubble brings chain bankruptcies, thousands of people lose their jobs every day and are forced to leave their homes unable to pay their mortgages. Feeling they have no way out, many people decide to take their own lives (the suicide rate sees an increase of 23%).

Even if President Hoover continues to nurture an optimism that was fictitious, that tragic Black Tuesday will mark not only the beginning of the greatest economic crisis in the United States but above all, the end of a period of great social and cultural revolutions and too easy utopias.

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Long line of people waiting to be fed in New York City

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United States Bank failure

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Unemployed waiting in line at a soup kitchen that opened during the Great Depression

F.S. FITZGERALD

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No one like Francis Scott Fitzgerald makes us relive, through his novels and stories, that historical period defined as the Roaring Twenties. Fitzgerald is undoubtedly the noblest spokesman of the Jazz Age and of all the socio-cultural upheavals that took place during the interwar period.

Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul on September 24, 1896, to a distinguished, aristocratic father and an Irish Catholic mother who was the daughter of a wealthy merchant.

After the birth of Scott his family moved to the state of New York but, lost their jobs, they had to return to St. Paul. Here the mother's family bequeathed a business to the daughter and the father ended up being a kept man. This fact begins to instill in young Scott an ambiguous feeling towards life between inconclusiveness (of the father) and social revenge (of the mother). This frustration will follow him throughout his life and influence his character and writing.

The relationship with writing Scott cultivated from an early age and this led him to publish, in the newspaper of the high school, his first detective story (The Mystery of Raymond Mortgage) at the age of only 13 years.

However, the results at school were not as good and he was expelled from college for lack of commitment. He managed to graduate from a school in New Jersey and enrolled at Princeton University. This choice was mainly dictated by the obsessive desire to be part of the high and rich society more than by the interest in studying.

And, once again, his results were questionable. His passion for writing continued and saw him grappling with articles in the college magazine, stories for literary journals, and scripts for musicals, but neglect of study would place him on academic probation.

It will be Ginevra King, a girl of high society, which will mark forever his vision of love and more generally of the affections. A troubled relationship that will shape in him a certain vision of the female figure, a vision that will often report in his works. The relationship will end with the abandonment by Ginevra, leaving in Scott a sense of inadequacy and emptiness that will accompany him also in his future affections.

The meeting with Ginevra will also mark the beginning of his relationship with alcohol and the end of his academic career. Scott will leave Princeton without obtaining a degree.

Upon leaving college Scott decided to enlist in