Celebrating Gatsby Book Club

Join the Downtown Huntsville Public Library in celebrating 100 years of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott. Fitzgerald.  Today we will be discussing the classic novel.

Published in 1925 the novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922. After its publication by Scribner's in April 1925, The Great Gatsby received generally favorable reviews, though some literary critics believed it did not equal Fitzgerald's previous efforts. Compared to his earlier novels, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922), the novel was a commercial disappointment. It sold fewer than 20,000 copies by October, and Fitzgerald's hopes of a monetary windfall from the novel were unrealized. When the author died in 1940, he believed himself to be a failure and his work forgotten. 

100 years later the book has become a required read for most high schools and a part of American popular culture.