HAPPY BIRTHDAY FRIEND

I cannot imagine my life without this book.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic The Great Gatsby (books by this author) was published on this day in 1925. The title was not one Fitzgerald liked; he'd asked his editor, Maxwell Perkins, to change it to either Trimalchio or Gold-Hatted Gatsby just a month prior, but Perkins had advised him against both. Shortly after, Fitzgerald requested a change to Under the Red, White and Blue, but by then it was too late. Fitzgerald remained convinced that the title wasn't a good one even after it was published; in hindsight, it's hard to imagine the book carrying his previous suggestions — like Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires, On the Road to West Egg, or The High-Bouncing Lover.

Fitzgerald was already a huge celebrity, his This Side of Paradise having made him one five years prior, but Gatsby was not nearly as commercially successful as his first two novels had been. The book got a boost, though, nearly 20 years later when the American military distributed nearly 150,000 copies to WWII servicemen, but it wasn't until the 1960s that it was widely accepted as a great American novel.