The Great Gatsby Flopped While Fitzgerald Lived
Quick answer: The Great Gatsby sold poorly and Fitzgerald died in 1940 believing he had failed. The true story of the flop that slowly became the great American novel.
In December 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald was living quietly in Hollywood, recovering from a heart attack, working each day on an unfinished novel about a film producer. He was forty-four. His books had almost stopped selling; his final royalty statements recorded sales so small they have become legend, and unsold copies of The Great Gatsby's modest second printing were reportedly still sitting in his publisher's warehouse, fifteen years after they were bound. On 21 December he died of a heart attack in an apartment on North Hayworth Avenue, convinced, by most accounts of his final years, that his work was already forgotten.
He was wrong by about five years. The novel he considered his finest, the one that had disappointed him commercially in 1925, was about to be pressed into the hands of roughly one hundred and fifty thousand American servicemen, and after that nothing about his reputation would ever be small again. The story of how Gatsby failed, and then refused to stay failed, is the sharpest lesson in literature about the difference between a book's first reception and its actual worth.
The fastest start in American letters
Fitzgerald's beginning was the opposite of obscure. This Side of Paradise, published by Scribner's in 1920 when he was twenty-three, made him famous almost overnight and made his marriage to Zelda Sayre possible within the week of publication. Through the 1920s he became one of the highest-paid short story writers in America; at his peak the Saturday Evening Post paid him $4,000 for a single story, a fortune at the time. He and Zelda lived like the characters he wrote about, expensively and in public.
That success set the scale of his expectations. When he finished The Great Gatsby in 1924, working in France with a discipline he rarely matched again, he believed he had written something new in American fiction, and he told his editor Maxwell Perkins so. He hoped for sales of around 75,000 copies. He had reasons: his first two novels had sold well, and he was among the most recognisable writers alive.
April 1925: the shrug
Scribner's published The Great Gatsby on 10 April 1925 with a first printing of about 21,000 copies. A second printing of 3,000 followed in August. And then, essentially, it stopped. The novel sold fewer copies in its first year than This Side of Paradise had, and it earned Fitzgerald less than he could make from a single magazine story. Reviews were mixed: some critics found the story thin or the people unpleasant, while a minority saw exactly what it was. Fellow writers, including T. S. Eliot and Edith Wharton, wrote to him with serious praise, which he treasured and quoted for years.
The commercial verdict stung more than the critical one. Fitzgerald had staked a claim to being an artist rather than an entertainer, and the market had answered with indifference. Money pressure pushed him back towards magazine work, and the next novel, Tender Is the Night, took nine years to arrive. When it was published in 1934, into the middle of the Depression, its sales were also a disappointment to him.
The long slide
The 1930s dismantled him methodically. Zelda's breakdown in 1930 began years of hospitalisations and staggering medical bills. His drinking worsened. In 1936 he published the Crack-Up essays in Esquire, an act of public self-examination so raw that friends thought it career suicide: a famous author announcing, in plain prose, that he had broken. In 1937 he took the practical way out and went to Hollywood, where MGM paid him $1,000 a week to write and rewrite scripts, most of which reached the screen without his name or did not reach it at all.
By 1940 his novels were commercially dead. His last royalty statement has been widely reported as amounting to $13.13, and accounts of his final year describe sales of his books dwindling to a few dozen copies. Yet the notebooks and letters from that year do not show a man who had stopped working. He was writing The Last Tycoon with real seriousness, sober, keeping careful chapter charts, telling his daughter Scottie in letters that the old talent was moving again. He died mid-book, on 21 December 1940.
The resurrection he never saw
The revival began almost immediately and gathered speed without him. His friend the critic Edmund Wilson edited The Last Tycoon for publication in 1941, and its evident quality startled reviewers into re-reading the earlier books. Then came the decisive accident of history: during the Second World War, the Council on Books in Wartime shipped cheap Armed Services Editions to American troops, and The Great Gatsby was among the titles. Roughly 150,000 copies went out to servicemen, a distribution the 1925 edition had never dreamed of.
Through the late 1940s and 1950s, critics and scholars rebuilt his reputation floor by floor, and the book entered school and university curricula, where it has lived ever since. Today The Great Gatsby sells hundreds of thousands of copies a year and sits near the centre of any argument about the great American novel. The arithmetic is brutal and clarifying: the author saw perhaps 24,000 copies printed in his lifetime; the decades after his death have seen tens of millions.
What a working writer can take from this
The obvious lesson is that first reception is not verdict, but Fitzgerald's story sharpens it: even the author's own despair is not verdict. He had every rational reason in 1940 to consider Gatsby a failure. Every measurable signal, sales, royalties, print runs, said so. The signals were simply wrong, because a book's real audience sometimes has not been born yet, or has not yet been handed the book. No writer can see around that corner, which is exactly why quitting on the evidence of silence is premature.
The quieter lesson is in his last year. Broke, unfashionable and ill, he was at his desk keeping chapter charts for a novel he doubted anyone would want. That is the professional habit separated from every reward that usually justifies it, and it is why there was a Last Tycoon for Wilson to publish and a reputation for the war editions to revive. Keep producing finished, submitted work and you leave the future something to find. Sending a poem to a contest that reads and scores every entry, as Writory's monthly one does, is a small modern version of the same wager: the work goes where readers are, and the verdict is never just silence.
What to read, and how
Read Gatsby as a maker rather than a student: it is barely 50,000 words, nine chapters, and nearly every scene is doing double work. Watch how Nick's narration lets Fitzgerald be lyrical and sceptical in the same paragraph. The famous closing line about boats against the current earns its music because two hundred pages of concrete detail precede it. Then read the Crack-Up essays for the other side of the ledger: what it costs, and what honesty on the page sounds like when the writer has nothing left to protect.
What poets can take from this
- Judge your work by the best readers it has found, not the number of them; Fitzgerald held on to Eliot's letter, not the sales figures.
- Separate money problems from talent problems; Fitzgerald's 1930s were a cash crisis long before they were a craft crisis.
- Keep finishing things even in a bad decade; unfinished work cannot be revived by anyone.
- Reread your own strongest pages when the market ignores you, and ask honestly whether they have gotten worse or the weather has changed.
- Let admired writers' praise be data you are allowed to believe.
- Put work where future readers can reach it; distribution, not quality, was what changed for Gatsby in 1945.
Try it yourself
Write a poem set in a warehouse of unsold books, at night, in the year the author dies, ending on the morning the crates are finally opened.
Questions
Was The Great Gatsby successful when it was first published?
No. The 1925 first printing was about 21,000 copies, a second printing of 3,000 followed, and sales stalled well below Fitzgerald's hopes of 75,000. Reviews were mixed, and the novel earned him less than a single well-paid magazine story.
Did Fitzgerald know Gatsby would become a classic?
He believed in the book's quality and said so to his editor, and he kept letters of praise from writers like T. S. Eliot. But by his death in 1940 his books had nearly stopped selling, and accounts of his last years suggest he thought his reputation was finished.
How did The Great Gatsby become famous after his death?
Edmund Wilson's 1941 edition of the unfinished Last Tycoon prompted critical re-reading, and during the Second World War around 150,000 Armed Services Edition copies of Gatsby were distributed to American troops. Postwar critics and school curricula then fixed the book at the centre of American literature.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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