I’m happy to announce that my novel Daisy, a refashioning of The Great Gatsby from Daisy Buchanan’s point of view, is now available in paperback. You can find it here if you’d like to buy a copy (and I hope you do!). It was previously available in hardcover and Kindle versions as well as on Audible.
The critical reaction to Daisy has been wonderful. You can find review snippets at my website: www.LibbySternberg.com .
I’m reposting below a blog piece I wrote on the anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby this past spring. You might find it interesting if you’re as fascinated by the book (and its author) as I am!
ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE PUBLICATION OF THE GREAT GATSBY: April 10, 1925
Maybe he wrote it because he, like the former slave Trimalchio—which F. Scott Fitzgerald favored as a title for The Great Gatsby—seemed to be the man who’d made it big but didn’t fit in. After all, he hailed from a middle-class family in the Midwest, and always felt like “a poor boy in a rich town.”
Maybe he wrote it because his adult life seemed to be an endless search for the girl who got away, like Gatsby’s quest for Daisy. Fitzgerald’s biographer, Matthew Bruccoli, wrote that it allowed him “to dramatize the most powerful experiences associated with his love for (his wife) Zelda.” After he wrote Gatsby, Zelda drifted away from him on the deep sea of mental illness.
Maybe he wrote it because he needed the money and the continued fame—he always seemed to need more money—and he wanted to deliver something sweet and tragic in a world filled with raucous glitz and glamour.
Whatever his reasons, today many consider F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, published on April 10, 1925, to be “The Great American Novel,” a story of striving for the American Dream of riches and status that ends badly, but is beautifully told.
Yet when it was published, Gatsby was not a best-seller. Copies of its print run were still in the publisher’s warehouse when Fitzgerald died. By that time, it had sold only 25,000 copies.
Only later did it rise to the level of best-seller, the reasons for which the writer Maureen Corrigan does a great job chronicling in her book So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.
Gatsby is short (barely 50,000 words), so it’s perfect for the limited attention spans of students and ultimately made its way into classrooms. It also made its way onto free GI book lists during World War II. Both helped speed its popularity after Fitzgerald’s death.
It’s so well-known today that it even turned up in a prison book discussion scene from the television series The Wire where an inmate sums up Gatsby’s ultimate failure at trying to buy his way into a higher social class this way: “’cause (Gatsby) wasn’t ready to get real with the story, that sh** caught up to him.”
I sometimes wonder if the reason Gatsby didn’t soar during its launch phase was because audiences were growing tired of Fitzgerald’s type of tales, of his flirtatious Jazz Age heroines and dapper beaus.
At least two of that year’s best-selling novels are historicals—E. Barrington’s Glorious Apollo, a fictional biography of Lord Byron, and Rafael Sabatini’s The Carolinian, a Revolutionary War tale whose author was already famous for Scaramouche and Captain Blood. The list also contains a smattering of tales that sound like coming-of-age stories, some melodramatic. Only one classic novel makes it, Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith.
If readers weren’t buying, some critics had issues, too.
H.L. Mencken praised Gatsby’s writing but called the story a “glorified anecdote” in his 1925 Chicago Tribune review.
Time magazine’s review was a snarky summary of the plot, beginning with the line: “Still the brightest boy in the class, F. Scott Fitzgerald holds up his hand (to tell Gatsby’s story).”
Yet, like boats against the current, we are borne ceaselessly back to our collective love of Gatsby.
Why?
For me, the novel ignited a sense of intense longing, of Sehnsucht. I read it as a young teen, on the cusp of adulthood, when undefined emotions crowded out rational thought.
Youth is the time of constant Sehnsucht, though, and every chapter of the book seemed drenched in that yearning for what could have been if only, if only…
Even the scenes where Gatsby and Daisy played no roles carried the melody of bittersweet possibilities.
A whole novel that pulls together one single strong emotion? Yes, I was in for that. And so were many others, after poor Fitzgerald had floated away from the world.
Today, readers might look for deeper meanings in every phrase of this great novel, but for me, it represents a fierce yet unrealized desire, a sense that we can devise second acts for ourselves, if only we can figure out the right way to plot them. “Poor boy” Jay Gatsby plotted his second act by achieving the American Dream, but it was in service to a greater goal—a great love. If only it had lasted.
If only…
Libby Sternberg is a novelist. Her novel Daisy tells the story of The Great Gatsby from Daisy’s point of view and has been hailed by Booklist as “original and charming.”
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