100 Fun Facts About The Great Gatsby

Who wrote The Great Gatsby?

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it; his full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, after the distant cousin who wrote the words to The Star-Spangled Banner.

In which year was The Great Gatsby first published?

The Great Gatsby was first published in 1925, released by Charles Scribner's Sons on April 10 of that year; the story itself is set in the summer of 1922.

Who narrates The Great Gatsby?

Nick Carraway narrates; he is 29 when the story begins and turns 30 during it, a birthday he only remembers in the middle of the Chapter 7 quarrel.

Which fictional Long Island community does Gatsby live in?

Gatsby lives in West Egg, the 'new money' peninsula across the bay from the Buchanans' 'old money' East Egg; Fitzgerald modelled it on the North Shore village where he rented a house in 1922.

What colour is the light at the end of Daisy's dock that Gatsby stares at across the bay?

Green is the colour of the light at the end of Daisy's dock; Nick first sees Gatsby alone on his lawn reaching toward it, and it closes the book as the symbol of everything he cannot reach.

Where is Daisy Buchanan originally from?

Daisy is from Louisville, Kentucky, where Gatsby met her in October 1917 while stationed as a young officer at Camp Taylor, and never let go.

How is Nick related to Daisy?

Her second cousin once removed is how Nick describes Daisy in the first chapter; that distant kinship gets him invited to dinner in East Egg and later lets him arrange the reunion over tea.

Which sport did Tom Buchanan star in at Yale?

Football: Nick calls Tom one of the most powerful ends ever to play at New Haven, a man who reached such acute excellence at 21 that everything afterward savours of anticlimax.

What is Jordan Baker's sporting occupation?

Golfer: Jordan Baker is a tournament golf champion, and Nick recalls a rumour that she once moved her ball from a bad lie in a semi-final, one of the novel's many small dishonesties.

What does George Wilson do for a living?

Runs a garage: George Wilson's garage and filling station sits in the valley of ashes, where Tom stops for petrol and where Myrtle is later struck down on the road outside.

Whose eyes stare out from the faded billboard over the valley of ashes?

Doctor T. J. Eckleburg is the optometrist whose giant spectacled eyes, blue and a yard high, look down on the valley of ashes from a faded billboard; George Wilson later takes them for the eyes of God.

What was Gatsby's name at birth?

James Gatz was his name at birth; the son of shiftless farm people renamed himself at 17, the day he rowed out to a millionaire's yacht on Lake Superior.

In which state was Gatsby born?

North Dakota is where Gatsby was born to shiftless farm people; he later lasted only two weeks at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, dismayed by the janitor's work that paid his way.

Which copper magnate took the teenage Gatsby aboard his yacht?

Dan Cody, a product of the Montana copper booms, kept Gatsby aboard his yacht for five years; Cody's mistress Ella Kaye then cheated him out of the $25,000 he was left.

At which Oxford college did Gatsby briefly study after the war?

Trinity is the college in whose quad Gatsby's Oxford photograph was taken; he stayed only five months in 1919 under a scheme for officers, which makes 'an Oxford man' both true and misleading.

Which small European kingdom awarded Gatsby a medal for wartime valour?

Montenegro awarded it; Gatsby carries the Order of Danilo, inscribed 'Montenegro, Nicolas Rex', in his pocket to prove his stories, alongside a photograph of himself at Oxford.

What make of car does Gatsby drive?

A Rolls-Royce: Nick calls it a rich cream colour, Tom sneers at it as a 'circus wagon', and it is the big yellow car that kills Myrtle Wilson with Daisy at the wheel.

Which real-life gangster inspired Meyer Wolfsheim, the man Gatsby says fixed the 1919 World Series?

Arnold Rothstein, the New York gambler accused of fixing the 1919 World Series, was Fitzgerald's model; Wolfsheim wears cufflinks of human molars and declines to attend Gatsby's funeral.

Where does the climactic confrontation between Gatsby and Tom take place?

A suite at the Plaza Hotel: on the hottest day of the summer the party takes a parlour there, where Tom exposes Gatsby's bootlegging and Daisy admits she once loved her husband too.

Where is Gatsby when George Wilson shoots him?

In his swimming pool: it is the first time Gatsby has used the pool all summer; after shooting him, Wilson turns the gun on himself.

Who is Henry Gatz, who arrives several days after the murder?

Gatsby's father, Henry C. Gatz, arrives for the funeral; he shows Nick a boyhood schedule his son wrote in the back of a Hopalong Cassidy book, and almost nobody else attends.

Which title had Fitzgerald settled on in November 1924, before being talked out of it?

Trimalchio in West Egg was the title he settled on; Trimalchio is the vulgar, party-throwing freedman of Petronius's Satyricon, and other candidates included Gold-Hatted Gatsby and The High-Bouncing Lover.

Which patriotic-sounding title did Fitzgerald push weeks before Gatsby was published in 1925?

Under the Red, White, and Blue was the title Fitzgerald cabled from Capri that March, weeks before publication; the book had already gone to press, so it was too late.

Which legendary Scribner's editor persuaded Fitzgerald to revise the manuscript?

Maxwell Perkins, the Scribner's editor who later shepherded Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, urged the revisions; Fitzgerald rewrote heavily on the galley proofs in the winter before publication.

What is the name of Francis Cugat's cover painting for the first edition?

Celestial Eyes shows a disembodied face over a carnival skyline; Cugat finished it before the novel was done, and Fitzgerald told his editor he had taken the jacket into the book.

Roughly how many copies had The Great Gatsby sold by October 1925?

Fewer than 20,000 copies had sold by that October; the first printing of 20,870 moved so slowly that Fitzgerald died in 1940 with copies of the second printing unsold, believing the book forgotten.

Which wartime programme sent 155,000 free copies of Gatsby to US soldiers and revived its fortunes?

The Armed Services Editions, pocket-sized paperbacks produced by the Council on Books in Wartime, shipped 155,000 copies of Gatsby to servicemen during and after the Second World War and turned a forgotten flop into a classic.

On what date did The Great Gatsby enter the US public domain?

January 1, 2021 is when the novel entered the US public domain, 95 years after its first publication; a flood of new editions and prequels such as Michael Farris Smith's Nick followed almost immediately.

Roughly how many copies had The Great Gatsby sold worldwide by early 2020?

30 million copies had sold worldwide by early 2020; through the 2010s it sold around 500,000 copies a year, and it has been translated into 42 languages.

Under what pen name did Fitzgerald write the novel's epigraph himself?

Thomas Parke D'Invilliers is a poet character from Fitzgerald's first novel; the other three options are likewise his own creations, from that same novel, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Last Tycoon.

According to Zelda Fitzgerald, Gatsby was partly based on which mysterious Long Island neighbour?

Max Gerlach, a reputed bootlegger who lived nearby, is the neighbour Zelda named; a surviving note from him to Fitzgerald signs off with 'old sport', the phrase Gatsby uses on everyone.

Which Chicago socialite, whom Fitzgerald loved at 18, inspired the character of Daisy?

Ginevra King, a Chicago debutante Fitzgerald met in January 1915, was Daisy's model; her father reportedly told him that poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls, a line that echoes through the novel.

Fitzgerald finished the rough draft of Gatsby in 1924 after moving where?

The French Riviera: he wrote at the Villa Marie near Saint-Raphaël through the summer of 1924, while Zelda's flirtation with a French aviator, Edouard Jozan, soured the season.

Which poet was among the contemporaries who wrote to Fitzgerald praising the novel?

T. S. Eliot wrote that Gatsby was 'the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James'; Willa Cather and Edith Wharton wrote too, which made the poor sales all the more galling.

Which pre-Gatsby novel made Fitzgerald an overnight success in 1920?

This Side of Paradise, published in March 1920, sold out its first printing of 3,000 copies within three days; a week after publication Fitzgerald married Zelda at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York.

Fitzgerald died in 1940 at what age?

Fitzgerald was 44: born on September 24, 1896, he died of a heart attack in Hollywood on December 21, 1940, leaving The Last Tycoon unfinished for Edmund Wilson to edit.

Who played Gatsby in the 1949 Paramount film?

Alan Ladd played Gatsby in Elliott Nugent's 1949 film for Paramount, with Betty Field as Daisy and Macdonald Carey as Nick.

Who wrote the screenplay for the 1974 film starring Robert Redford?

Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay; Jack Clayton directed, Mia Farrow was Daisy, and the film won Oscars for Theoni V. Aldredge's costumes and Nelson Riddle's score adaptation.

Which Newport, Rhode Island mansion stood in for Gatsby's estate in the 1974 film?

Rosecliff, the 1902 Stanford White mansion on Newport's Bellevue Avenue, served as Gatsby's house; Marble House was used too, and the film took $26.5 million at the box office.

Who plays the narrator, Nick, in Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film?

Tobey Maguire plays Nick opposite Leonardo DiCaprio's Gatsby; Paul Rudd had played the role in the 2000 A&E television version with Toby Stephens and Mira Sorvino.

Where was Luhrmann's 2013 Great Gatsby filmed?

Sydney, Australia: Luhrmann, himself Australian, rebuilt 1922 New York on the Fox Studios Australia soundstages in Sydney and released the result in 3D.

Which rapper executive-produced the soundtrack of the 2013 film?

Jay-Z served as executive producer of the soundtrack; Lana Del Rey's Young and Beautiful was its breakout single, and the film won Oscars for Catherine Martin's costumes and production design.

Which composer's operatic Great Gatsby premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in December 1999?

John Harbison composed it and wrote his own libretto; the Met commissioned the opera to mark James Levine's 25th anniversary with the company, and it premiered on December 20, 1999.

Roughly how long does Gatz, the stage production that reads the entire novel aloud, run?

Eight hours, roughly, with a dinner break and two intermissions, while an office worker who finds a copy of the novel reads every word aloud in Elevator Repair Service's production.

Who starred as Gatsby and Daisy when the Broadway musical opened in April 2024?

Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada led the cast at the Broadway Theatre from April 2024, after the musical's premiere at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse in October 2023.

The Fitzgeralds' 1922 move to which Long Island town inspired the novel's West Egg?

Great Neck, where the Fitzgeralds rented a house from October 1922; their nouveau riche neighbours included Ring Lardner and Ed Wynn, while old-money Manhasset Neck across the bay became the Buchanans' East Egg.

Which sensational 1922 double murder likely influenced the plot of The Great Gatsby?

Hall–Mills: the Rev. Edward Hall and choir singer Eleanor Mills were found shot in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in September 1922, and the papers covered the case for months as Fitzgerald planned the novel.

Who directed the first stage adaptation of the novel, which opened on Broadway in 1926?

George Cukor, later a Hollywood director, staged it; Owen Davis wrote the script for producer William Brady, and the play ran 112 performances at the Ambassador Theatre from February 1926.

What is all that survives of the 1926 silent film of The Great Gatsby, a famous lost film?

A trailer at the National Archives, about a minute long, is all that remains of Herbert Brenon's silent film, which starred Warner Baxter and William Powell; Zelda wrote that the picture was 'rotten'.

By 1960, thirty-five years after publication, how many copies was the novel selling each year?

By 1960 the novel was selling 50,000 copies a year, a revival that prompted Arthur Mizener to proclaim it a masterwork of 20th-century American literature in The New York Times.

What colour is the 'death car' that witnesses say struck Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby?

Yellow is what a passing bystander tells the police, calling it a big, new car. Tom Buchanan, questioned at the scene, is quick to say his own coupé is blue.

Daisy Buchanan sobs into a pile of which of Gatsby's belongings, saying she has never seen such beautiful ones?

His shirts come flying out of the cabinets in linen, silk and flannel until Daisy buries her head in the heap. Gatsby says a man in England sends him a fresh selection every season.

According to Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan's voice, which Nick calls 'indiscreet', is full of what?

Money is Gatsby's blunt answer, and Nick agrees at once. He hears in her voice 'the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it'.

Which two-word term of address does Gatsby use for almost everyone, to Tom Buchanan's open irritation?

Old sport grates on Tom until he snaps, 'Don't you call me old sport!' in the middle of their showdown. He had already sneered at the phrase and asked where Gatsby picked it up.

Which word completes the last line of The Great Gatsby: 'So we beat on, ___ against the current'?

Boats against the current, 'borne back ceaselessly into the past', is how the book ends. Just before, Nick pictures the first Dutch sailors holding their breath at the sight of a new continent.

What does Tom Buchanan do to Myrtle Wilson at their apartment party when she keeps shouting Daisy's name?

Tom breaks her nose with one 'short deft movement' of his open hand. The party ends with bloody towels on the bathroom floor and a long wail of pain.

Which actor plays Jay Gatsby in the 2013 film, raising a glass in a shot that became a popular meme?

Leonardo DiCaprio was the first actor cast. The film reunited him with Baz Luhrmann, who had directed him in Romeo + Juliet seventeen years earlier.

What does Gatsby urge Daisy to tell Tom Buchanan when the two men finally have it out over her?

She never loved him is the line Gatsby wants, and Daisy gets it out 'with perceptible reluctance'. Minutes later she takes it back, crying that she did love Tom once.

What does a nervous Gatsby nearly knock off Nick Carraway's mantelpiece during his reunion with Daisy?

A clock that had already stopped tilts under the pressure of his head. Gatsby catches it with trembling fingers, sets it back and apologises for it.

Which pet does Tom Buchanan buy for Myrtle Wilson from a street seller on the way to their apartment?

A puppy is what she wants, ideally a 'police dog'. The seller admits it is more of an Airedale, and Tom pays up, telling him to go and buy ten more dogs.

Asked which part of the Middle West he comes from, Gatsby names which city that is nowhere near it?

San Francisco is his straight-faced reply, and Nick briefly suspects his leg is being pulled. Gatsby goes on to claim he lived 'like a young rajah' in the capitals of Europe.

What are the cuff buttons of Gatsby's gambler friend Meyer Wolfsheim made from in The Great Gatsby?

Human molars, the 'finest specimens', as he proudly informs Nick. The two meet over lunch with Gatsby in a Forty-second Street cellar.

Which journalist typed out pages of The Great Gatsby while a copy boy at Time, to learn Fitzgerald's rhythms?

Hunter S. Thompson earned $51 a week in the job until Time fired him for insubordination in 1959. He later made his name with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Tom Buchanan reveals that Gatsby and Wolfsheim sold grain alcohol over the counter of which shops?

Drugstores on side streets in New York and Chicago were the front. Tom boasts that he picked Gatsby for a bootlegger the first time he saw him.

When Nick first glimpses Gatsby, alone on his lawn at night, what is Gatsby doing?

Reaching toward the water with both arms, he seems to Nick to be trembling. When Nick glances seaward and back again, Gatsby has vanished into the dark.

Who gave Nick Carraway the advice about other people's lack of advantages that opens The Great Gatsby?

His father told him that not everyone has had the advantages he has had. Nick says the advice left him inclined to reserve all judgements, which made him a magnet for bores.

Which word does Nick use for Tom and Daisy Buchanan, who 'smashed up things and creatures' and let others clean up?

Careless people is his verdict on the couple. It comes when he bumps into Tom on Fifth Avenue one October afternoon, and he shakes Tom's hand only because refusing seemed silly.

Which East River crossing into Manhattan do Nick and Gatsby drive over as Nick decides 'anything can happen'?

The Queensboro, Nick says, always shows the city as if 'seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world'.

What does Gatsby flash from his wallet to make a motorcycle policeman wave him on without a ticket?

A Christmas card from the police commissioner does the trick. Gatsby explains that he once did the commissioner a favour and has been sent one every year since.

Before his reunion tea with Daisy, what does Gatsby send a man over to Nick Carraway's house to do?

Cut the grass is the job, and the man turns up at eleven in a raincoat, dragging a lawn-mower through pouring rain. Gatsby also sends over a greenhouse's worth of flowers.

What gift, valued at $350,000, does Tom Buchanan give Daisy on the day before their wedding?

A string of pearls arrives the day before the ceremony. That night a drunken Daisy fishes it out of a wastebasket and tells a bridesmaid to give it back, yet she marries Tom the next day.

On which of the Great Lakes does a seventeen-year-old Gatsby row out to a millionaire's anchored yacht?

Lake Superior is where he had drifted for over a year as a clam-digger and salmon-fisher. He rows out to warn the owner that a wind could break the boat up within half an hour.

What is the name of the daughter Daisy Buchanan hopes will grow up to be 'a beautiful little fool'?

Pammy is named just once, as her nurse leads her away from the guests. Daisy says she wept on waking to learn the baby was a girl, with Tom 'God knows where'.

What amazes the drunken guest known as Owl Eyes about the books in Gatsby's Gothic library?

They are real, with 'pages and everything', when he had expected a nice durable cardboard. He adds admiringly that Gatsby knew when to stop: the pages have never been cut.

When Nick Carraway ends things with Jordan Baker, what surprising news does she claim to have?

She is engaged to another man, she tells him without comment. Nick doubts it, though he admits there were several she could have married at a nod of her head.

When Nick telephones the Buchanans' house with news of Gatsby's death, what does he learn Tom and Daisy have done?

Left town is the answer he gets: the couple went away early that afternoon with baggage and gave no address. At the graveside Nick notes that Daisy has not sent a message or a flower.

What was Daisy Buchanan's surname before she married, when a young army officer named Gatsby courted her?

Fay was the name behind the largest banner and the largest lawn in the city. There the eighteen-year-old Daisy drove her own roadster, and the telephone rang all day with army officers asking for her evening.

Why does Myrtle Wilson run out into the road toward Gatsby's speeding car?

She thinks Tom is driving because she watched him stop for gas in that very car hours earlier. Her jealous eyes were fixed on Jordan Baker beside him, whom she took for his wife.

What does George Wilson do in The Great Gatsby moments after shooting Gatsby dead?

Wilson kills himself, and a gardener soon spots his body lying nearby. Nick, carrying Gatsby toward the house, writes that 'the holocaust was complete'.

After Gatsby's funeral, where does a disillusioned Nick Carraway decide to go?

Home to the Midwest he goes, once the blue smoke of brittle leaves is in the air. After Gatsby's death, he says, the East was haunted for him.

Which Ivy League university did F. Scott Fitzgerald drop out of to join the army during World War I?

Princeton enrolled him in 1913 as one of the few Catholics in its student body. He left four years later without ever taking a degree.

Which label for his own times did F. Scott Fitzgerald popularise with the title of a short story collection?

The Jazz Age was already in circulation, but his 1922 collection Tales of the Jazz Age spread it. Fitzgerald thought Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue caught the youthful spirit of the era.

Which then little-known writer did F. Scott Fitzgerald first meet in Paris weeks after The Great Gatsby was published?

Ernest Hemingway was still relatively unknown when the two met. He read The Great Gatsby, liked it, and decided that his own next work had to be a novel.

Which Hollywood novel was F. Scott Fitzgerald still writing when he died, leaving it unfinished?

The Last Tycoon, whose studio-boss hero was based on Irving Thalberg, was readied for print from his notes by his friend Edmund Wilson. The same volume included The Great Gatsby and revived interest in it.

Gatsby came second on the Modern Library's 1998 list of the century's best novels, behind which James Joyce book?

Ulysses topped the list, and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man came third. That left Fitzgerald's short book sandwiched between two Joyce novels.

Which actress cabled the producer to ask to play Daisy opposite Robert Redford in 1974's The Great Gatsby?

Mia Farrow stepped in after the producer's wife, Ali MacGraw, lost the part by leaving him for Steve McQueen. Faye Dunaway arranged her own screen test and was still passed over.

Which story of a former caddie's love for a rich girl did Fitzgerald call a first draft of the Gatsby idea?

Winter Dreams follows a middle-class Minnesota boy, Dexter, whose pursuit of the fickle socialite Judy Jones ends in heartbreak. Fitzgerald modelled her on the same lost love who shaped Daisy.

In economics, the 'Great Gatsby curve' shows that countries with high income inequality tend to have low what?

Mobility across generations is lower where incomes are more unequal, so a poor farm boy is less likely to rise as Gatsby did. Economist Alan Krueger introduced the name in a 2012 speech.

In which Minnesota city was F. Scott Fitzgerald born into a middle-class Catholic family?

Saint Paul was his birthplace, though he grew up mainly in New York state. He was named after Francis Scott Key, the distant cousin who wrote the words of 'The Star-Spangled Banner'.

Inside a copy of which cowboy novel did the boyhood Gatsby write out his daily self-improvement schedule?

Hopalong Cassidy is the ragged old copy whose back flyleaf carries the timetable. Under it the boy listed resolves such as 'Bath every other day' and 'Be better to parents'.

After Gatsby's death, the freeloading house guest Klipspringer telephones only to ask for the return of what?

His tennis shoes are all he wants, since he is 'sort of helpless without them'. He cannot promise to attend the funeral because of a picnic, and Nick hangs up on him.

Gatsby's mansion is described as an imitation of a 'Hôtel de Ville' in which region of France?

Normandy supplied the model for the towered pile, which Nick finds 'spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy'. It stands in more than forty acres of lawn and garden.

What name is on Meyer Wolfsheim's office door when Nick calls on the morning of Gatsby's funeral?

Swastika Holding Company is the name on the door. In the early 1920s the swastika was still widely seen in the West as a sign of good luck, a meaning it kept until the 1930s.

Gatsby needles Tom Buchanan at one of his parties by introducing him to guests as 'the' what?

Polo player is the label, and although Tom objects 'not me', Gatsby likes the sound of it. Tom stays 'the polo player' for the rest of the evening.

At their first meeting, Gatsby invites Nick Carraway to try out which newly bought machine the next morning?

A hydroplane is the new toy, to be tried out near the shore along the Sound. Gatsby makes the offer before Nick has even worked out that he is talking to his host.

Which colour of suit does Tom Buchanan cite as proof that Gatsby could never be 'an Oxford man'?

Pink is the colour Tom sneers at. Gatsby is still in that suit hours later, when Nick finds him standing guard in the moonlight outside the Buchanans' house.

Myrtle Wilson's sister tells Nick that Gatsby's fortune comes from being a nephew or cousin of which monarch?

Kaiser Wilhelm is her theory, and she adds that she is scared of Gatsby. Guests at his parties trade other rumours: that he was a German spy, or that he once killed a man.

Which fruit arrives at Gatsby's mansion by the crate every Friday, ahead of his weekend parties?

Oranges and lemons arrive five crates at a time from a New York fruiterer. A kitchen machine can juice two hundred in half an hour, if a butler presses its button two hundred times.

What sets Nick Carraway apart from most of the crowd at the first Gatsby party he attends?

He was actually invited: a chauffeur in robin's-egg blue crossed his lawn that morning with a formal note. Most guests simply turned up, and some left without ever meeting their host.

What rank does Gatsby tell Nick he was promoted to after his machine-gun unit held out in the Argonne Forest?

Major is the rank he claims, and a medal he carries is engraved 'Major Jay Gatsby, For Valour Extraordinary'. He says every Allied government gave him a decoration.