50 Fun Facts About The Great Gatsby

Who wrote The Great Gatsby?

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?

Charles Scribner's Sons released it on April 10; the story itself is set three years earlier, in the summer of 1922.

Who narrates The Great Gatsby?

He is 29 when the story begins and turns 30 during it, a birthday he only remembers in the middle of the Plaza Hotel row.

Which fictional Long Island community does Gatsby live in?

The 'new money' peninsula was modelled on Great Neck, where Fitzgerald himself lived; the Buchanans' 'old money' side was Port Washington.

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

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?

Gatsby met her there in 1917 while training as a young officer at Camp Taylor, and never let go.

How is Nick related to Daisy?

The distant kinship is what gets him invited to dinner in East Egg in the first chapter and later lets him arrange the reunion over tea.

Which sport did Tom Buchanan star in at Yale?

Nick describes him as one of those men who reach such an acute excellence at 21 that everything afterwards is anticlimax.

What is Jordan Baker's sporting occupation?

Nick recalls a rumour that she once moved her ball in a tournament, one of the novel's many small dishonesties.

What does George Wilson do for a living?

His business sits in the valley of ashes beneath the billboard eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which he takes for the eyes of God.

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

The optometrist's advertisement is echoed by Francis Cugat's cover painting Celestial Eyes, which impressed Fitzgerald so much he wrote it into the book.

What was Gatsby's name at birth?

The son of unsuccessful farmers reinvented himself at 17 when he rowed out to a millionaire's yacht on Lake Superior.

In which state was Gatsby born?

He briefly attended St. Olaf College in Minnesota, lasting only two weeks before quitting the janitorial work that paid for it.

Which copper magnate took the teenage Gatsby aboard his yacht?

The old man's mistress cheated Gatsby out of the $25,000 he was left, but five years at sea gave him his manners and his ambitions.

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

He was there for five months in 1919 under an officers' scheme, which is why his claim to be 'an Oxford man' is both true and misleading.

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

He carries the Order of Danilo in his pocket to prove his stories, along with a photograph of himself at Oxford.

What make of car does Gatsby drive?

The big yellow machine, which Tom sneers at as a 'circus wagon', is the 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?

Wolfsheim wears cufflinks made of human molars and declines to attend Gatsby's funeral, preferring not to 'get mixed up in it'.

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

On the hottest day of the summer, Tom exposes Gatsby's bootlegging and Daisy admits she once loved her husband too.

Where is Gatsby when George Wilson shoots him?

It is the first time he has used the pool all summer; Wilson then turns the gun on himself.

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

He shows Nick a boyhood schedule his son wrote in the back of a Hopalong Cassidy book; almost nobody else comes to the funeral.

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

Trimalchio is the vulgar, party-throwing freedman of Petronius's Satyricon; 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?

The book had already gone to press, so the request came too late; Fitzgerald went on grumbling that Gatsby was the wrong title.

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

The same editor later shepherded Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe; Fitzgerald rewrote heavily on the galley proofs.

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

The disembodied face over a carnival skyline was finished before the novel, and Fitzgerald claimed to have written it into the book.

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

According to his ledger Fitzgerald earned only $2,000 from the book, and he died in 1940 believing it forgotten.

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

The pocket-sized paperbacks from the Council on Books in Wartime turned a forgotten flop into a classic within a decade.

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

The flood of new editions, prequels and a Muppet parody followed almost immediately.

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

It still shifts around 500,000 copies a year and has been translated into 42 languages.

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

The name belongs to a poet character in his first novel, This Side of Paradise; the other options are also his fictional creations.

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

The reputed bootlegger addressed people as 'old sport' and, like Gatsby, supposedly never wore the same shirt twice.

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

Her father reportedly told him that poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls, a line that echoes through the whole novel.

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

He wrote at the Villa Marie in Saint-Raphaël while Zelda's flirtation with a French aviator soured the summer.

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

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?

It sold about 40,000 copies in its first year and, a week after publication, he married Zelda at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Fitzgerald died in 1940 at what age?

A heart attack killed him in Hollywood on December 21, leaving The Last Tycoon unfinished for Edmund Wilson to edit.

Who played Gatsby in the 1949 Paramount film?

The 1926 silent version starring Warner Baxter came first, but it is now a lost film; only a trailer survives.

Which future Godfather director wrote the screenplay for the 1974 film starring Robert Redford?

Jack Clayton directed, Mia Farrow was Daisy, and the film won Oscars for Theoni V. Aldredge's costumes and Nelson Riddle's score.

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

Marble House was used too; the film took $26.5 million against a $7 million budget.

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

Paul Rudd had played Nick in the 2000 A&E television version opposite Toby Stephens and Mira Sorvino.

Where was Luhrmann's 2013 Great Gatsby filmed?

The Australian director rebuilt 1922 New York on Fox Studios soundstages and released the result in 3D.

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

Lana Del Rey's Young and Beautiful was the breakout single; 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?

The Met commissioned it to mark James Levine's 25th anniversary with the company.

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

Audiences get a dinner break and two intermissions while an office worker reads every word of the book aloud.

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

The show came almost a century after Owen Davis's 1926 Broadway play, which George Cukor directed for 112 performances.

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

Their nouveau riche neighbours included Ring Lardner and Ed Wynn, while old-money Manhasset Neck across the bay became East Egg.

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

A man and his lover were killed on September 14, 1922, weeks before Fitzgerald arrived in Great Neck, and the papers covered it for months.

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

Owen Davis wrote the script for producer William Brady, and the play ran for 112 performances at the Ambassador Theatre.

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

Reportedly Fitzgerald and Zelda loathed the silent version, which starred Warner Baxter and William Powell.

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

That revival prompted the New York Times to proclaim it a masterwork of 20th-century American literature.