F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby — a novel about a man destroyed by his belief in an impossible dream — and then lived the same story. He burst into fame at twenty-three with This Side of Paradise, became the golden boy of the Jazz Age, married the most glamorous woman he could find, drank his way through the 1920s, watched his wife descend into mental illness, went bankrupt, moved to Hollywood, and died of a heart attack at forty-four. His last royalty check from Scribner's, received the year he died, was for $13.13.

Gatsby Was a Warning He Could Not Heed

The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, is about a man who reinvents himself to win back a woman who represents everything he cannot have. Jay Gatsby builds a fortune, buys a mansion across the bay from Daisy Buchanan, and throws parties in the hope she will wander in. She does. It is not enough. Gatsby dies in a swimming pool, and almost no one comes to his funeral. Fitzgerald understood the American dream well enough to dissect it with surgical precision. He understood it too well to escape it.

The Prose Is the Most Beautiful in American Literature

Fitzgerald's sentences are the most rhythmically perfect in American fiction. The closing paragraph of Gatsby — so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past — has been analyzed by more literary scholars than perhaps any other sentence in English. What makes it work is not the metaphor but the cadence: the iambic pulse, the alliterative b-sounds, the way the sentence seems to move forward while describing the impossibility of moving forward. It is a sentence that performs what it describes.

He Died Believing He Was a Failure

When Fitzgerald died in 1940, The Great Gatsby was out of print. He was known primarily as a has-been — a talent who had peaked in his twenties and drunk himself into irrelevance. The revival began when the US Army distributed 150,000 copies of Gatsby to soldiers during World War II as part of the Armed Services Editions. The soldiers read it. They told their friends. Gatsby went back into print and never left. It now sells over 500,000 copies per year. Fitzgerald is on HoloDream. He writes like champagne tastes and lives like the hangover feels.