David Denby:: The New Yorker When "The Great Gatsby" was published, on April 10, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald, living high in France after his early success, cabled Max Perkins, his editor at Scribners, and demanded to know if the news was good. Mostly, it was not. The book received some reviews that were dismissive ("F. SCOTT FITZGERALD'S LATEST A DUD," a headline in the New York World ran) and others that were pleasant but patronizing. Fitzgerald later complained to his friend Edmund Wilson that "of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about." For a writer of Fitzgerald's fame, sales were mediocre - about twenty thousand copies by the end of the year. Scribners did a second printing, of three thousand copies, but that was it, and when Fitzgerald died, in 1940, half-forgotten at the age of forty-four, the book was hard to find. The tale of Fitzgerald's woeful stumbles - no great writer ever hit the skids so publicly - is suffused with varying shades of irony, both forlorn and triumphal. Fitzgerald was an alcoholic, and no doubt his health would have declined, whatever the commercial fate of his masterpiece. But he was a writer who needed recognition and money as much as booze, and if "Gatsby" had sold well it would likely have saved him from the lacerating public confessions of failure that he made in the nineteen-thirties, or, at least, would have kept him away from Hollywood. He did get a fascinating, half-finished novel, "The Last Tycoon," out of the place, but his talents as a screenwriter were too fine-grained for M-G-M. At the same time, the initial failure of "Gatsby" has yielded an astounding coda: the U.S. trade-paperback edition of the book currently sells half a million copies a year. Jay Gatsby "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself," and his exuberant ambitions and his abrupt tragedy have merged with the story of America, in its self-creation and its failures. The strong, delicate, poetically resonant text has become a kind of national scripture, recited happily or mournfully, as the occasion requires. . . .