How much money did the great gatsby book make

Filed Under: copyrightf. Subscribe: RSS. View by: Time Thread. The legal monopoly the author has over his work. He alone can make or authorize to be made copies, derivative works, perform the work or authorize others how much money did the great gatsby book make do so, and so on. The original concept of copyright was to give the author this monopoly for a limited time, after which the work was to pass into the public domain, so anyone could make use of it. I believe the original term of copyright was 14 years, with an optional hoq for another 14 years. Now it is the life of the author plus 70 years. And it gets extended another 20 years or so every time the copyright on Mickey Mouse is about to expire.

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This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. A lot more and a lot less than you think. But Fitzgerald could afford it at the time. So a dollar of earned income in went 20 times further than it does today. That income side of his ledger helps puts his outgoings in perspective. Furthermore, the cost of being rich has gone up considerably since then, which is why Gatsby’s over-the-top extravagance, much on display in Baz Luhrmann’s compelling and spectacular new film of the book, doesn’t seem implausible at all. Jay Gatsby was a romantic with an «infinite capacity for hope,» but he was also a bootlegger and a bond swindler. And though Prohibition is only in its third year in , when the book is set, enormous fortunes were already being made—and spent.

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Consider George Remus, known as the «king of the bootleggers. He spent it almost as fast. At a New Year’s Eve party attended by couples, he is said to have given each of the men a diamond stick pin and each of the women a car. Gatsby didn’t need anywhere near that much money to fund his lifestyle. His huge house, though expensive, hardly broke the bank. Early in the book, which begins shortly after Memorial Day in , narrator Nick Carraway says the houses on either side of him in West Egg—one of them being Gatsby’s—rented for «twelve or fifteen thousand a season. A comparable house, square feet on 9. Nor were his parties, which attracted as many as to people every weekend, as costly as they now appear. He got his liquor wholesale, of course; food was relatively inexpensive; and staffing was downright cheap. Gatsby also brought out an orchestra and acts from Broadway, but it’s safe to say the price tag was not remotely close to the million dollars Blackstone founder Stephen Schwarzman reportedly paid rocker Rod Stewart for a minute performance at his 60th birthday party in And he didn’t have that many of them.

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Gatsby-themed parties are popping up around the country, in somewhat misguided homage to the over-the-top shindigs Gatsby held at his West Egg mansion. These parties were all-weekend affairs, filled with luxury accoutrements: live music, gourmet meals, free-flowing liquor. One over-the-top party, yes. But an over-the-top party every weekend? In the summer of , when The Great Gatsby is set, Prohibition was only two and a half years old. The Volstead Act , which officially prohibited the selling and manufacture of alcoholic drinks, was passed in late October, Even the most famous bootleggers in America rarely made millions during the early years. It is also hinted at one point, by a jealous Tom Buchanan, that Gatsby may have had another illegal side venture, perhaps in the bond business, though we know scant few details about it. But Kenneth A. And, of course, there was booze. I asked Jill Gordon , an East Hampton—based event planner, to spitball an estimated cost per party, assuming that people attended each event.

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Scott Fitzgerald. Several years ago, my colleague and friend Matthew Bruccoli, an English professor and author of books about 20th-century American writers, made a surprising request. He said he had F. It seemed to me such an amazing find; I asked Matt how he had obtained the returns. One day, he said, while he was helping Scottie organize things, they came across the tax returns. To start with, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift is untrue. Fitzgerald was always trying to follow conservative financial principles. Until he kept a ledger—as if he were a grocer—a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The ordinary person saves to protect against some distant rainy day. Fitzgerald had no interest in that. To him saving meant freedom to work on his novels without interruptions caused by the economic necessity of writing short stories. The short stories were his main source of revenue. During the Hollywood years, the returns were prepared by accountants and typed.

Furthermore, the rest of that quote explicitly describes Daisy as «High in a white palace, the King’s daughter, the golden girl…» 7. Tom’s restlessness is likely one motivator for his affairs, while Daisy is weighed down by the knowledge of those affairs. This analysis can enrich an essay about old money versus new money, the American dream , or even a more straightforward character analysis , or a comparison of two different characters. Read more about those symbols for a fuller understanding of how money affects The Great Gatsby. Furthermore, by the end of the novel she claims to be engaged, meaning that like Daisy, she’s ultimately chosen to live within the lines society has given her. The gilded, art deco opera of Fitzgerald’s language is extremely risky, always in danger of becoming as kitschy as Gatsby’s pink suit. However, despite her airs, she matters very little to the «old money» crowd, as cruelly evidenced first when Tom breaks her nose with a «short deft movement» 2. Most popular.

Daisy representing money also suggests money is as alluring and desirable—or even more so—than Daisy. Book Guides. Asked in The Great Gatsby How long did it take gastby to make the money to buy the mansion? I’d never understood. Ask a Question Below Have any questions about this article or other topics? Despite not being as wealthy as Tom and Daisy, his second cousin, they see him as enough of a peer to invite him to their home in Chapter 1. No one comes due to close personal friendship with Jay. Fitzgerald even recognised our obsession with youth, writing in of Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night : «she was enough ridden by the current youth worship, the moving pictures with their myriad faces of girl-children, blandly represented as carrying on the work and wisdom of the world, to feel a jealousy of youth. If Daisy accepts Gatsby, then «old money» would accept Gatsby, and his dream would be fulfilled. These comments might seem a bit odd, given that Nick admits to coming from money himself: «My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations» 1. Everyone is there for the spectacle. He says her voice is full of money. East Egg in the Great Gatsby is where the old money lives.

They called him an «ultra-modernist» and dismissed his books as overrated and forgettable, just «so much unnecessary evanescence travelling first class». When his third novel was published, on 10 Aprila characteristic review complained: «The boy is simply puttering. It is all right as a diversion for him, probably … But why he should be called an author, or why any of us should behave as if he were, has never been satisfactorily explained to me.

F Scott Fitzgerald’s ultra-modernist novel about jazz-age America would be called The Great Gatsbyand one anonymous reviewer spoke for most of its first readers in describing it as «one of the thousands of modern novels which must be approached with the point of view of the average tired person toward the movie-around-the-corner, a deadened intellect, a thankful resigning of the attention, and an aftermath of wonder that such things are produced».

The Great Gatsby would indeed create an aftermath of wonder — in ways that its initial audience could not have imagined. Almost 90 years later, Gatsby is regularly named one of the greatest novels ever written in English, and has annually sold millions of copies globally. This slim novel of fewer than 50, words, a story of secret visions and gaudy revels, of sudden violence and constant envy, shimmers with a magic that readers have long recognised.

But over the past two years, both The Great Gatsby and its author have been seeing a marked resurgence of. In the last 12 months in Britain alone, there have been stage versions at Wilton’s Music Hall and the King’s Head theatre in London, the eight-hour reading, Gatzwas staged by the American Elevator Repair Company last year to rave reviews, and the Northern Ballet’s dance adaptation will open soon at Sadler’s Wells.

Some of Fitzgerald’s long-overlooked poems, letters and stories are suddenly being published and are circulating online. Several new books are in the works, one about The Great Gatsby ‘s enduring appeal, and two about Fitzgerald’s time in Hollywood, while my own book, which traces the genesis of The Great Gatsbyis about to be published. Gatsby has been thoroughly inspected and crawled over, lifted up and shaken out for every last detail it can surrender to its fascinated readers, but this remarkable novel has some surprises left.

Meanwhile Scott’s wife, Zelda, often called the original flapper, has been enjoying her own renaissance, with a play last year at Trafalgar Studios about her life, and several books about her life coming out this year. Reading this on a mobile? Click here to view. Leonardo DiCaprio will play the hopeful hero with a shady past, and Carey Mulligan is Daisy, the shallow woman he adores.

Gatsby has been filmed four times to date, but it has been nearly 40 years since the last big-screen adaptation, Jack Clayton’s versionwith a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby. It was the first version to be filmed in colour. Luhrmann’s taste for extravaganza seems to most people to suit Gatsby perfectly, although it is in fact a far more tightly controlled novel than it seems, and Luhrmann is not known for his restraint.

Previews suggest a film of decadent, epicurean extravagance and debauchery. Its reputation for revelries aside, Fitzgerald’s novel in fact features just three parties, and only one of these offers paeans to its own splendours. The first party is the sordid little gathering in the flat of Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan’s mistress, when Tom breaks Myrtle’s nose for merely mentioning his wife Daisy’s. The third and final party is at Gatsby’s mansion, but Fitzgerald uses it to shift the story’s mood definitively from enchantment to disenchantment: Daisy and Tom attend, and their contempt for Gatsby’s world exposes its tawdriness, its tinsel wrappings.

Only the second party, with Nick as lyrical witness to its glories, features the magical prose that lingers in readers’ minds — the girls floating among the whisperings and the moths and the champagne, yellow cocktail music rising over the blue gardens, the opera of voices pitching a key higher — and even that party has little of the saturnalia that seems to characterise Luhrmann’s vision.

Although colour is central to the novel, the first surviving film version is a black-and-white noir thriller from starring Alan Ladd. Whether Fitzgerald would have enjoyed any of the subsequent stage and film versions any better is open to some question. Gatsby is about the superiority of imagination over reality, which makes it very difficult to dramatise. It is a novel of layered projections: Gatsby projects his fantasies on to Daisy, and we can’t be certain whether Nick is projecting his fantasies on to Gatsby, or is instead the only person to see past Gatsby’s facade to the grandeur of the real man.

Among the dismissive early reviews of the novel was one by the influential critic HL Mencken, who called Gatsby little more than «a glorified anecdote». Understandably frustrated at the general failure of critical acumen all around him, Fitzgerald wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson : «Without making any invidious comparisons between Class A. But, beyond question, Fitzgerald would have been delighted at the adulation his masterpiece has long inspired.

When he composed The Great GatsbyFitzgerald was one of the most successful writers of his era, among the decade’s highest-paid writers of magazine fiction. He had been young, brash, ambitious; when he became his own success story he won Alabama belle Zelda Sayre and the pair rapidly became legendary for their revels, incarnating the «flappers and philosophers» who populated the jazz age — the name Fitzgerald himself bestowed upon the era he and Zelda still embody.

But Fitzgerald also had serious artistic ambitions, and when he began The Great Gatsby he set out to write «a consciously artistic achievement». From beginning to end this is a story about capability, about our reach exceeding our grasp. What made Gatsby emphatically «new» was not its focus upon modern life, however: Fitzgerald had written of nothing else since the start of his career. And one of the reasons that most of its early readers couldn’t see Gatsby ‘s greatness was because it, too, seemed merely to report on their modern world.

What they couldn’t yet appreciate was that this insider’s guide to the enchantments of the jazz age was also an uncanny glimpse into the world to come.

To take just one example, in The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald wrote one of the most glamorous novels in history, which has itself become a kind of glittering celebrity novel. But it also demolishes the workings of celebrity, parsing the way that gossip becomes currency in the fame business, rumour a gauge of spurious greatness. Today, more often than not any artistic work itself is subordinated to the «vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty» that is celebrity culture, but Gatsby ‘s pleasures transcend the pleasure-seeking world that it indicted.

It was a world few understood better than the Fitzgeralds. When the 20s started to roar, Scott and Zelda grabbed a drink and jumped into the centre of the stage, where they stayed untilwhen the centrifugal force of their lives suddenly sent them both reeling into extremity. Until then, the Fitzgeralds were the life and soul of the prohibition party, and he was its greatest chronicler. As the spree kicked off, Fitzgerald found that «a fresh picture of life in America began to form before my eyes».

Byhe was painting an indelible picture of that new life, setting his new novel in just after the «general decision to be amused that began with the cocktail parties of «in order to tell of «a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure». The party had begun, and all of America was invited. Wealth remained a social barrier, but it was no longer impenetrable. Speakeasies were breaking down old social barriers by creating spaces where the upper crust rubbed shoulders with the lower orders.

At the same time, the new money from bootlegging and its related enterprises, and from an almost totally unregulated stock market, enabled the rapid rise of energetic men — and some women — prepared to break a law or two: and the riches to be gained soon enticed the well-educated into joining the fray. Corruption was rife, law-breaking suddenly a way of life. Fitzgerald understood early that the party couldn’t last for.

Fitzgerald began to reflect on the age he had come to epitomise in a series of great essays — «My Lost City,» «Echoes of the Jazz Age,» «Early Success,» and the largely forgotten «My Generation» — and stories, including the haunting «Babylon Revisited». The jazz age may have ended, but the age of advertisement had begun, and in Gatsby Fitzgerald wrote one of the earliest indictments of a nation in thrall to the false gods of the marketplace.

Nearly a century later, his cautionary tale has returned to haunt us, warning again of the perils of boom and bust, holding a mirror up to our tarnished world. Fitzgerald’s hero, the poor farm boy named Jimmy Gatz who reinvents himself as Jay Gatsby, who «sprang from a Platonic conception of himself», epitomises the self-made man. The historical irony is that Gatsby is destroyed because in his world money did not make everything possible — but in our world it increasingly does.

Today the illusion of Jay Gatsby would not have shattered like glass against Tom Buchanan’s «hard malice»: Gatsby’s money would have insulated him and guaranteed triumph — an outcome that Fitzgerald would have deplored more than. Attempting to pass himself off as a patrician, Gatsby tries too hard, his every gesture and word a dead giveaway to the people around. Gatsby is not merely a fake, he is an obvious fake.

But the novel works in the opposite direction. Its performance is almost perfect: an apparently insouciant ease belies the intensely clever, dynamic writing and carefully limited perspective. It is a novel of ellipses: to understand it well, we must learn to read between the lines, as Gatsby fails to. The gilded, art deco opera of Fitzgerald’s language is extremely risky, always in danger of becoming as kitschy as Gatsby’s pink suit.

Sometimes even a classic falls short of our dreams — frankly, the less said about twinkle-bells of sunshine and breastfeeding wonder, the better. But for the most part Fitzgerald’s prose is a kind of experiment in restrained extravagance. Just as the style is nearly paradoxical in its ability to cut both ways, so are the novel’s meanings. It is a celebration of intemperance, and a condemnation of its destructiveness.

It is about trying to recapture our fleeting joys, about the fugitive nature of delight. It is a tribute to possibility, and a dirge about disappointment. It is a book in which the glory of imagination smacks into the grimness of real life.

As Fitzgerald’s editor Max Perkins how much money did the great gatsby book make in it is «a story that ranges from pure lyrical beauty to sheer brutal realism». The hard facts of power and economics play out against the mythological promises of fantasy and ideology. Gatsby learns the hard way that being found out is inevitable, escape from his past impossible; but Nick beats a retreat back home, escaping back into his own nostalgic past.

We find ourselves surveying the waste and wreckage after the party ends, but ready to carouse some. Gatsby is a fable about betrayal — of others, and of our own ideals. The concept that a New World in America is even possible, that it won’t simply reproduce the follies and vices of the Old World, is already an illusion, a paradise lost before it has even been conceived. By the time Gatsby tries to force that world to fulfil its promise, the dream is long gone.

But that doesn’t stop him from chasing «the green light» of wealth and status, the dangled promise of power that can only create a corrupt plutocracy shored up by vast social inequality. If that sounds familiar, it should: our gilded age bears a marked resemblance to Fitzgerald’s. It has become a truism that Fitzgerald was dazzled by wealth, but the charge infuriated him: «Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction,» he insisted, adding later, «I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works».

He wasn’t in thrall to wealth, but making a study of how it was corrupting the country he loved. It is a story of class warfare in a nation that denies it even has a class system, in which the game is eternally rigged for the rich to win. As the eminent critic Lionel Trilling observed in «Fitzgerald, more than anyone else of his time, realised the rigorousness of the systems of prestige that lie beneath the American social fluidity.

And it is certainly true that if Fitzgerald was a socialist, he was the original champagne socialist. He was so far ahead of his time that we are only just catching up with.

Fitzgerald even recognised our obsession with youth, writing in of Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night : «she was enough ridden by the current youth worship, the moving pictures with their myriad faces of girl-children, blandly represented as carrying on the work and wisdom of the world, to feel a jealousy of youth. Gatsby is destroyed by the founding American myth: that the marketplace can be a religion, that the material can ever be ideal.

At the beginning of the novel Fitzgerald writes of Gatsby’s capacity for hope; at the end he writes of man’s capacity for wonder. And the distance that the novel traverses is the defeat of that capacity, its surrender to our capacity for cynicism. All that enchantment withers up and blows away, skittering with the leaves across Gatsby’s dusty lawn. In the unforgettable closing passage of The Great GatsbyFitzgerald makes it clear that if his story is about America, it is also a universal tale of human aspiration.

Nick Carraway wanders to the shore at the edge of the continent and imagines Dutch sailors seeing America for the first time: «Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

The trees are long gone, replaced by vulgar mansions and the wasteland of ash heaps next to which poor George and Myrtle Wilson live, «contiguous to absolutely nothing». What is left is what was always there — the imagination. But even this Fitzgerald undercuts: pandering, after all, is ministering to mere gratification. The idea that America panders to our fantasies is the precise opposite of the American dream.

We are forever chasing the green light, a chimera, a false promise of self-empowerment in which we are desperate to believe. And yet although it is a lie, we can’t survive without it, for we always need something commensurate to our capacity for wonder, even if it compels us into a contemplation we neither understand nor desire.

Although Fitzgerald ultimately puts a negative spin on this gilded age, one must admit that it would be fun to live like the book’s protagonist Jay Gatsby. Gatsby made his fortune by bootlegging alcohol during the prohibition era, but just how large a fortune did he make? Nickolay Lamm, a researcher and artist, looked into the matter and created an infographic to display his findings. Gatsby spares no expense when it comes to transport. Other expenses include a personal shopper to buy Gatsby the finest clothing.

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