Fitzgerald wrote most of The Great Gatsby in France, far from the Long Island world it describes. The hard work happened in the summer and fall of 1924, at a rented villa on the Riviera, and the final shaping happened later in Rome.
A Riviera Villa, Summer 1924
Fitzgerald had been circling the novel since 1922, but he kept stalling. He outlined it, made a false start, and threw out most of an early draft. The breakthrough came when the family left America. They sailed for France in the spring of 1924 and rented Villa Marie in Valescure, a hillside neighborhood just outside the small town of Saint-Raphael on the Mediterranean coast. Work on the book resumed in earnest that April, and through the summer and fall he wrote steadily, sending a near-final manuscript to his editor Maxwell Perkins on October 27, 1924.
The setting was anything but tranquil. While he wrote, his marriage took a serious hit. Zelda became involved with a French naval aviator, and the strain of that summer bled into the book's themes of longing and betrayal. The irony is hard to miss. The most American novel of the decade, set among the mansions and parties of Long Island, was largely composed on a quiet stretch of the Cote d'Azur.
I want to write something new, something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to Maxwell Perkins, 1922
The Rome Revisions
Sending the manuscript wasn't the finish line. The Fitzgeralds spent the winter of 1924 to 1925 in Rome, and that's where the novel got its final shape. Perkins pushed back on how vague Gatsby's character and wealth were, and Fitzgerald rewrote in response. The galley proofs, where the book still carried the working title Trimalchio, came back so heavily marked that whole sections were crossed out and replaced with pasted-in typed pages. He kept revising through the first two months of 1925. The novel was published by Scribner's on April 10, 1925, while the couple was traveling back toward Paris.
For the wider picture of how he worked and why he had no tidy daily routine, see the full F. Scott Fitzgerald writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Change your surroundings to break a stall. Fitzgerald couldn't crack the book at home. A new place jolted him into finishing it.
- Treat the first finished draft as a starting point. He kept rebuilding Gatsby long after he mailed the manuscript in.
- Protect the work from the chaos around it. His personal life was falling apart, and he still got the pages done.
- Listen to a sharp editor. Perkins' pressure on the vague spots is part of what made the book land.