Someone writing in The Guardian is a big fan of The Great Gatsby (re-reads it every year) and notes that the Luhrmann film coming out about it may well be disappointing. (Let's hope so - Luhrmann's lurid style never seems to get quite the uniform rubbishing it deserves.)
As for the book, which I read some years ago: it struck me as adequate but pretty light weight. I caught a bit of the Robert Redford Gatsby movie on TV recently, and it seemed that it did the opposite of usual cinema compression of a novel: it was very long for a book that was very short.
But anyway, The Guardian writer gives a potted history of the trouble life of Fitzgerald, and I don't think I knew this:
When he died in Hollywood in 1940, Fitzgerald was almost completely forgotten. His funeral was attended by just 30 people, including his editor Maxwell Perkins. Sales of his books had virtually dried up. His publishers, Scribners, still had unsold stock from the first printing of Gatsby. He had lived the American dream, and it had turned into a waking nightmare.Given that (as I recall) Gatsby ends with the funeral of the title character attended by virtually no one, that's a bit of an unfortunate "life imitating art" episode.
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