If you’re reading this because your paper is due tomorrow and the search engine, with its black magic, spitted out our site among the first ten hits, you are out of luck. Or are you? Keep reading my celebration of this the timeless classic with “My Great Gatsby,” observing the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s memorable book.
My Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby meets the Alcohol Studies Collection in the RU Libraries Annex. Photo: J. H. Ward
Pictured is my tattered copy, in Hungarian, falling apart at the seams, published in 1971 with 36,500 copies via a popular series in Hungary called Olcsó Könyvtár (translates approximately into “Frugal Library”). Published by the major literary publishing house in the country, the series featured mostly “promoted” literature, with an occasional “permitted” category book through the three P’s (promoted, permitted, prohibited) distribution system. These small, soft cover books included Russian literature classics, such as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and many others strongly promoted (that I have been trying to forget), from classic and contemporary Hungarian literature, timeless classics from world literature, as well as a few outliers deemed by professional brainwashers harmless to readers, such as The Great Gatsby. Featuring a sanitized blurb on the cover, The Great Gatsby looked interesting, and was also a steal for three Hungarian forints, about the price of a quart of gasoline at that time (not that anyone could afford a car).
My yellowing copy is not the first edition. The Great Gatsby was first published by Magvető Press in 1962 in a short story anthology entitled Újra Babilonban (Babylon Revisited), which presented F. Scott Fitzgerald’s five works to the Hungarian audience, with a 4-page Afterwords by Mihály Sükösd – literary historian, author, journalist, and acclaimed expert of American literature. That was also part of the deal. The ignorant masses had to be enlightened and educated by those paid to do so, which meant hand feeding carefully filtered information censored by the government – in this case, about how wealth and ambition lead to a total moral decline. There were always scholars eager to step up to the task, hence the mostly negative reviews in literary magazines and newspapers from1962-63 hidden in archives.
The Great Gatsby, 100 years later
Digitized by our Hungarian colleagues, reviews are so much fun to read in 2025, for example, the one lamenting about the potential the author missed (to educate the crowds or what?) Or another about how the reader needs to wade through boring paragraphs to get to the real gems. But the best demanded “realism” (for the uninitiated, it means “socialist realism,” the didactic use of literature, with its mandatory idealized representation of life in socialism) from the author.
Meanwhile, the title page of a publication also from 1925, a collection of poems in praise of drinking. Authors include Yeats, Blake, Thackeray, and more. Source: Alcohol Studies Archives.
Jay Gatsby, the romantic villain, fit into the party line narrative, if properly mansplained. Portraying the wild, hedonistic culture that emerged in defiance of Prohibition, the book, after all, depicted a “decaying western culture rotting away in a far away universe.“ Featuring free-flowing alcohol, jazz, and reckless indulgence, Gatsby’s lavish parties do capture the era’s materialism and extravagance. His rise to wealth, hinted to be tied to bootlegging and other illegal activities, reflects how Prohibition fueled organized crime, as criminal enterprises profited from the illegal sale of alcohol.
A little bit too much booze? Oh well. Alcohol was not a big deal in the Hungarian culture at that time (or now, if we are perfectly honest). I vividly recall our nineteenth century literature professor in the 1970s, who kept looking at his watch as we were getting closer to 9 a.m. during his lecture, because the university buffet, although open in earlier hours, started to serve alcohol at 9, as per the law. The other common denominator in literature classes in college, high school, and middle school was the struggle as we were always prompted to find “the” message: look for the moral of the story, for a role model to praise or for an evil capitalist to denigrate. In hindsight, publishing The Great Gatsby in such a popular series with very high circulation was probably easily justified.
If you are reading The Great Gatsby in Hungary, remember, Prohibition is more than just a historical setting, it becomes a powerful metaphor for the moral decay and hypocrisy spanning centuries. Characters in the novel pretend to maintain facades of respectability while engaging in various forms of moral corruption. The same law that was meant to improve society led to increased lawlessness, corruption, and violence. Meanwhile, keep an eye on the wealthy elite privately indulging, while publicly, they supported temperance.
If you made it to the end and your paper is still barely shaping up, I hope now you know what to do. Write about “Your Great Gatsby!” Here are a few resources to help. Stay tuned for Part 2!
Related resources from Rutgers University Libraries
The Great Gatsby
- Fitzgerald, F. S. (1925). The Great Gatsby.C. Scribner. – Available online from HathiTrust Digital Library Full View Worldwide. The full text of the book is also freely available as an ebook from Project Gutenberg.
- Other titles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald – this “canned search” lists the author’s book in chronological order, all available online.
- Fitzgerald, F. S., & Farris Smith, M. (2021). The Great Gatsby. (1st ed.). Oldcastle Books. – This new edition of The Great Gatsby includes a foreword by critically acclaimed novelist Michael Farris Smith, as well as an exclusive extract of his forthcoming novel, NICK, which imagines narrator Nick Carraway’s life before he meets Gatsby.
- Fitzgerald, F. S. (Francis S. (2018). The Great Gatsby: an edition of the manuscript (J. L. W. West & D. C. Skemer, Eds.). Cambridge University Press. – With the original text of the manuscript and details of the editing process.
About The Great Gatsby
- The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review publishes essays on all aspects of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life and work. The journal serves both the specialist and the general reader with essays that broaden understanding of Fitzgerald’s writing and related topics. While the centrality of The Great Gatsby is recognized, the journal is also eager to advance interest in the breadth of Fitzgerald’s writing. The journal is published on behalf of F. Scott Fitzgerald Society at Penn State University Press, available from JSTOR in the Project Muse Premium Collection at Rutgers
- Dickstein, M. (Ed.). (2010). The great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1st ed.). Salem Press. – With critical viewpoints covering topics such as issues of race and individual character studies, an introduction exploring the simplicity of the plot and the complex underpinnings that make the novel a true masterpiece, and essays considering the cultural and historical contexts of Fitzgerald’s work and comparing it to other literary works.
- Tredell, N. (2007). Fitzgerald’s the great Gatsby: a reader’s guide (1st ed.). Continuum. – A comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works