The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · first published 1925
Filmed since 1926, and the 1926 version is lost — Fitzgerald’s wife walked out of it.
5 versions · 1926–2013
Zelda Fitzgerald reportedly left the screening; no print survives to judge whether she was right. Later versions in 1949, 1974 and 2013 have all struggled with the same problem, which is that the book’s best material is a voice rather than an event.
Nick Carraway is not a camera. He is a man telling you, some time afterwards, about a summer he did not entirely understand while he was in it.
Long Island, 1925
Prohibition had been in force for five years and had made bootlegging one of the fastest ways to get rich in America; the stock market was climbing towards 1929. Fitzgerald was writing about new money in a country that had suddenly produced an enormous amount of it, and about how thoroughly old money declined to be impressed.
The book sold poorly. He died in 1940 believing himself forgotten, and the novel became what it is now largely because it was printed by the hundred thousand and given to American servicemen during the Second World War.
On screen
5Film and television, earliest first.
- 1926 The Great Gatsby Herbert Brenon
- 1949 The Great Gatsby Elliott Nugent
- 1975 The Great Gatsby Jack Clayton
- 2000 The Great Gatsby Robert Markowitz
- 2013 The Great Gatsby Baz Luhrmann
Versions are listed where they are documented. A century of stage productions and most broadcasts were never catalogued at all, so this is what can be shown rather than everything that was ever made.