Babylon Revisited

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories defined the 1920s ‘Jazz Age’ generation, with their glittering dreams and tarnished hopes. This book features three tales of a fragile recovery, a cut-glass bowl and a life lost. It portrays the idealism of youth and the ravages of success.

The stories within are:

Babylon Revisited
The Cut-Glass Bowl
The Lost Decade

14,9 GEL

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The Great Gatsby

Gatsby’s mansion on Long Island blazes with light, and the beautiful, the wealthy, and the famous drive out from New York to drink Gatsby’s champagne and to party all night long. But Jay Gatsby, the owner of all this wealth, wants only one thing – to find again the woman of his dreams, the woman he has held in his heart and his memory for five long years.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, is one of the great American novels of the twentieth century. It captures perfectly the Jazz Age of the 1920s, and goes deep into the hollow heart of the American Dream.

18,5 GEL

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Six Other Stories

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2. Fitzgerald was quite close to choosing one of the Trimalchio titles until someone persuaded him that the reference was too  obscure. The original Trimalchio was a character in a first century work of fiction called Satyricon. The story had other famous fans, too; you can find mentions of Trimalchio in Les Miserables, Pompeii, and works by H.P. Lovecraft, Henry Miller and Octavio Paz, among others.

3. The Great Gatsby was partly inspired by a French novel called Le Grand Meaulnes, written in 1913. It has since been translated into English with the titles The Wanderer and The Lost Estate.

4. The famous cover of the book was designed by Francis Cugat, who later went on to become a designer for  actor/director/producer Douglas Fairbanks. Fitzgerald so loved Cugat’s art that he rewrote parts of the book to better  incorporate it.

5. The poet who “wrote” the novel’s epigraph never actually existed. He was a character in Fitzgerald’s previous book, This  Side of Paradise. Fitzgerald also occasionally used it as his pen name. Here’s the epigraph:

“Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry, “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!”

6. At the time of its publication in 1925, the novel cost just $2.

7. Unlike Fitzgerald’s previous two novels, Gatsby was not a commercial success. It sold just 20,000 copies in its entire first  year of publication.

8.Fitzgerald was convinced that the reason the book wasn’t a rousing success was because Gatsby didn’t have a single admirable female character—and, at the time, the majority of people reading novels were women. He also thought that the title, which was only “fair,” resulted in poor sales.

9.Gatsby wasn’t a critical success with everyone, either. Here’s a few of the not-so-rave reviews:

“Why [Fitzgerald] should be called an author, or why any of us should behave as if he were, has never been satisfactorily  explained to me.” —The Brooklyn Daily Eagle

“We are quite convinced after reading The Great Gatsby that Mr. Fitzgerald is not one of the great writers of to-day.” —The New York Evening World

“Scott Fitzgerald’s new novel, The Great Gatsby, is in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that.” —The Baltimore Evening Sun

1. He is named after Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Key was a distant relative of Fitzgerald’s.

2. While in the U.S. Army, Fitzgerald was assigned to Camp Sheridan outside of Montgomery, Alabama and that is where he fell in love with Zelda Sayre. A southern belle and daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court Justice, it took two marriage proposals, and his first book deal, before she agreed to marry the author.

3. Ernest Hemingway became close friends with Scott, although he frequently criticized Zelda. Hemingway thought she was absolutely “insane” and claimed that she “encouraged her husband to drink so as to distract him from his writing.”

4. Fitzgerald was hired by MGM in the late 1930s and relocated to Hollywood. Despite befriending the crème of the crop in the Hollywood circuit like Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, and Errol Flynn, he hated the place. He is quoted as saying, “Hollywood is a dump – in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulating gardens of its rich; full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.”

5. Between tears at Fitzgerald’s funeral, Dorothy Parker quoted the famous line from The Great Gatsby, “the poor son of a bitch,” in mournful sorrow over the early passing of her dear friend.