| Summary: | "Introduction Much attention has been devoted to the composition of The Great Gatsby. Scholars have traced the development of the novel from Fitzgerald's initial handwritten drafts through typescript and proof versions and into print. Fitzgerald began work on the novel in the late spring of 1922. In a letter dated 20 June to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner's Sons, he envisioned a story with a "catholic element," set in 'the middle west and New York of 1885.' Fitzgerald set down a partial draft of this narrative in 1922 and 1923 but was not satisfied with what he had produced. He scrapped the material, salvaging only a short story called 'Absolution,' which he published in The American Mercury in June 1924. Fitzgerald reconceived the novel in the spring of that year, setting it now in a fictional version of Great Neck, Long Island, where he and his wife and daughter were living. He continued to work on the novel in France during that summer and fall, composing the remainder of the narrative in holograph draft. Working with hired typists (he himself could not type), Fitzgerald put the text through two and perhaps three typescripts, each of which he revised. On 27 October he placed a final typescript of the novel in the transatlantic mail to Perkins. The text was typeset at the Scribner Press on West 43rd Street. Galley proofs were pulled; two sets were mailed to Fitzgerald in late December 1924. Partly in reaction to suggestions from Perkins and partly on his own, Fitzgerald virtually rewrote the novel in these galleys"--
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