Our book members jumped into this discussion by noting that the blue background took up the largest area of the cover, suggesting that the disembodied eyes and mouth are somewhat ethereal, just like they are floating in space. Since the cover came before the book was published, it would be hard to explain how it couldn’t have influenced Fitzgerald’s writing – since there are several key story elements and themes that can be observed on the dust jacket. Bruccoli, in his introduction to the 1991 “Authorized Text,” speculated that Fitzgerald may have taken key ideas from the cover and written them into his novel. Since it has been re-issued the cover has been part of over 25,000,000 copies sold worldwide. he asked his editor, Maxwell Perkins, to secure the rights to use it exclusively for him. Eder writes that when Fitzgerald first saw Cugat’s artwork, he was interested in using it for his book. In a 1991 essay, publisher, Charles Scribner III called Cugat’s cover “the most celebrated and widely distributed jacket art in twentieth-century literature, and perhaps of all time.” What is most remarkable about this is that “Fitzgerald saw the cover before his manuscript was finished” (Chris Eder,, ). The Scribner publishing firm decided to bring the book cover back at the same time they decided to republish the book, in the early 1960s, after it had gone out of print for nearly 40 years. I think that the cover reveals almost everything we need to know about the tone, the fate of the characters, and the major theme of this book. Thus, one focused way of unlocking some of the keys of The Great Gatsby is to reflect on the symbolic meanings of the images of its iconic book cover ( see the lead photo of this article and below).Īs the theme of our book club and this site is, “A Classic Book Keeps Speaking to Us Long After It is Written, “I started off of our discussion with a look at how Gatsby’s book jacket, by the Spanish artist Francis Cugat still speaks to us.
But in the case of this book, you might ask if you can judge the greatness of its cover by the book it helped to inspire. It has often been said that you can’t judge the greatness of a book by its cover. Each time I have approached this book, I have discovered new insights into its characters, themes, writing style, dialogue, cultural context, and textual history. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American Classic. I felt this was fortunate, as I have a keen interest in this book and have either previously participated in or led many groups considering F.
A powerful snowstorm in January 2018 permitted me the opportunity, as the Coordinator of the Classic Book Club near Richmond, VA, to re-schedule our discussion of The Great Gatsby to January 4, 2019.
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