JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

When F Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, he was, in the words of his biographer Matthew J Bruccoli, “an unemployed screenwriter”, whose fiction was largely ignored, if not entirely forgotten. The Great Gatsby had sold only seven copies in the last year of his life, and his complete works had earned him a grand total of $13.13 in royalties. Not long before his death, Fitzgerald scrawled a list of sources for each of Gatsby’s nine chapters, in the back of a book by André Malraux. Some of these notes are slightly mysterious: decades of digging by Fitzgerald scholars has not revealed who exactly “Mary” was, or what precisely the phrase “the day in New York” might mean. Others are readily comprehensible, such as “Gt Neck” – Great Neck being the real-life version of West Egg, the location of Gatsby’s Long Island mansion and the narrator Nick Carraway’s rented cottage.

Read the review of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell at the Guardian.