Original edition of ‘the great American novel’ influenced Great Gatsby film

The Great Gatsby, known around the globe as one of the greatest American novels since its publication in 1925, started out as a very different book.

It started out as Trimalchio, a darker, more violent story that F. Scott Fitzgerald submitted to Scribner the publisher a year earlier.

The draft eventually became the story of lost love, the American dream, and the roaring 20s that we all know today, but was never published in its original form – until Cambridge University Press released an edition in 2000.

Cambridge remains the only publisher with a published edition of that early manuscript.

Fitzgerald’s early imagining of Gatsby and his American tragedy served as a major inspiration for Baz Luhrmann, whose film adaptation of The Great Gatsby starring Leonardo DiCaprio is in cinemas now.

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