The Centenary of a Publishing Landmark
We’re coming up to a pair of centenaries that mark the pinnacle of one of the great literary rivalries of all time.
April 10 is the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, regarded by all as the author’s finest novel and by many as the greatest novel ever written. Eighteen months later, on Oct. 22, 2026, Hemingway fans will celebrate the centenary of The Sun Also Rises, his first and arguably greatest novel.
These masterpieces are linked not just because they were published at roughly the same time. They’re linked because these two authors, with few peers in the American canon, impacted one another so strongly. The Sun Also Rises would likely have been a different novel without Fitzgerald’s influence. And the whole relationship of these two brilliant, complicated men was infused with the transcendent romance of Paris in the 1920s.
Fitzgerald was already a celebrated author when he and his wife Zelda arrived in Paris in 1924. His first novel This Side of Paradise, published by Scribner in 1920, had been a massive success, and he’d coined the name for the decade when he published Tales of the Jazz Age in 1922. Arriving in Paris, this Princeton-educated dandy fit right into the local literary set, which already included Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound and a handsome young Chicagoan called Ernest Hemingway.
Hemingway was all the rage in the Paris crowd and utterly unknown beyond it. Genial, manly and adventurous, Hemingway had been injured as an ambulance driver in Italy in the war, and was now working as a journalist for The Toronto Star. By the time he had met Fitzgerald in 1925, he had published a few short stories that first revealed his lean, athletic style.
The two men soon bonded over a shared love of books and the bottle. At the time, Fitzgerald and his editor at Scribner, Maxwell Perkins, were putting the finishing touches on his latest novel The Great Gatsby. The novel, about a mysterious tycoon and his obsessive love for an old flame, was published to mixed reviews in the spring and was never recognized as a masterwork in Fitzgerald’s lifetime. (It is now – big time. A special 100th Anniversary edition, with a slick art deco cover, has already been published.)
Hemingway, meanwhile, was formulating plans for a novel. At Stein’s suggestion, he had taken in the festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain, and fell in love with bullfighting and the famous Running of the Bulls. He returned to the festival in the summer of 1925 with a band of rowdy friends, whose antics became the stuff of legend . . . and Hemingway’s first novel.
Fitzgerald was impressed enough with Hemingway that he wrote Perkins in New York to tell him about this emerging writer he’d met who had a brilliant future. “He’s the real thing,” Fitzgerald wrote. He also read the first draft of what would become The Sun Also Rises, and responded with a ten-page letter packed with suggested revisions.
It’s difficult to overstate Fitzgerald’s impact on this novel. He coached his protégé to edit out the “elephantine facetiousness” of the opening chapter and simply cut some of the worst scenes. He shared his impressions with Perkins, who eventually let Hemingway know Scribner would like to publish the book. There was only one problem: Hemingway by this time was under contract with a lesser publishing house, Boni & Liveright, which had published his first collection of short stories, In Our Time.
Hemingway devised a plan to let Scribner publish the book. His contract with Boni & Liveright included a clause that voided the agreement if the publisher rejected one of Hemingway’s books. Within a matter of days, Hemingway wrote a farcical novella called The Torrents of Spring. It was a parody of Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of stories by Sherwood Anderson, who was Boni & Liveright’s leading author at the time. Hemingway submitted this dreadful book to Boni believing it would never accept a manuscript that mocked its star writer. He was right. Boni & Liveright rejected Torrents. The contract was void, and Hemingway signed with Scribner.
It was Hemingway at his worst. Not only had he shafted the first American publishing house to show faith in him, he’d also publicly ridiculed Anderson, a kindly gent who had taken the time to mentor Hemingway when he was younger. Anderson’s influence can be found in several of Hemingway’s early short stories. Though Hemingway’s wife Hadley disliked her husband’s scheme, Fitzgerald stood solidly behind it, encouraging Hemingway to go through with it.
As a result, Perkins and the Scribner team published within eighteen months of each other not only The Great Gatsby, but also The Sun Also Rises, two of the greatest American novels ever. In my own mind, I always pair these two books, as if they could be marketed together as a box set.
On the surface, these two novels are very different, one about the ostentatious gentry on Long Island and the other about expats in Europe. But there’s a similarity I can’t escape. They’re both short novels, about 430 pages together, written in the first person, and are penned in cogent, accessible prose – aspects that marked a clear break from the weighty Victorian traditions of the past.
Both had unforgettable tortured heroines: Daisy Buchanan, in love with Jay Gatsby but married to the brutish Tom; and the promiscuous Lady Brett Ashley, who loved Jake Barnes but was unable to consummate their relationship because of his war wounds. The diction of these two female characters always seems similar to me.
Both novels close with timeless lines. Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Sun: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” They’re probably my two favorite closing lines in all literature.
Both stories featured some pretty unlikable people behaving dreadfully, and yet both authors draw the reader into the stories with remarkable panache. Scholarly books written about the influences on The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises highlight these unruly characters in their very titles. Sarah Churchwell in 2014 published Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, and two years later Lesley M.M. Blume put out Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece the Sun Also Rises.
Above all else, both novels define their era in a complementary fashion. Fitzgerald captured the glitz and greed of the roaring Twenties, almost making a fairy tale of this period of prosperity. Hemingway chronicled the young people shattered by the First World War, adrift in the world. The epigraph of The Sun Also Rises is a quote from Gertrude Stein, "You are all a lost generation.” The two authors, both still in their twenties, first published the memorable nicknames for their times, the Jazz Age and the Lost Generation.
The years in Paris marked the pinnacle of the Hemingway-Fitzgerald friendship, and the rivalry played a larger and larger role in their relationship as the years went on. Scholars have often appraised the two men in tandem, comparing their works and highlighting how their relationship molded both their careers. It’s been the subject of such books as Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Scott Donaldson’s Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald. Again, the very titles highlight how unhealthy their relationship became.
Unhealthy, but somehow fruitful. Hemingway especially became a better writer because of Fitzgerald’s tutelage. And the legacy of both men is all the richer because they have left behind magnificent novels and the enduring story of their friendship during the golden age of expat literature in Paris.
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As well as writing Hemingway on the China Front, Peter Moreira is the author of The Haight Mystery Series — retro mystery novels set in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Go to the home page of this website to sign up for a free prequel.
