A new movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio should boost paperback sales of “The Great Gatsby.” But it won’t hold a candle to the book’s greatest promoter: the U.S. military.
During World War II, tens of thousands of bored soldiers were given copies of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slim Jazz Age book to kill the time. Some scholars think that may have propelled its postwar recognition as a great American novel.
It’s a story worthy of Gatsby himself, who also went from war to success.
Working with the military, a group of publishing executives created the Council on Books in Wartime in 1942 to distribute cheap paperbacks to soldiers to boost morale. The complete list of 1,322 books the council chose for special Armed Services Editions between 1943 and 1946 ranged from lowbrow (“The Fireside Book of Dog Stories” and “The Adventures of Superman”) to high culture (Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim” and W. Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage”).
For G.I.s looking to take their mind off the war, just about anything would do.
“The hunger for these books, evidenced by the way they are read to tatters, is astounding even to the Army and Navy officers and the book-trade officials who conceived Editions for the Armed Services,” noted the Saturday Evening Post in a story on the program.
The books, one G.I. told the magazine, were “as popular as pin-up girls.”
At the time of the program, “The Great Gatsby” had a not-so-great reputation, when it was discussed at all.
Published in 1925, the book was considered more of a “nostalgic period piece,” something like an old Gershwin tune, as one critic put it. In 1937, Fitzgerald couldn’t even find his own novel on the shelves, going from bookstore to bookstore to find a copy for his mistress, Sheilah Graham. Sometime over the next decade, that all changed.
“By 1945, the opinion that ‘Gatsby’ was merely a period piece had almost entirely disappeared,” noted a critic with the New York Times, years later.
Some of that change may be due to a reappraisal after Fitzgerald’s death in 1940. Some may be due to necessary distance from the book’s 1920s setting. And some credit may go to its selection for an Armed Services Edition. The late Matthew J. Bruccoli, one of the top experts on Fitzgerald and a collector of Armed Services Editions of books, wrote that the Council on Books in Wartime’s efforts far outstripped those of his original publisher.
“One hundred fifty-five thousand ASE copies of ‘The Great Gatsby’ were distributed — as against the twenty-five thousand copies of the novel printed by Scribners between 1925 and 1942,” he wrote. “Was there a connection between the ASE publication of ‘Gatsby’ and ‘Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ and the Fitzgerald revival that commenced in the late 1940s?”
The U.S. military has long helped popularize certain products by giving them free to soldiers: disposable razors in World War I, cigarettes and M&Ms in World War II and Tabasco sauce today.
The books selected by the Council on Books in Wartime are also on that list. Over three years, the council gave away more than 122 million paperbacks — the biggest book giveaway in history — at a cost of just under $8 million.
The program was not without problems.
It’s been noted that few women or minorities were among the authors selected. Some books, such as Zane Grey’s classic Western “Riders of the Purple Sage,” were cut from the list by Army censors. (It was deemed anti-Mormon.) And a 1944 fight in Congress led to the program being curtailed out of concern that some books might promote Franklin Roosevelt’s re-election effort.
Nonetheless, the program has been credited with boosting the postwar publishing industry, inspiring G.I.s to go back to college after the war and providing solace to soldiers on the front lines.
Not to mention giving a boost to a little book called “The Great Gatsby.”
