The Armed Service Editions gave a second life to F. Scott Fitgerald's book,
The Great Gatsby. In a radio interview on WNYC's
Fresh Air, titled, "
How 'Gatsby' Went From A Moldering Flop To A Great American Novel" (Monday, September 08, 2014), book critic Maureen Corrigan - author of
So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures - told radio host Terry Gross:
Quote:
When Fitzgerald died in 1940 in Hollywood, his last royalty check was for $13.13. Remaindered copies of the second printing of The Great Gatsby were moldering away in [publisher] Scribner's warehouse.
World War II starts, and a group of publishers, paper manufacturers, editors [and] librarians get together in New York. And they decide that men serving in the Army and Navy need something to read. ... They printed over 1,000 titles of different books, and they sent over a million copies of these books to sailors and soldiers serving overseas and also to [prisoners of war] in prison camps in Japan and Germany through an arrangement with the Red Cross.
The Great Gatsby was chosen to be one of these Armed Services Editions. And what that meant was that all of a sudden this novel that was basically nowhere, you couldn't get it in bookstores in the early 1940s, [but] by 1945 over 123,000 copies of The Great Gatsby were distributed. ...
|