THE GREATNESS OF GATSBY AND ZAPATA

The Great Gatsby a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald was first published on the 10th April 1925.

The novel takes place following the First World War in 1922. After its republishing in 1945 and 1953, The Great Gatsby quickly found a wide readership and is today widely regarded as a paragon of the Great American Novel, and a literary classic. The Modern Library named it the second best English-language novel of the 20th Century.

With The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald made a conscious departure from the writing process of his previous novels. He started planning it in June 1922, after completing his play The Vegetable and began composing it in 1923. He ended up discarding most of it as a false start, some of which resurfaced in the story "Absolution". Unlike his previous works, Fitzgerald intended to edit and reshape Gatsby thoroughly, believing that it held the potential to launch him toward literary acclaim. He told his editor Maxwell Perkins that the novel was a "consciously artistic achievement" and a "purely creative work — not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world". He added later, during editing, that he felt "an enormous power in me now, more than I've ever had"

After the birth of their daughter, Frances a.k.a. ‘Scottie’, the Fitzgeralds moved to Great Neck, Long Island in October 1922, appropriating Great Neck as the setting for The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald's neighbours included such newly wealthy New Yorkers as writer Ring Lardner, actor Lew Fields and comedian Ed Wynn. Great Neck, on the shores of Long Island Sound, sat across a bay from Manhasset Neck or Cow Neck Peninsula, which includes the communities of Port Washington, Manhasset, Port Washington North and Sands Point and was home to many of New York's wealthiest established families. In his novel, Great Neck became the new-money peninsula of "West Egg" and Manhasset the old-money peninsula of "East Egg".

Progress on the novel was slow. In May 1923, the Fitzgeralds moved to the French Riviera, where the novel was finished. In November he sent the draft to his editor Maxwell Perkins and his agent Harold Ober. The Fitzgeralds moved to Rome for the winter. Fitzgerald made revisions through the winter after Perkins informed him that the novel was too vague and Gatsby's biographical section too long. Content after a few rounds of revision, Fitzgerald returned the final batch of revised galleys in the middle of February 1925. It appeared on the 10^th April.

Zapata

It was also on the 10^th April 1919 that Mexican Revolution leader Emiliano Zapata is ambushed and shot dead by government forces in Morelos. The Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910, and was initially directed against the president Porfirio Diaz. Zapata formed and commanded an important revolutionary force, the Liberation Army of the South. Followers of Zapata were known as Zapatistas.