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Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires​
Trimalchio in West Egg
On the Road to West Egg
Under the Red, White and Blue
Gold-Hatted Gatsby
The High-Bouncing Lover
Choosing a title for your newly finished masterpiece can be a tricky process.

F Scott Fitzgerald came up with all the above ideas before finally settling on the famous one, largely because of his editor Max Perkins (although he still grumbled about it after it was published).

And of course he was not alone. Ernest Hemingway toyed with I Have Committed Fornication But That Was in Another Country, and Besides the Wench Is Dead before sensibly settling on A Farewell to Arms.

He also considered:
Love In War
Sorrow For Pleasure
Late Wisdom
The Enchantment
If You Must Love
World Enough and Time
In Praise of His Mistress
Every Night and All
Of Wounds and Other Causes
The Retreat from Italy
As Others Are
Love is One Fervent Fire​
Kindlit without Desire
A World to See
Patriots Progress
The Grand Tour
The Italian Journey
The World's Room
Disorder and Early Sorrow
An Italian Chronicle
The Time Exchanged
Death Once Dead
They Who Get Shot
The Italian Experience
Love in Italy
Love in War
The Sentimental Education
Education of the Flesh
The Carnal Education
The Sentimental Education of Frederick Henry
Thing That Has Been
Nights and Forever
In Another Country
Knowledge Increaseth Sorrow
The Peculiar Treasure
One Event Happeneth To Them All
One Thing For Them All
Nothing Better For A Man
Time of War
The World's Room
One Thing is Certain
The Long Home
So what is the best way of choosing a title?

You could try the always popular Something's Something approach - Midnight's Children, Schindler's List, Homer's Daughter; equations such as author Andy Martin's useful "number + noun + 'of' + noun" (eg Seven Pillars of Wisdom); and various random title generators (some are very specific, such as the online Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator which includes The Cheers Effect: How and Why Everybody Knows Your Name).

Lulu.com even offers an automated way of checking if your title is likely to be a bestseller, generally suggesting that books with slightly more abstract titles, such as Agatha Christie's Sleeping Murder, have the greatest chances of success.

Another way is simply to borrow the best bits of other people's work, which is not only the way that Aldous Huxley usually went but can be turned into a Christmas quiz for the well read. So where do these Huxley titles come from originally? (answers below):
After Many a Summer Dies The Swan
Antic Hay
Beyond the Mexique Bay
The Doors of Perception
Eyeless in Gaza
Jesting Pilate
Those Barren Leaves
One problem with this method of choosing a title is that it requires you to be very well read (as Clive James has observed, "Nowadays, the titles of his books are more alive than his books").

This is exactly what Huxley was. He had read everything and for good measure even travelled with a half-sized edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to make sure he had something decent to read.

As good luck would have it, there's a much easier way. Just open your Collected Works of Shakespeare and off you go, an approach which also bore fruit for Huxley, who certainly perused his copies of The Tempest (Brave New World), Macbeth ( Brief Candles), Hamlet ( Mortal Coils), and Henry IV Part 1 ( Time Must Have A Stop - a bit of a cheat, this one, as the actual quote from Hotspur's death speech is "But thought's the slave of life, and life time's fool; And time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop").

Answers:

Tithonus by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Edward II by Christopher Marlowe
Bermudas by Andrew Marvell
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
Samson Agonistes by John Milton
Of Truth by Francis Bacon
The Tables Turned by William Wordsworth
'A Book of Book Lists' by Alex Johnson, £7.99, British Library Publishing

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These are the alternative titles F Scott Fitzgerald considered for 'The Great Gatsby'

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Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires​ Trimalchio in West Egg On the Road to West Egg Under the Red, White and Blue Gold-Hatted Gatsby The High-Bouncing Lover Choosing a title for your newly finished masterpiece can be a tricky process.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel is a surprisingly apt primer on the president of the United States.

There's an eerie symmetry between Donald Trump and The Great Gatsby's Tom Buchanan, as if the villain of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel had been brought to life in a louder, gaudier guise for the 21st century. It's not just their infamous carelessness, the smashing-up of things and creatures that propels Tom's denouement and has seemed to many a Twitter user to be the animating force behind Trump's policy and personnel decisions. The two men, real and fictional, mirror each other in superficial but telling ways. Tom moves like Trump, aggressive and restless, and talks like him, with ponderous pride. He picks personal fights in public, "as though ... it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of [his] emotions." Tom surprises his dinner guests with disjointed political speeches, warning insistently that " civilization's going to pieces." His patrician mannerisms are shot through with flashes of anxiety, "as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more."

Tom-the Yale man, the football star, the spender of old money, the scion of what he calls the Nordic race-embodies the peak of social status in his century. Trump-the former Playboy-cover subject, the billionaire celebrity, the most powerful man in America-does the same for his. And their shared personality traits are the product of their shared relationship to power-the casual unreflective certainty that comes from inheritance, and enables its holders to wield its blunt force as both a weapon and a shield. Such power has its own logic; it responds not to social or moral rules, but to what it perceives as danger. It's for these reasons that in 2018, The Great Gatsby reads like a warning. For as much as it is a story about the American dream, it is also a story about power under threat, and of how that power, lashing out, can render truth irrelevant.

Here's the cast of The Great Gatsby, for those distant from their high-school English classes. Nick Carraway, the narrator, is a naive midwesterner who considers himself "one of the few honest people that I have ever known." He takes a Wall Street job to escape hometown ennui and romantic commitment, renting a house in the less glamorous of twin Long Island suburbs and flirting idly with Jordan Baker, an athlete and cynical socialite. Next door to Nick is Jay Gatsby, a self-made man in terms of both fortune and identity, and across the bay is wealthy, beautiful Daisy Buchanan, Nick's cousin and the love of Gatsby's life. Daisy is married to Tom, who has a lover, Myrtle Wilson. And Myrtle, in turn, is married to a struggling mechanic, whose emasculation is just thorough enough to leave him the strength for revenge.

Fitzgerald draws a connection between class and character from the first pages of the novel, encompassing honor and honesty in Nick's comfortable middle-class notion of "advantages." Yet it soon becomes clear that the advantage afforded by wealth is less a natural inclination to honesty than it is the privilege of bending the world to one's own convenience. Nick sums up this dynamic:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy-they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Money is a shield between the careless wealthy and the consequences of their actions, cutting them off from the reality of what they have done and what it means. Thus, although Tom (like Trump) has a reputation for having cheated on his wife, he decries the loss of family values, transforming easily " from libertine to prig." His actions, however confused, are in his own mind "entirely justified"-so that talking to him feels, in the end, like "talking to a child." Tom throws the weight of his denials around in tandem with his money, dismissively contradicting a man who sells him a dog on the street. When George Wilson, the mechanic, implies that Tom has been slow to produce the car he's promised to sell him, all it takes is Tom's cold "No" to make clear that he's overstepped his place.

Yet Tom is far from the only character to use his wealth and status as a means for deceit. Jordan, similarly privileged, is "incurably dishonest," relying on the assumed codes of polite society to protect her reputation just as she relies on drivers more careful than herself to stay out of her way. Gatsby acquires a new identity when he acquires his fortune, the excess of his belongings-shirts and books and oranges and flowers-matched only by the proliferation of stories about his roots. Nick, more subtly, aspires to do the same: He buys a set of financial books with "that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer," seeking amid their "shining secrets" a way out of his old life and out of "that tangle back home" with a woman he's rumored to be courting.

Even Daisy, idealized as she is, demonstrates the relationship between money and its power to override reality. As Tom's wife, she personifies the kind of wealth that he possesses and other men can only pursue: In Gatsby's words, "Her voice is full of money," which is to say it's seductive, hard to catch, and compels her listeners to belief, though she rarely says anything she means. At one point, Nick doesn't notice her insincerity until the moment she stops speaking. When she does, he interprets her smirk "as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged"-signaling the couple's elite status by flaunting how little they need to care for the truth.

Trump displays a similar carelessness. Amid the cloud of easily disprovable statements that surrounds his administration, he has also, strikingly, used falsehoods to define himself and his office-spinning claims of the largest-ever inauguration crowd and a landslide electoral victory and a record number of Time covers into the mythical biography of a superlatively powerful self. Trump doesn't appear to care for realism, and maybe that's the point: Whereas a social climber like Gatsby is meticulous with the details of his self-invention, stocking his library with real books though his guests would not be surprised by cardboard, Trump knows that the secret of power is effortlessness; in his world, as in Tom and Daisy Buchanan's, wealth means less if you have to work for it. The president inspires loyalty through sheer swagger, telling it like it is even when it isn't, speaking reality into existence: It is so, because I say so.

What can rouse such complacency into action? Only, perhaps, the notion that what Nick terms the "rather distinguished secret society" of the powerful is under siege. Tom expresses this anxiety early on in The Great Gatsby, when he warns from the head of his own opulent dinner table that "the white race," having "produced all the things that go to make civilization," must "watch out or these other races will have control of things." He wants, above all, to preserve the ease with which he sets the terms of his world-"to ensure," as Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, "that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification." Tom is motivated by the same reactionism that Coates has documented as one of the forces that crowned Trump the successor to America's first black president.
Read more: Ta-Nehisi Coates on the "awful inheritance" underlying Trump's presidency
Tom's fears aren't brought to life, however, until he comes face-to-face with Gatsby-the man who "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself," whose smile, which "believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself," reflects back to all who behold it the reification of their dreams. There's convincing scholarship to suggest that Fitzgerald may have created Gatsby-with his "tanned skin," close-cropped hair, and studied diction-as a light-skinned black man passing for white, and this, to the white-supremacist Tom, would have been the ultimate insult. It's enough, though, that Gatsby acts, and leads Daisy to act, on terms that Tom has not defined-so that Tom finds his wife, and all of the wealth and power she represents, "slipping precipitately from his control."

The tragedy unfolds from there, and strangely, it parallels Trump's rise. Tom attacks Gatsby's origins the way Trump demanded Barack Obama's birth certificate, denouncing Gatsby as "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere." There is a scene; Daisy, unable at last to embody Gatsby's romantic ideal, drives in tears toward home, running Myrtle down with Gatsby's car. And Tom (after conspiring, the novel suggests, with Daisy) turns Wilson's need for vengeance to his advantage-just as Trump, with his anti-immigrant rhetoric, played to the previously unspeakable fears of those who felt their country had been taken from them. Tom names Gatsby as the source of Wilson's grief-his wife's lover and her killer-and Wilson kills both Gatsby and himself, while Myrtle's real lover (Tom) and killer (Daisy) retreat unharmed. Nick's famous condemnation comes here-"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy." This censure is all the more scathing for the moral emptiness of the Buchanans' petty sin, and all the more futile: The careless, by definition, pay no attention to whom they hurt.

Like Trump, who ran on promises to ban Muslims and deport Mexicans, Tom scapegoats an outsider as a threat to what his community values. Tom assigns an identity to hazy, formless discontents and fears, just as Trump has declared a national crisis that he alone can fix. The president lives in a widening circle of disgraced former aides and advisers; likewise, Tom leaves behind him the bodies of those who have done, or been blamed for, his dirty work. And like Trump, who's made numerous unfounded claims to cast himself as a victim, Tom cherishes his own implacable sense of what's right and wrong and real.

And this, today, may be the most potent warning of Fitzgerald's novel. Because when Tom and Daisy smash up the things and creatures around them, they don't just demonstrate their own carelessness about truth and consequences. They also expose the misconceptions of their witnesses, revealing that Gatsby is blinded by his own dreams; that Jordan is naive to trust in other people's honesty; that Nick has, as he confesses to Jordan, been lying to himself and calling it honor. So too has Trump exposed the gaps in America's ideal of itself- the ugly currents of its power, the limits of its possibilities. He's forced a reckoning, brought the country's vision closer to its reality.

Yet it's difficult, now, to know what a sense of reality is good for, when the disconnect between truth and the truths of power is so stark. In the penultimate scene of The Great Gatsby, Nick confronts Tom about what he told Wilson-and Tom is so certain of the justice of his actions that the only thing Nick can do is shake his hand. "There was nothing I could say," Nick muses, "except the one unutterable fact that it wasn't true."

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel is a surprisingly apt primer on the president of the United States.

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How 'The Great Gatsby' Explains Trump

Last week, Rosa Inocencio Smith wrote about the "superficial but telling ways" President Donald Trump resembles Tom Buchanan, a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

As a high-school English teacher, I found your article informative, refreshing, and full of new takeaways to consider.

While I agree with many of your points, I believe one consideration is missing. First, though the similarities between Tom and our president are apt, I believe the parallels between Gatsby and Trump must also be explored. Their similarities coalesce around a relentless ambition for social promotion. Gatsby, in his disdain for poverty, sees Daisy as the final piece in his lifelong effort to remake himself and find acceptance in the elite, old-money society he so desperately wants to join. Trump, as well, has based his entire life on being accepted into the elite Manhattan social scene, something his Queens upbringing has prevented. After all, the working title for The Great Gatsby was "Trimalchio"; as a former slave in Satyricon, by Petronius, Trimalchio pursued wealth through rather ruthless means.

As you note, Gatsby was indeed blind to his dreams, and in no small part this led to his downfall, though by means he never imagined. That someone like Gatsby could plummet from dizzying heights just as quickly as he climbed the rungs of wealth and influence suggests the limits of power and wealth. To the external observer, our president, in his previous life, seemed to have all the trappings of wealth and power; however, his own insecurity and narcissism became the direct catalyst for his unceasing devotion to climbing the social ladder, or simply to spiting certain people. This is quite the opposite of Tom, who never sought to continually climb the social ladder but rather to maintain the undisputed status quo he occupied. Tom is free to spout unmerited claims about race and other topics; in no way is his societal position altered. But Trump's blindness is rooted primarily in arrogance and lack of intellectual ability. Without a doubt, our president never seems to have asked himself what might happen if past deeds he's never had to account for were to become a topic of national interest, or what might happen if his policy and executive decisions were confronted by the many layers of power in the government. Just as Gatsby assumed that a relentless pursuit of wealth would open his path to the pinnacle of society, Trump assumed his self-perceived skills and accomplishments in business would gloss over his gross deficiencies. We must consider Gatsby and ask ourselves what a downfall might look like in respect to our president. Such an event should give a shudder to any American concerned about the future of democracy.

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Letters: Is Trump Tom Buchanan Incarnate?

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Last week, Rosa Inocencio Smith wrote about the "superficial but telling ways" President Donald Trump resembles Tom Buchanan, a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. As a high-school English teacher, I found your article informative, refreshing, and full of new takeaways to consider.

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The best advice I ever got about reading came from the critic and scholar Louis Menand. Back in 2005, I spent six months in Boston and, for the fun of it, sat in on a lit seminar he was teaching at Harvard. The week we were to read Gertrude Stein's notoriously challenging Tender Buttons, one student raised her hand and asked-bravely, I thought-if Menand had any advice about how best to approach it. In response, he offered up the closest thing to a beatific smile I have ever seen on the face of a book critic. "With pleasure," he replied.

The plot of The Great Gatsby, should you need a refresher, is easily told. Nick Carraway, an upstanding young man from the Midwest, moves to New York to seek his fortune in the bond business. He rents a cottage on Long Island, next to a mansion occupied by a man of mysterious origins but manifest wealth: Jay Gatsby, known far and wide for his extravagant parties. Gradually, we learn that Gatsby was born into poverty, and that everything he has acquired-fortune, mansion, entire persona-is designed to attract the attention of his first love: the beautiful Daisy, by chance Nick's cousin. Daisy loved Gatsby but married Tom Buchanan, who is fabulously wealthy, fabulously unpleasant, and conducting an affair with a married working-class woman named Myrtle. Thanks to Nick, Gatsby and Daisy reunite, but she ultimately balks at the prospect of leaving Tom and, barreling back home in Gatsby's car, kills Myrtle in a hit-and-run. Her husband, believing that Gatsby was both the driver and Myrtle's lover, tracks him to his mansion and shoots him. Finis, give or take some final reflections from Nick.

When this tale was published, in 1925, very few people aside from its author thought it was or would ever become an American classic. Unlike his first book- This Side of Paradise, which was hailed as the definitive novel of its era- The Great Gatsby emerged to mixed reviews and mediocre sales. Fewer than 24,000 copies were printed in Fitzgerald's lifetime, and some were still sitting in a warehouse when he died, in 1940, at the age of 44. Five years later, the U.S. military distributed 150,000 copies to service members, and the book has never been out of print since. Untold millions of copies have sold, including 405,000 in the first three months of this year.

But sales figures don't capture the contemporary Gatsby phenomenon. In recent years, the book has been reinvented as a much-admired experimental play ( Gatz) and a Nintendo video game-"Grand Theft Auto, West Egg," as the New York Times dubbed it. This Thursday, Stephen Colbert will host a Gatsby book club; the new movie opens Friday. (Read David Edelstein's review here.) If you need a place to take your date afterward and have $14,999 to spare, you can head to the Trump hotel, which is offering a glamorous "Great Gatsby Package": three nights in a suite on Central Park West, a magnum of Champagne, cuff links and a tailored suit for men, and, "for the ladies, an Art Deco shagreen and onyx cuff, accompanied by a personal note from Ivanka Trump." Car insurance is not included.

So Gatsby is on our minds, on our screens, on our credit cards, on top of the Amazon best-seller list. But even in quieter days, we never really forget Fitzgerald's novel. It is, among other things, a pedagogical perennial, in part for obvious reasons. The book is short, easy to read, and full of low-hanging symbols, the most famous of which really do hang low over Long Island: the green light at the end of Daisy's dock; the unblinking eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, that Jazz Age Dr. Zizmor. But the real appeal of the book, one assumes, is what it lets us teach young people about the political, moral, and social fabric of our nation. Which raises the question: To our students, and to ourselves, exactly what kind of Great Gatsby Package are we selling?

I will grant Fitzgerald this much: Somehow, in the five years between his literary debut and The Great Gatsby, he taught himself to write. This Side of Paradise is intermittently brilliant but terrifically uncontrolled. Gatsby, by contrast, is focused and deliberate: a single crystal, scrupulously polished.

It is an impressive accomplishment. And yet, apart from the restrained, intelligent, beautifully constructed opening pages and a few stray passages thereafter-a melancholy twilight walk in Manhattan; some billowing curtains settling into place at the closing of a drawing-room door- Gatsby as a literary creation leaves me cold. Like one of those manicured European parks patrolled on all sides by officious gendarmes, it is pleasant to look at, but you will not find any people inside.

Fitzgerald fails at that, most egregiously where it most matters: in the relationship between Daisy and Gatsby. This he constructs out of one part nostalgia, four parts narrative expedience, and zero parts anything else-love, sex, desire, any kind of palpable connection. Fitzgerald himself (who otherwise expressed, to anyone who would listen, a dazzled reverence for his own novel) acknowledged this flaw. Of the great, redemptive romance on which the entire story is supposed to turn, he admitted, "I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy."

What was Fitzgerald doing instead of figuring out such things about his characters? Precision-engineering his plot, chiefly, and putting in overtime at the symbol factory. Gatsby takes place over a single summer: three months, three acts, three chapters each, with a denouement-the car accident and murder-of near-Greek (but also near-silly) symmetry. Inside that story, almost everything in sight serves a symbolic purpose: the automobiles and ash heaps, the upright Midwest and poisonous East, the white dresses and decadent mansions.

Heavy plot, heavy symbolism, zero psychological motivation: Those are the genre conventions of fables and fairy tales. Gatsby has been compared to both, typically to suggest a mythical quality to Fitzgerald's characters or a moral significance to his tale. But moral significance requires moral engagement: challenge, discomfort, illumination, or transformation. The Great Gatsby offers none of that. In fact, it offers the opposite: aloofness.

Scott Fitzgerald was, in his own words, "a moralist at heart." He wanted to "preach at people," and what he preached about most was the degeneracy of the wealthy. His concern, however, did not lie with the antisocial behaviors to which the rich are prone: acquiring their wealth through immoral means, say (Gatsby manipulates the American financial system and dies a martyr), or ignoring all plights from which they have the means to protect themselves. Like many American moralists, Fitzgerald was more offended by pleasure than by vice, and he had a tendency to confound them. In The Great Gatsby, polo and golf are more morally suspect than murder. Fitzgerald despised the rich not for their iniquity per se but for the glamour of it-for, in H. L. Mencken's words, "their glittering swinishness."

That's an interesting tension, common to most of us and great fodder for fiction. But rather than explore it, Gatsby enacts it. As readers, we revel in the glamorous dissipation of the rich, and then we revel in the cheap satisfaction of seeing them fall. At no point are we made to feel uncomfortable about either pleasure, let alone their conjunction. At no point are we given cause, or room, to feel complicit. Our position throughout is that of an innocent bystander. That's also Nick's role, so the perspective of the book becomes one of passive observation. He watches across apartments as affairs take place, across parties as fights break out, across the road where the dead Myrtle's left breast flaps leerishly loose. Yet he never admits to collusion with or seduction by all the fabulous depravity around him. After it's all over, he retreats to the Midwest and, figuratively and literally, tells his story from the safe remove of America's imaginary moral high ground.

In This Side of Paradise, in many of his short stories, and especially in his nonfiction, Fitzgerald displays a quick and often mordant wit. Then, suddenly, that voice vanishes; The Great Gatsby might be the least funny book about rich people ever written. The British, who kick our ass at writing about class, know how useful a dash of humor is-how it can lift up or deflate, jostle or soothe, comfort or eviscerate. (In a literary hostage exchange, I would trade a thousand Fitzgeralds for one Edward St. Aubyn, 10,000 for an Austen or Dickens.) In leaving that note out, Fitzgerald is not just making a stylistic choice, nor even just signaling his solemnity of purpose. He is all but inventing a new narrative mode: the third-person sanctimonious. From the story of America's self-consuming profligacy, corruption, and avarice, he omits himself and his moral proxy-and, by extension, us.

I can't say more here about any of these. But allow me, in its fullness, one last apostasy. Every time I read the book's beloved final line, I roll my eyes. "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past": What a shame that Fitzgerald wasted such a lovely image on such an insufferable voice. Even as that faux "we" promises intimacy, the words drift down to us from on high-condescending, self-serious, detached from genuine human struggle. I'm sorry, but in the moral universe of The Great Gatsby, we are not all in the same boat. We are all up above it, watching-with prurient fascination, with pious opprobrium, watching and watching and doing nothing at all.

*This article originally appeared in the May 13, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.

Edelstein: Why I Sort of Liked The Great Gatsby

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The best advice I ever got about reading came from the critic and scholar Louis Menand. Back in 2005, I spent six months in Boston and, for the fun of it, sat in on a lit seminar he was teaching at Harvard.

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5. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Part II

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The Great Gatsby - Thug Notes Summary and Analysis