Gatsby at 101: An East Egg Easter Egg

By Dan Linke

Tomorrow is the 101st anniversary of The Great Gatsby’s publication. After last year’s centennial panel talk, Anne Margaret Daniel revealed an interesting Gatsby tidbit to me: one line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s handwritten manuscript was inadvertently left out of the published version. It was never corrected–until she edited the 2023 Norton Library edition. 

Daniel hypothesizes that the transcriptionist or the typesetter inadvertently skipped over an entire manuscript line, but, as the sentence reads well enough without the phrase, it was not caught. However, she reinserted it into her edition, and I find it makes the sentence even more Fitzgeraldian–that is, more complex and lyrical.

The image above is from Fitzgerald’s corrected copy of the published 1925 first edition–without the added/missing line, nor any notation from Fitzgerald himself, so even he did not catch this omission. It is from Chapter One, where Nick first visits his cousin Daisy at her home in East Egg. 

While this does not in any way change our understanding of the novel, it is an interesting footnote that also underscores the importance of keeping literary authors’ manuscripts.  And while one may think this is less important once drafts contained within electronic files were emailed to publishers, there is an instance where the only drafts of Toni Morrison’s Beloved survived in electronic form.