Jay Gatsby - Wikipedia

Further information: Max Gerlach and F. Scott Fitzgerald   F. Scott Fitzgerald (left) partly based the character of Jay Gatsby on his wealthy neighbor Max Gerlach (right).[c] The character's obsession with Daisy Buchanan was based on Fitzgerald's romantic pursuit of Chicago heiress Ginevra King.[d]

After the publication and success of his debut novel This Side of Paradise in 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda Sayre relocated to a wealthy enclave on Long Island near New York City.[19] Despite enjoying the exclusive Long Island milieu, Fitzgerald disapproved of the extravagant parties,[20] and the wealthy persons he encountered often disappointed him.[21] While striving to emulate the rich, he found their privileged lifestyle to be morally disquieting, and he felt repulsed by their careless indifference to less wealthy persons.[22][23]

Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald admired the rich, but he nonetheless harbored a deep resentment towards them.[23][24] This recurrent theme is ascribable to Fitzgerald's life experiences in which he was "a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton."[25] He "sensed a corruption in the rich and mistrusted their might."[25] Consequently, he became a vocal critic of America's leisure class and his works satirized their lives.[26][27]

While living in New York, writer F. Scott Fitzgerald's enigmatic neighbor was Max Gerlach.[c][1][31] Gerlach claimed to be born in America to a German immigrant family,[e] and he served as an officer in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. He later became a gentleman bootlegger who lived like a millionaire in New York.[5] Flaunting his new wealth, Gerlach threw lavish parties,[6] never wore the same shirt twice,[7] used the phrase "old sport",[8] claimed to be educated at Oxford University,[9] and fostered myths about himself, including that he was a relative of Wilhelm II.[10] These details about Gerlach inspired Fitzgerald in his creation of Jay Gatsby.[33] With the end of prohibition and the onset of the Great Depression, Gerlach lost his immense wealth.[34] Living in reduced circumstances, he attempted suicide by shooting himself in the head in 1939.[34] Blinded after his suicide attempt, he lived as a helpless invalid for many years before dying on October 18, 1958, at Bellevue Hospital, New York City.[35] He was buried in a pine casket at Long Island National Cemetery.[35]

"They're a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."I've always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chapter VIII, The Great Gatsby[36]

Mirroring Gerlach's background, Fitzgerald's fictional creation of James Gatz has a Germanic surname,[13] and the character's father adheres to Lutheranism.[3] These biographical details indicate Gatsby's family are recent German immigrants.[13] Such origins preclude them from the status of Old Stock Americans.[13]

Fitzgerald based many aspects of the lower-middle-class character on himself. "The whole idea of Gatsby", he later explained, "is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it."[37] In particular, Gatsby's obsession with Daisy Buchanan was based on Fitzgerald's romantic obsession with Chicago heiress Ginevra King.[d]

After The Great Gatsby's publication in April 1925, Fitzgerald was dismayed that many literary critics misunderstood the novel,[38] and he resented the fact that they failed to perceive the many parallels between his own life and his fictional character of Jay Gatsby; in particular, that both created a mythical version of themselves and attempted to live up to this legend.[39]

In June 2025, Clare Hopkins, archivist at Trinity College, and Roger Michel, a fellow of the College, announced after searching historical records that the model for young Gatsby was “almost certainly” Robert P. T. Coffin, a poet.[40]