Today 100 Years Ago: Headlines from April 11, 1925

Looking Back a Century

On this day in 1925, the world crackled with jazz, radio static, and the hum of modernity speeding up Western society. While we in 2025 flip through holographic feeds and AI-curated playlists, our great-grandparents were lining up at neighborhood bookshops for a new hard-back that promised to bottle the magic—and malaise—of the Roaring Twenties.

1️⃣ A Novel Arrives That Defines the Jazz Age

The Great Gatsby Hits the Shelves — April 10, 1925

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slim, 180-page novel arrived quietly on a Friday in New York City bookstores—just hours before this very morning a hundred years ago. Early buyers paid two dollars for a first-edition copy with its now-iconic cerulean dust jacket: a melancholic pair of eyes floating above carnival lights on Long Island’s shore.

Newspaper reviewers the next day called the book, “a curious study in decadence,” and predicted modest sales. Few foresaw that Jay Gatsby’s so-called “orgastic future” would become the cultural touchstone for the entire decade—and, eventually, the American Dream itself.

Fitzgerald was thirty-eight cents in the red at Scribner’s that Friday, hoping the book would renew his bank account after lavish hotel bills with his wife Zelda. It didn’t—at least not immediately. Fewer than 25,000 copies left store counters in the first year, and Fitzgerald wrote to friends that he felt “like a forgotten ghost.”

Through the 2025 Lens

• In 2025, a debut novelist can upload an e-book and hit one million downloads overnight. Fitzgerald had to wait until well after his death in 1940 for Gatsby to enter the American canon.
• The novel’s themes—income inequality, conspicuous consumption, and the chase for curated identities—still feel eerily current amid our NFTs, influencer culture, and metaverse mansions.
• First-edition Gatsbys now fetch six-figure sums at auction, roughly the price of a mid-tier VR condo—proof that nostalgia pays dividends.

Flash-Forward Fact: When future classrooms crack open The Great Gatsby on neural-ink tablets, they’ll be scrolling pixels scanned from paper printed exactly one century—and one day—ago.