The Great Gatsby was Fitzgerald’s third novel. After This Side of Paradise, he wrote a similar novel entitled, The Beautiful and the Damned, as well as several short stories, and these cemented his personality in the eyes of the public. Scott and his wife Zelda were notable, drinking fantastically at parties, widely quoted in newspapers, and generally living up to the Roaring Twenties aesthetic that Fitzgerald had helped to codify in the public eye. Just two months after The Beautiful and the Damned was released, amidst the press flurry of his new book, Fitzgerald began work on a third novel.

The Fitzgeralds in May 1923, a year before moving to Europe, joining many other American expatriates who moved there after the end of World War I.

At the start of 1924, while the Fitzgeralds were living in Great Neck, New York — a location not dissimilar to The Great Gatsby's West Egg — Fitzgerald began writing what would become his most famous novel. In May, the family of three (daughter Scottie was born in 1921) moved to Europe. In the introduction to the Cambridge Edition of The Great Gatsby, the editor estimates that Fitzgerald had drafted the first three chapters of the book at this point.

Princeton has a few pages of the Gatsby ur-text, a very early draft, sent to fellow author Willa Cather in Spring 1925. These pages read similarly to the finished book, but the character names are different and there are passages deleted or rephrased. “Ada” used here would later become Daisy; “Jordan Vance,” Jordan Baker; and “Caraway” would gain an additional R. The narration differs as well, as the work embodies a third-person narrator instead of Nick’s first-person perspective.

Ur-text of a passage from The Great Gatsby, with, as would be expected, notable differences from the finished product.

The full autograph manuscript of The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald’s own autograph draft manuscript copy of Gatsby, written over 1924 and 1925, demonstrates a work in progress, with altered phrases as well as characterizations that would be completely re-conceptualized in the subsequent text. Jordan, for example, is hardly present. The next version was referred to as the Trimalchio galleys, because the title of the book at this point was Trimalchio or Trimalchio in West Egg, in reference to Petronius’s first century Satyricon. These galleys are more recognizable, but serve as a middle point between the draft and the finished manuscript. There are many substantial revisions including lines skipped or added, contrary to the minor correction of typos and tiny changes that a typical author would be permitted to do. Fitzgerald's changes required that the entire text be reset, and, in an age of physical typesetting, this was not an inconsequential cost.

One of the most iconic book covers due to both its striking illustration and the book’s ubiquity on school reading lists, “Celestial Eyes,” a gouache by painter and graphic designer Francis Cugat, was the only book cover that he created. Fitzgerald’s editor Max Perkins acquired the work for Gatsby's dust jacket before Fitzgerald had finished the novel. At one point, Fitzgerald admonished Perkins not to use the cover for anything else because he had already written it into the book in the form of the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg.