When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, at the age of 44, he believed that he was a failure, in large part because of the resounding failure of The Great Gatsby. Five years later, The Council on Books in Wartime gave American soldiers free copies of thousands of books, among them The Great Gatsby. These young men saw what the critics had not. All you can do as a writer is tell your stories, your way, and judge yourself by that alone.