Three years later, "The Great Gatsby" was published. "The Great Gatsby," set in 1922, the same year as the Hall-Mills murder, was published April 10, 1925. Jane Gibson, the pig woman, testifies from a stretcher on Nov. 18, 1926, at the Hall – Mills murder trial. A century after its publication, some literary scholars argue "The Great Gatsby" is about as close as any book can get to being called the Great American Novel. It's hard to imagine "The Great Gatsby" by any other name, but F. Scott Fitzgerald considered plenty of them.