[3] The work depicts a female face of a flapper with poorly delineated contours, of which are seen only the eyes and mouth, suspended above the night sky of a city, evoking the Coney Island amusement park in New York.

[5] In addition, her ill-defined characters have prompted readers and critics to wonder what she may have been inspired by, with the main hypotheses pinning on Dr. Eckleburg's billboard in the Valley of Ashes or the description of Daisy, loved by the protagonist Jay Gatsby in the novel.

[10] In a preliminary sketch, Cugat drew a gray, blem landscape, inspired by the original title Fitzgerald wanted to give to the novel, Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires.

[11] After discarding this concept for being excessively gloomy, the painter then implemented a radical modification that became the foreshadowing of the final cover: a pencil and pastel drawing of the half-hidden face of a typical flapper of the time on the canal of Long Island Sound.

This cover, which was praised by the same Scott Fitzgerald and from his editor Maxwell Perkins, was the only job Cugat did for the publishing house of Charles Scribner's as well as the only one he ever drew and later established himself as the most famous in all of American literature, if not worldwide.

[17] Having read only part of the book and taking as inspiration only a few conversations with the author and the title, instead of representing an image taken directly from the text Cugat has created a strongly symbolic one with the eyes of a woman who play the protagonist, thus transforming a visual work into an abstract representation.

[18][19] Originally the background was more arid and barren, as in fact in the novel it is the Valley of the Ashes of the second chapter, but at the suggestion of Fitzgerald himself it was cleverly adapted in the city of New York.

The billboard is located in a barren, desolate area, called the "Valley of the Ashes" near the garage of mechanic George Wilson, and perhaps had been exposed to advertise an ophthalmologist of the Queens, New York, Dr. Eckleburg, but later abandoned.

But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.However, there is also the hypothesis that the cover may have been inspired by the character of Daisy, cousin of the story's narrator, Nick Carraway.

But the outbreak of the First World War forces the latter to leave for Europe and, despite the vain promise to return, too much time that has elapsed drives Daisy to marry Tom Buchanan, a wealthy polo player.