The Great Gatsby
- Written By F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
$19.99
A world at his feet. One heart out of reach.
It was the summer of 1922, and even among the roaring rebellion and dazzling excess of the Jazz Age, Jay Gatsby stood apart. Every Saturday night, New Yorkโs rich and reckless gathered at the opulent Long Island mansion of this enigmatic millionaire to dance and drink until dawn. But beneath this gilded haze of gin and jazz lay a singular, smoldering obsession: Gatsbyโs dream of rekindling lost loveโno matter the cost.
Filtered through the observant eyes of young Nick Carraway, F. Scott Fitzgeraldโs novel spins a tragic, intoxicating tale of hollow affluence, longing, and betrayal. A masterpiece of modern literature, The Great Gatsby is both a shattering critique of the American Dream and the portrait of an era: its brilliance, its fragility, and its inevitable downfall.
โIn his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.โ
About the Author
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Born in Minnesota in 1896 and raised in New York State, F. (Francis) Scott Key Fitzgerald dropped out of Princeton University during World War I to join the army. But rather than fighting overseas, he was stationed in Alabama. There he met his future wife, the aristocratic writer, Zelda Sayre, and wooed her with words: namely, the success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise.
The Great Gatsby, Fitzgeraldโs third novel, did not fare quite as wellโat least, not at first. Following the initial critical and commercial disappointment of this 1925 work, Fitzgerald traveled to Paris to briefly join the โLost Generationโ of American literary expats, including Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. But before long, both his literary reputation and his marriage rapidly deteriorated. Strained by his own history of decadence and alcoholism, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood in a failed attempt to revive his career through screenwriting.
In 1940, at the age of 44, Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in Los Angeles, California, leaving behind four published novels and 164 short stories. Zelda, whose personal experiences and editorial collaborations helped shape (among others) the Gatsby character of Daisy Buchanan, died eight years later, when the psychiatric institution she had been living in caught fire.
Years after Fitzgeraldโs death, during World War II, the Council on Books in Wartime distributed free copies of The Great Gatsby to American soldiers overseas. This led to a sweeping popular resurgence of both sales and literary acclaim for the novel. By the 1950s, The Great Gatsby was already a cornerstone of American high school literary curricula. It has been recognized as a contender for the title of Great American Novel since the 1960s, cementing its place of honor in the canon of world literature.
