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The Great Gatsby

f. scott fitzgerald

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No one ever knew who Gatsby was

Some said he had been a German spy, others that he was related to one of Europe's royal families. Nearly everyone took advantage of his fabulous hospitality. And it was fabulous. In his superb Long Island home he gave the most amazing parties, and not the least remarkable thing about them was that few people could recognize their host. He seemed to be a man without a background, without history; whose eyes were always searching the glitter and razzamatazz for something... someone?

The Great Gatsby is one of the great love stories of our time. In it the author distilled the essences of glamour and illusion so powerfully that his book has haunted and tantalized generations of readers.

172 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published April 10,1925
Literary awards
grammy award, australian book industry award (abia), long island reads, 
Places
new york city new york, new york (state), long island new york, the united states of america, 

This edition

Format
172 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published
January 1, 1974 by Penguin Books
ISBN
9780553074482
ASIN
0553074482
Language
English
Characters More characters
  • Nick Carraway

    Nick Carraway

    The novels narrator, Nick is a young man from Minnesota who, after being educated at Yale and fighting in World War I, goes to New York City to learn the bond business....

  • Jay Gatsby

    Jay Gatsby

    The title character and protagonist of the novel, Gatsby is a fabulously wealthy young man living in a Gothic mansion in West Egg....

  • Daisy Buchanan

    Daisy Buchanan

    Nicks cousin, and the woman Gatsby loves....

  • Tom Buchanan

    Tom Buchanan

    Daisys immensely wealthy husband, once a member of Nicks social club at Yale....

  • Jordan Baker

    Jordan Baker

    Daisys friend, a woman with whom Nick becomes romantically involved during the course of the novel....

  • Myrtle Wilson

    Myrtle Wilson

    Toms lover, whose lifeless husband George owns a run-down garage in the valley of ashes....

More editions

About the author

Profile Image for f. scott fitzgerald

f. scott fitzgerald

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Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works during the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death. In 1993, a new edition was published as The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.

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Community Reviews

Rating(4 / 5.0, 99 votes)
5 stars
23(23%)
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49(49%)
3 stars
27(27%)
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99 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
DamnMuggle
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Read as part of The Infinite Variety Reading Challenge, based on the BBC's Big Read Poll of 2003.

I am a Classics person, but not a Modern Classics reader. I prefer the Victorian and pre-Victorian Classics and Modern Classics have never really interested me. However, even before I began this Reading Challenge I knew that I needed to change that. I'm still not overly enamoured with Modern Classics (though they tend to be a lot shorter than Victorian Classics are, which can come as a relief) but I am thoroughly enjoying the journey through the genre.

This book was quite a disappointment and not a surprise at the same time. I knew I wasn't going to love it before I went in to it, though I don't know why. I had no preconceptions of this book: I've never seen the film and I haven't ever read a blurb about it. My copy doesn't have one. I just knew I wouldn't love it.

I didn't think I wouldn't like it, though. I can't really think of any specifics, I just didn't like the plot, the characters or the setting at all. There were some fun moments, some dire moments and just a whole lot of dullness going around. It's hard to really enjoy something if you don't feel any sympathy or empathy with the characters, not even mentioning that ever-present idea that we need to identify with characters, too. I also found that this book wasn't particularly American, or particularly 20s, or particularly anything at all, really. It was just a kind of story with a kind of moral to it.

The one thing I will say about this: F. Scott is a wonderful writer. I kind of thought this before I went in, but I never really knew until I found I was re-reading sentences over and over again just to re-live them. Not what they were saying, or what they were telling, or showing, or portraying, or anything like that, but just the words used and in which order. Sometimes it felt like magic. I will definitely read more F. Scott, but this one really isn't great at all. But that's okay. Most Classics aren't that great, anyway, we just pretend they are most of the time.


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Profile Image for Kimberly .
_hehe_
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Se me olvidó actualizar la info de este libro en GR, oops. Luego dejo un review por acá, aunque ya expliqué mi sentir en el Wrap up de Los Juegos de Booktube, en el canal.

OH, y no estoy segura del rating que le puse al libro, en estos días pensaré si debo subirlo o bajarlo, sigo muy pensativa al respecto.
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s-viv
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past": I think this must be favorite quote of all the readers who know how to appreciate this remarkable classic.

Fighting against the obstacles that life has thrown at you as the past’s misdemeanors being you down! That’s why I chose this book as my flashback Saturday read! Each time I reread it, I find something different to enchant me!

Mostly I enjoyed Gatsby and narrator Nick’s complex relationship than the doomed to fail love story between Daisy and Gatsby.

The characterization of the book is remarkable and the message is clear, choosing wealth over the happiness not always makes you the winner. The financial security comes with its own burden!

Gatsby is fictional character represents the American Dream after WW 1 before the Great Depression changed the entire economic balance. According to the hedonist, arrogant Gatsby who controls the wealth also controls the power. At some parts the power defeats the person’s individualism.

Most of the people like Gatsby don’t hesitate to turn to crime for preserving their financial strength. Tom and Daisy are another exemplary couple who are so vicious to protect their own power over people, acting mean, never thinking over the consequences.

Overall: poetic writing style, deeply layered, well- constructed characterization and remarkable conclusion. That’s why it’s always pleasure for me to read this book over and over again.

Here are my other favorite quotes of the book:

“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away. “

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”
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christian_dsa
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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so... why exactly is this unimpressive piece of cheap melodrama still glorified & labelled as the Great American Novel?
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GHWolfKing
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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*3.5 stars *

A long overdue reread, which I enjoyed all over again!
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internetworking
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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At some point in high school, a usually supercilious teacher stands in front of a group of highly suggestive students and holds up a copy of The Great Gatsby waxing poetic about how it is such a marvelous masterpiece.

tAnd—make no mistake—it is. After the eager, young students read The Great Gatsby, the inevitable conclusion is that no piece of literature will ever come close to reaching this impossibly high standard. What isn’t always readily apparent is twofold.

tOne. The Great Gatsby wasn’t Fitzgerald’s first novel. It was his third after his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, and then The Beautiful and Damned. He also churned out plays and short stories. He developed his writing skills over the years.

tTwo. The Great Gatsby didn’t just magically flow from the tip of Fitzgerald’s pencil. There were several drafts of The Great Gatsby, and Fitzgerald wrote this book over a span of years; it took nearly three years for The Great Gatsby to go from the planning phase to ultimate publication. Three years.

As early as June 1922, Fitzgerald began planning The Great Gatsby according to Matthew Bruccoli in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: A Literary Reference (page 53), and in October 1922, Fitzgerald moved to Great Neck, Long Island (West Egg), the primary setting for the book. In a letter dated to Willa Cather, Fitzgerald said that he was “in the middle of the first draft A Lost Lady [Willa Cather’s novel] was published.” A Lost Lady was published in 1923. Finally, The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925.

tFun Fact: In the very earliest versions of The Great Gatsby, Daisy was named Ada, and Nick was named Dud.

tIn the manuscript of The Great Gatsby, you can see that the famous quotes weren’t quite refined yet. For example, in the manuscript, “an extraordinary aliveness to life, an alert vitality such as I have never found in any human person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again,” doesn’t quite stir the soul as much as, “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”

tThe manuscript mentions psychic radio, garbage men, and dope. None of which found their way into the published version.

tThe manuscript also shows where Fitzgerald struggled—there are many drafts of the confrontation scene between Tom and Gatsby. Further, in the manuscript, Daisy was much more into Gatsby, confiding in Nick that she plans to leave Tom in a couple of months and then she shows up at Gatsby’s house with her things packed, ready to run away with him. Later, Fitzgerald wrote in a letter that he could never quite nail Daisy’s reaction. However, I would argue that the published version is ideal because it mimics the authentic feel of love where one may know his or her own feelings but is not completely sure if the other person fully reciprocates.

tInstead of setting impossibly high standards, the manuscript makes writing more accessible. With perhaps enough versions and revisions, greatness is within reach. Or one can hope.

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Hardcover Text – $240 from SP Books

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Cataldes
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made..."

The first time I read this novel, I was about a decade younger than the protagonists, and I was mesmerised. All I saw was wealth, glitter, doomed love stories, fast cars, big mansions, secret affairs and emotions running high, criminals getting away with their crimes because they talked and dressed and behaved like money.

The second time I read it, this weekend, I am about a decade older than the protagonists, and I am still mesmerised, but I see something entirely different in the novel. All I can see now is the ugliness of a world devoid of empathy, focusing on a shiny surface to the point of forgetting the most basic human values. I see the dirty soul of rich white supremacy shown in its most disgusting shape. And I see history repeating itself, but not in the way Jay Gatsby hoped. He thought he could own the past, even reinvent it to suit his need for total control over the feelings of another human being. That is not the way history operates though. It comes back to haunt us.

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

That is America today - trying to recreate the glitter of a long lost love by digging up the dirt of the past. If one could learn anything from Gatsby, it is that it won't work.
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humantwig
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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"The Great Gatsby" is considered by many to be the zenith of American fiction writing in the last century. I won't say that it is the best American novel I've read but I will say it is probably the most perfect.

Along with J.D. Salinger, Fitzgerald has got to be my favorite writer of fiction. As opposed to Hemingway's bluntness, and Faulkner's artiness, Fitzgerald's prose seems(to paraphrase Michael Chabon) to rain down from style heaven. His style in fact is like the ladies he writes about: cool, lean and absolutely enchanting. He would never dream of overwriting and knows exactly when to hold back for maximum effect. His use of the language is assured and consequently eminently readable. For that alone this should be considered the Mona Lisa of prose.

What is astounding though is how he puts his sparsely elegant style to use giving his characters shade and depth. Fitzgerald is a true student of humanity and his skills of observation are razor sharp. He sums up his characters in sentences that read like aphorisms bulging with truth about the human condition. There's not a page goes by I'm not gasping at the depth of his vision and the economy he uses to express it.

So far I've dwelt on how he wrote and not on what he wrote. People who'd back another nag in the Great American Novel derby knock Fitzgerald's sophomoric (their word not mine) obsession with romance between men and women. They reduce his works to the level of melodramatic tear jerkers. This is a gross simplification of his talents. Yes "Gatsby" focuses on a doomed love affair but it does so to illustrate the errors in thinking that he felt marred his generation.

Gatsby is about the hollowness of the American dream as dreamt in the twenties. Fitzgerald looked around him (and in the mirror)and saw men and women locked in a frenzied and ultimatley doomed race for speed, money and sin. Gatsby and Daisy's love is doomed because their values have been distorted by money and comfort and opulence. They cannot see the depths because they are too easily distracted by shiny surfaces. When Daisy cries as Gatsby shows off his elegantly tailored shirts because she has never seen clothes so beautiful sums up perfectly how for her exteriors matter most. This is at the heart of the tragedy that unfolds before us in this delicious little novel.

There is no denying this is one of the GREAT BOOKS. If you haven't read it do so. I dare you to not fall in love with it.
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