The Great Gatsby

About this book

The Great Gatsby is a short novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925. It is set on Long Island and in New York City in the summer of 1922 and is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young bond salesman from the Midwest who rents a small house next door to the mansion of a mysterious and very wealthy man named Jay Gatsby.

The novel sold modestly in Fitzgerald’s lifetime and was out of fashion when he died in 1940. Its reputation was rebuilt after the Second World War, helped by cheap editions distributed to American servicemen, and by the 1950s it had become a fixture of the school and university curriculum. It is now one of the most widely read American novels, valued for its economy, its prose and its portrait of a decade.

The story

Nick Carraway arrives in West Egg, Long Island, in the spring of 1922. Across the bay in the more fashionable East Egg live his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan, a wealthy and brutal former football player. Next door to Nick, Gatsby throws enormous parties every weekend for guests who mostly do not know him and trade rumors about where his money came from.

Gatsby, it turns out, has a reason for being where he is. He and Daisy knew each other five years earlier, before the war and before her marriage, and he has built his whole life since around the idea of getting her back. Nick is drawn in as a go-between. The rest of the novel covers a single hot summer in which that plan meets the Buchanans’ marriage and Tom’s own affair.

Themes and historical context

Fitzgerald wrote the book in 1924, mostly on the French Riviera, during the decade he named the Jazz Age. Prohibition had made bootlegging a route to sudden fortune, the stock market was climbing, and the gap between old money and new was a subject of open fascination. The novel’s geography, with East Egg and West Egg facing each other across the water and the ash heaps of Queens between them and the city, maps that social world directly.

The book’s central subject is the American idea that a person can remake himself. Gatsby has done exactly that, and the novel is both admiring of the effort and clear about what it costs and what it is built on. Nick’s narration adds a second layer: he is a participant who insists on his own honesty, and readers have long debated how far to trust him.

The novel’s prose is a large part of why it is taught. It is short, the chapters are tightly arranged, and the imagery, from the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock to the billboard eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, is designed to be noticed and discussed. Fitzgerald considered it his best work and was disappointed by its reception.

Who should read it

Almost anyone can read The Great Gatsby; it is under two hundred pages and the language is clear. The difficulty is in the reading, not the decoding: the book rewards attention to who is telling the story and what is left unsaid. First-time readers sometimes find the characters unlikeable and the plot slight, which is a fair reaction and also part of the point. It is a good candidate for reading twice.

Edition notes

The Gutenberg edition was produced by Alex Cabal for the Standard Ebooks project, based on a transcription made for Project Gutenberg Australia, where the book had been available earlier under Australian copyright terms. It was added to Project Gutenberg in January 2021, when the novel entered the public domain in the United States.