The Great Gatsby

Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).

Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby chiefly in 1924, revising it on the French Riviera, and published it with Scribner's in April 1925. It grew from his fascination with the extravagance and moral drift of Jazz Age America, drawing on his and Zelda Fitzgerald's experiences among the newly rich of Long Island after they settled in Great Neck, New York — the model for the novel's West Egg and East Egg. The book reflects Prohibition-era bootlegging, the postwar stock-market boom, and a pervasive disillusionment following World War I. Fitzgerald consciously sought to move beyond his reputation as a popular magazine writer, aiming, in his words, to produce "something new — something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned." On publication the novel sold modestly and met mixed reviews, and Fitzgerald died in 1940 believing it a failure. Its canonical status developed later, helped considerably by a wartime paperback edition distributed to American servicemen and by postwar academic reappraisal, which established it as a defining statement on the corruption of the American Dream in the 1920s.

Nick Carraway, a Yale-educated Midwesterner working in bonds, moves next door to the mysterious, immensely wealthy Jay Gatsby in West Egg, Long Island, in the summer of 1922. Visiting his cousin Daisy Buchanan and her arrogant husband Tom in fashionable East Egg, Nick meets golfer Jordan Baker and learns of Tom's affair with Myrtle Wilson, wife of a struggling garage owner. Nick is gradually drawn into Gatsby's orbit and discovers that Gatsby's lavish parties and vast fortune, built partly through bootlegging with his associate Meyer Wolfsheim, are all directed toward reclaiming Daisy, whom he loved and lost years earlier when he was poor and she married Tom. Nick arranges a reunion, and Gatsby and Daisy begin an affair. Tensions come to a head when Tom confronts Gatsby in a New York hotel suite, exposing the criminal source of his wealth and unraveling Daisy's resolve to leave her marriage. Driving back to Long Island, Daisy, at the wheel of Gatsby's car, strikes and kills Myrtle. Tom directs the grieving George Wilson toward Gatsby as the driver and Myrtle's secret lover, and Wilson shoots Gatsby dead in his pool before killing himself. Abandoned by Daisy and nearly all of Gatsby's former guests, only Nick, Gatsby's father, and a lone partygoer attend the funeral. Disillusioned, Nick returns to the Midwest, reflecting on Gatsby's tragic idealism and the corrupt, careless world of the Buchanans.

• The corruption of the American Dream
• Class division and old vs. new money
• The idealization and destructiveness of the past
• Illusion versus reality
• Moral decay beneath glittering surfaces
• Carelessness and the privilege of wealth
• The impossibility of repeating the past

• ◆First-person narration — Nick Carraway's retrospective, morally ambivalent voice frames and colors all events
• ◆Symbolism — recurring objects (the green light, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg) carry thematic weight
• ◆Color imagery — white, gold, and green recur to signal purity, wealth, and longing
• ◆Lyrical, impressionistic prose — richly figurative language elevates ordinary scenes to near-mythic status
• ◆Foreshadowing — early hints of Gatsby's mysterious past and looming tragedy build dramatic irony
• ◆Unreliable/limited narrator — Nick's admitted biases complicate the reader's judgment of events
• ◆Contrast and juxtaposition — East Egg vs. West Egg, the Valley of Ashes vs. Manhattan, structure the novel's social critique

• ◆The green light — Gatsby's yearning for Daisy and, more broadly, the unreachable American Dream
• ◆The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg — a faded billboard suggesting moral judgment or the absence of God in a spiritually empty world
• ◆The Valley of Ashes — the moral and social decay hidden beneath the era's wealth
• ◆Gatsby's mansion and parties — the emptiness of wealth without genuine connection
• ◆The color white — Daisy and Jordan's surface purity masking carelessness and moral vacancy

The Great Gatsby became a touchstone of American literature, shaping how later writers depict wealth, aspiration, and disillusionment. Its concise, symbolically dense style and critique of the American Dream influenced writers such as Richard Yates, and its imagery and themes echo through works examining class and materialism in American fiction. The novel's structure and unreliable-narrator technique have been widely studied and imitated. It is a fixture of American secondary and university curricula and a frequent point of reference in journalism and popular culture whenever the excesses or failures of the American Dream are discussed, cementing its place as one of the most influential twentieth-century American novels.

• ◆The Great Gatsby (1974 film), directed by Jack Clayton, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow
• ◆The Great Gatsby (2013 film), directed by Baz Luhrmann, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan

• Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
• Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

1. 1Fitzgerald considered several alternative titles, including 'Trimalchio in West Egg,' before settling on The Great Gatsby.
2. 2The novel sold poorly during Fitzgerald's lifetime; he died in 1940 believing himself a failed and forgotten writer.
3. 3A mass paperback edition distributed to U.S. troops during World War II is widely credited with boosting the novel's postwar popularity.
4. 4The character of Jay Gatsby is often thought to draw partly on figures Fitzgerald encountered among Long Island's nouveau riche during his time in Great Neck.