The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
Every sentence is a brushstroke. Fitzgerald captured the roar and the rot of the 1920s in one perfect, heartbreaking novel.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 masterpiece is narrated by Nick Carraway, a bond salesman newly arrived in New York, who becomes entangled in the life of his mysterious neighbour Jay Gatsby. Gatsby throws legendary parties at his West Egg mansion in pursuit of one goal: to win back Daisy Buchanan, the woman he loves and lost. Fitzgerald's prose crackles with longing, glamour, and inevitable ruin. Initially a modest seller, the novel became a canonical American text after World War II and has sold over 25 million copies.
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"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
"F. Scott Fitzgerald · The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald originally wanted to title the novel Trimalchio in West Egg. His editor Maxwell Perkins talked him out of it. Fitzgerald himself preferred the discarded title until the day he died.
The novel was considered a commercial failure in Fitzgerald's lifetime. It was the US Army distributing copies to soldiers in World War II that sparked the book's legendary second life.