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    The Great Gatsby
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    The Great Gatsby
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    The Great Gatsby
    Ebook183 pages3 hours

    The Great Gatsby

    By F. Scott Fitzgerald

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    About this ebook

    "The Great Gatsby" is a 1925 novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that follows a cast of characters living in the fictional town of West Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. The story primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his quixotic passion and obsession for the beautiful former debutante Daisy Buchanan. Considered to be Fitzgerald's magnum opus, "The Great Gatsby" explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval, and excess, creating a portrait of the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream.

    Fitzgerald—inspired by the parties he had attended while visiting Long Island's north shore—began planning the novel in 1923, desiring to produce, in his words, "something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned." Progress was slow, with Fitzgerald completing his first draft following a move to the French Riviera in 1924. His editor, Maxwell Perkins, felt the book was too vague and convinced the author to revise over the next winter. Fitzgerald was repeatedly ambivalent about the book's title and he considered a variety of alternatives, including titles that referenced the Roman character Trimalchio; the title he was last documented to have desired was "Under the Red, White, and Blue".

    First published by Scribner's in April 1925, "The Great Gatsby" received mixed reviews and sold poorly; in its first year, the book sold only 20,000 copies. Fitzgerald died in 1940, believing himself to be a failure and his work forgotten. However, the novel experienced a revival during World War II, and became a part of American high school curricula and numerous stage and film adaptations in the following decades. Today, "The Great Gatsby" is widely considered to be a literary classic and a contender for the title "Great American Novel". In 1998 the Modern Library editorial board voted it the 20th century's best American novel and second best English-language novel of the same time period.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBooks on Demand
    Release dateFeb 2, 2015
    ISBN9783734760594
    Author

    F. Scott Fitzgerald

    Among the “Lost Generation” of writers that came of age during the Roaring Twenties, the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) epitomized “The Jazz Age”: a period of declining traditional values, prohibition and speakeasies, and great artistic leaps. Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, was a financial success, but subsequent ones, including his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, sold poorly. In need of money, he turned to writing commercial short stories and Hollywood scripts, while his lifelong alcoholism destroyed his health and led to an early death. The 1945 reissue of The Great Gatsby spurred a wide resurgence of interest, and Fitzgerald is now considered one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century.

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    Reviews for The Great Gatsby

    4/5

    19,062 ratings523 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Interesting rags to riches to oblivion novel.
    • 4/5
      A powerful slice of nouveau riche New York.
    • 4/5
      One of the first novels to reach out and speak to the humanity within me. This is an important work.
    • 5/5
      One of the best books ever written in the English language. It is moving and still; purposeful and lost; tragic and somehow hopeful.
    • 4/5
      Borrowed froma friend at Bracklesham Bay. A classic and I can see why. Although a little thin on character it was an excellent story. Almost a sketch for a film!
    • 4/5
      I "had" to read this in high school and loved it.
    • 4/5
      Easy read. Good read. Fun read. Who doesn't like the Great Gatsby?
    • 5/5
      Perhaps my favorite book. I love the characters, the dialog, & the absence of the narrator.
    • 5/5
      Everyone should read this book.
    • 5/5
      The classic novel of the lost American Dream. I love reading this book. I feel like each page necessary and adds to the story. Set in the 1920's with prohibition and dancing creates the perfect setting. I love reading about Daisy, and how my opinion of her has changed since first reading the novel back in high school. BTW - I now find her shallow and a gold-digger. I love that the man trying to relive his past is shown to be a fool. My favorite sections of the book are the vivid scenes that make me feel like I'm there watching. The dress shirts in Gatsby's room - getting drunk in the hotel - the car wreck, etc.
    • 1/5
      I don't like reading about selfish people. I know that's the point and it's beautifully written but I want to like the people I'm reading about, at least one character. The characters and the story line make me nauseous. Blech....
    • 5/5
      I had the feeling that I had read this book years ago. Maybe I saw it as a movie and now a new version of the movie has come out. At any event, I was really moved to read it because I had started reading a book by Roy Peter Clark called The Art of X Ray Reading. It's really about literary analysis and the first example he uses is "The Great Gatsby" and it piqued my curiosity. And, I rather liked the prose extracts that Clark uses. So I bought the book. And when I found it was so short I read it quite quickly. I'm not really a great reader of fiction but thought Fitzgerald's book was a delight. A tight story line, great characterisation, and the script itself almost like poetry...."For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at the fall of dusk". And this: "There was music from my neighbour's house through the simmer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars." New York in the twenties .....decadence and wealth on display. Casual immorality such as Tom Buchanan keeping a mistress. And Daisy's presumed infidelity......is not really judged by the narrator. He does't condemn doesn't condone...merely reports like a good reporter recording the facts. The mystery surrounding Jay Gatsby develops throughout the book. There are intricate connections such as between the green light at the start of the book and at the end...but also precisely in the middle. The mysterious phone call from Chicago after Gatsby's death about "Young Parke" being in trouble when he handed the bonds over the counter. No other explanations ..a seemingly disconnected piece of information that throws a distinct shadow over Jay Gatsby's financial dealings. The Oxford connection ....assumed by Tom Buchanan to be phony ...but shown to probably be real...and Carraway "had one of those renewals of complete faith in him".Or this: "He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour".I really like the book. Must admit that I have never really been a great fan of some of the other American classics such as "Catcher in the Rye" and "to Kill a Mockingbird". But Gatsby I liked. Was there a moral in there somewhere.....well maybe the idea that money doesn't necessarily buy happiness. Or maybe, in hindsight, that this kind of corrupt lifestyle was setting them up for the great depression. And there is the class stratification clearly drawn between old money in East Egg and new money in West Egg. And the "unutterable truth " that it was not Gatsby that killed Myrtle ...but Daisy......Daisy and Tom ...were careless people...they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or vast carelessness....and let other people clean up the mess they had made. But overall, it was a story well-told. Happy to recommend this book.
    • 5/5
      The Great American Novel? Discuss.
    • 5/5
      Jay Gatsby has moved to West Egg in search of his love, Daisy, who is now married to Tom Buchanan. Carraway, Gatsby's next door neithbor narrates the book.
    • 4/5
      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.

      What's one to do in the wake of this incandescence? I disagree with Nabokov. This is brilliant (though so is Tender Is The Night). Thinking quite a bit today about Pound and Bunny (Wilson). What about Wharton and the Master - Henry James? All this re-imagining, all this space to plot a counter movement, a line of transgression. Prisms of nature are revealed. The viewer's eye is stimulated by money and possibility. The senses blurred in a haze of exhaust fumes and gin. My thinking of this novel now has been colored by Sarah Churchwell's thesis in careless people, that can't be helped. Despite our failures, there's always sex and strange lights.
    • 4/5
      (Original review, 1981-04-30)“The Great Gatsby” is essentially a love story. Daisy turns out to be as unattainable to Jay as Beatrice was to Dante but this being the US, the hero doesn't elevate his idol to muse status; instead he embarks on a ruthless pursuit that ends up destroying him.It's difficult in the present era of throwaway relationships to comprehend the extent of Gatsby's romantic obsession. The questions are: 1) would he have taken to crime had Daisy returned his love and told her wealthy family to go to hell and 2) did he love Daisy precisely because she was a romantic chimera, a glamorous woman who represented a rarefied world he wished to conquer?Fitzgerald himself never abandoned his sick wife Zelda even when advised to divorce her. He worked himself ragged to pay the high costs of her medical treatments and stays in various clinics. I think it's true to say his own health was ruined because of his devotion and sense of responsibility to his wife.But then Fitzgerald was a man born into a more chivalrous era, so it's not really surprising that he should produce works like Tender is the Night and the Great Gatsby.One interesting bit I'm surprised many have overlooked is that Nick Carraway and Jordan both appear to be gay. Not the first one to think of this-- lots written on the topic - but hard to get more obvious than the scene where, after leaving Myrtle's party, Nick winds up in the bedroom of the effete artist where they are both in their underwear. In the 1920s, Fitzgerald would not have been allowed to write a gay sex scene, but this comes pretty darn close. Many other clues - Nick's massive man crush on Gatsby, the fact that he doesn't date, doesn't seem to have any interest in women beyond Jordan, the mannish female golf pro (Nick's descriptions of her make her seem very mannish anyway), very vague about why he wasn't marrying his former fiancé despite the fact that it was expected of him and he couldn't go through with it.) Nick's homosexuality is interesting as both a side note and for what it says that we are seeing Gatsby through the gaze of someone with a massively illicit (for the time) crush on him who builds him up and then tears him down.The chattering class in Portugal have always had a different definition of the "American Dream" than actual Americans, for whom its essence is owning a home and raising children who have it a bit easier than you did. Both of those aspirations, for that is what the dream is, are in bad shape at the moment. The Portuguese and the Western world in general seem to think the American Dream is some feverish conception of mansions and millions...As for Gatsby, it's the language I enjoy. Should we at abandon wondering at Gatsby to avoid existential bewilderment. Or falter forward and be lost in the aftermath of wonder. Or remain entrenched in conservative certainty. Perhaps it's why so many of us reread this novel. It's also damn fine prose.
    • 2/5
      I read this book in print years ago. I didn't really enjoy it that much then. This time I listened to the audio version narrated by Anthony Heald. As much as I wanted to like the book better, I didn't. I just hate the characters and do not relate to them. While I recognize the writing is quite good, I simply do not like the story.
    • 2/5
      The beginning i fragmented and awkward, but it picks up speed in the middle.
      I immediately liked Owl Eyes. He ends up being one of the very few to attend Gatsby's funeral.
      I dislike Daisy and Tom. I feel sorry for Gatsby.
      his unethical business partner or the man that made him rich, told Nick Carroway, pg. 180 "Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead." (Meyer Wolfsheim)
      I also didn't like the abstract descriptions given, almost out of context.
      Most of the characters behave as victims of their lives when they made the choices. (they didn't take responsibility.)
      It's an okay book. I don't understand why it's a classic. I don't feel it surpasses time. I didn't understand a lot of the "current lingo" of the book.
    • 5/5
      “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald captures the decrepit side of the American Dream, which truly erupted during the 1920s. With a darkness stirring inside Gatsby, a feeling of loneliness takes hold, and his longing for an old flame sparks into reality. Readers come to learn that life as a glamourous host is not all it’s cracked up to be; his heart, head, and identity is jumbled beyond recognition; the person he could have married is seemingly unattainable; the green light he is so set on is merely a feebly lit lantern. All in all, superficiality reigns supreme in the mansion Gatsby calls his “home”.The snazzy millionaire changed everything about himself, from his name to the uneducated dialect of his youth. While watching his story unfold, one uncovers the languished lifestyle of the rich and infamous. Looking for a taste of champagne with a dash of insanity? Pick up this book and join the party, old sport.
    • 3/5
      This is a book I would have liked to have read in high school like so many other students did. (My classes never required it.) I feel as I would appreciate the book more as a reread now that I'm older than the narrator, Nick Carraway.

      The story seems to be a commentary on the affluent culture of New York in the 1920's that at times feels disturbingly familiar. It's also a interwoven collection of tragic romances; or, in the case of the narrator and title character, of one-sided infatuation.

      Some descriptions I didn't understand, some are well out of date, and others are unaccountably awkward. That's what brings my rating down. The reason I'm looking forward to rereading The Great Gatsby later is its depth, spattering of wonderfully crafted phrases, and the general...honesty of it.
    • 5/5
      Speechless..
    • 5/5
      My English teacher at southern college recommend the class to read and do a term paper. I don't usually read books like this but this book was really good. I really liked it.
    • 3/5
      At the end of the day, it is just not that good.
    • 5/5
      Just as good as the first time I read it!

      And now I need to totally have a 20's party!!!!!!
    • 2/5
      A rich man is obsessed with his ex-girlfriend.1.5/4 (Meh).Fitzgerald takes a lot of words to say very little. For example: "...an indefinable expression, at once defiantly unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable, as if I had only heard it described in words, passed over Gatsby's face." That sort of completely meaningless statement that's dense enough to sound meaningful is fairly representative of the book.
    • 3/5
      2.5 stars Nick is renting a place on Long Island near some very rich people; his immediate neighbour is Jay Gatsby. They finally meet at one of Gatsby’s parties and Gatsby asks Nick to help set up a meeting with Nick’s friend (or cousin?) Daisy, who is married to Tom. Amidst adultery, drinking, partying, and driving (in the 1920s, when not everyone did drive), things go horribly wrong. I thought about rating it 3 stars, ok, but decided to go with the lower rating when I read a wikipedia summary, knowing I’d missed what happened at one point (even after reading it a couple of times, I still couldn’t quite figure out exactly what had happened) and wanting to find out what it was I’d missed, only to realize I’d missed way more than I thought throughout the book! I thought I was mostly following, but somehow, in Fitzgerald’s vagueness (or was it just not keeping my attention? Since I tried reading that one part twice and it still didn’t make sense, I’m saying vagueness – at least mostly), some things just went right over my head. It would be nice to not have to reread sections to figure out what he was trying to say, especially when I still couldn’t figure it out on the reread! I saw the diCaprio movie when it came out, and I thought it was good, but it was long enough ago, that I didn’t recall most of it to help me with the book. But hey – at least it wasn’t a long book.
    • 4/5
      I have been putting off writing about the book, as I am not sure I can articulate my feelings about it. In fact Im not sure what my feelings even are about it. I do know I enjoyed reading it and kept wanting to pick it up, and I was glad when a slightly exciting story line developed. The hoo-ha with the car accident finally brought out some interest in the characters for me.So, yes, they float about in their own little rich worlds. People have been critical of the novel for this reason alone, but that's life isnt it? Some people do have that luxury, and it doesnt make their feelings or experiences any less valid. It just limits who can relate to them. I liked reading about their petty worries and relationship dramas, it took me away from my life and into someone's completely different.And written in a very appealing way.The first time I read this book was half my life ago, so this was like the first time for me. And I think there'll be more readings in it yet.
    • 3/5
      Eh. It was okay. Not sure that I would read this one again though; maybe in a few years when I can look at it through the eyes of a non-student rather than as a student forced to read it and talk about how "wonderfully moving" it was.
    • 3/5
      I feel like The Great Gatsby should be more of a play rather than a novel. Some of the emotions and dialogue could be confusing or a little bland, especially from the women characters (but even more so Daisy), I get that is their personality but while reading it it didn't seem like a character flaw, just odd writing. I enjoyed the plot surrounding Daisy, Tom, Gatsby and the Wilson's, what I liked even more was that it was told from a different persons point of view so you kind of felt the frustration Nick was going through while all of this was going on even though he wasn't a big part of it he was still around it and drawn in against his will. The book is fairly short but I felt it kind of moved slow and had parts that were just filler but it makes sense why they are in the story towards the end. Overall The Great Gatsby was a good read, I felt it is a bit overrated with how much hype it gets and would much rather of read it in a play format.
    • 5/5
      Very well done audio book.