The Great Gatsby

A Masterpiece of the Jazz Age

Published on April 10, 1925, by Charles Scribner's Sons, The Great Gatsby is a tragedy novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set on Long Island and in New York City during the 1920s, it is widely regarded as the definitive literary expression of the Jazz Age, a term Fitzgerald himself popularized. The novel examines the glittering, reckless world of the newly rich, and its central concerns are love, money, class, and the corruption of the American Dream. Although it received mixed reviews and modest sales during the author's lifetime, it later became one of the most celebrated and studied American novels of the twentieth century, ranking high on lists such as the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels.

Plot Summary

The story is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young man from the Midwest who moves to New York to learn the bond business. He rents a small house in West Egg, next door to the mansion of the enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby. Every weekend, Gatsby throws lavish parties attended by hundreds of strangers, yet he himself remains elusive. Nick learns that Gatsby, born James Gatz, was once a poor young officer who fell in love with Nick's cousin, Daisy Buchanan. After World War I separated them, Daisy married the wealthy, arrogant Tom Buchanan, who now has a mistress. Gatsby, convinced that wealth can win Daisy back, has built his fortune—largely through dubious means—and positioned his mansion across the bay from hers, where a green light glows at the end of her dock. With Nick's help, Gatsby and Daisy reunite. Their affair rekindles, but Daisy is no longer the girl Gatsby remembers. Tension escalates during a hot day in New York, and on the drive home, Daisy, at the wheel of Gatsby's car, accidentally kills Tom's mistress, Myrtle Wilson. Gatsby takes the blame to protect her. Tom then tells Myrtle's grieving husband where to find Gatsby, and Gatsby is shot dead in his pool. Nick organizes his funeral, but the people who flooded his parties stay away; even Daisy and Tom have vanished. The novel ends with Nick's reflection on Gatsby's doomed dream and the haunting image of striving toward a future that recedes like the green light.

Themes, Composition, and Legacy

The Great Gatsby explores the hollowness of the upper class, the unattainability of the past, and the destructive power of obsession. Fitzgerald began sketching the novel after attending parties on Long Island's North Shore, and he worked on it slowly, writing in a letter of wanting something "extraordinary, beautiful, simple and intricately patterned." He completed a draft in 1924 while living in the south of France, then rewrote extensively. His editor Maxwell Perkins urged him to clarify the early chapters, and the first edition featured cover art by Francis Cugat. The novel's prose is celebrated for its lyrical precision and symbolic density, especially the recurring image of the green light. Today, The Great Gatsby is a classroom staple, frequently adapted for film and stage, and it remains a powerful critique of the American Dream and a timeless portrait of an era defined by excess and ennui.

About the Author

The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, into a family that had seen better days. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was a failed furniture businessman, and young Scott grew up conscious of social status and money. He was named after Francis Scott Key, the composer of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Thanks to a relative's support, he enrolled at Princeton University in 1913. He neglected formal studies, devoting himself instead to social life, literary clubs, and theater productions, and he contributed to campus publications. He left without a degree, partly due to poor health. In 1917, he joined the army but never saw combat overseas.

Rise and Fall

After the war, he worked as an advertising copywriter while revising a manuscript. In 1920, his first novel, This Side of Paradise, became an immediate sensation, making him the chronicler of the Jazz Age; it also enabled his marriage to Zelda Sayre, a vivacious Southerner who would become his lifelong muse and burden. The couple's extravagant lifestyle, fueled by magazine short stories, kept them in debt and constant motion—New York, Paris, and the Riviera—where he befriended other expatriate writers such as Ernest Hemingway. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, appeared in 1922. In 1925 came The Great Gatsby, his third novel, on which he had worked painstakingly while living in the south of France. It was not an immediate bestseller, and its mixed reception deepened Fitzgerald's disappointment. His wife's mental health collapsed in the early 1930s, and she spent years in clinics. Fitzgerald battled alcoholism and financial strain, turning to Hollywood screenwriting for income. In 1934 he published Tender Is the Night, a novel about the decline of an American expatriate couple, but the Depression-era public had little patience for Jazz Age themes. His health deteriorated; he developed tuberculosis in 1936 and died of a heart attack in Los Angeles on December 21, 1940, at forty-four, leaving his final novel, The Last Tycoon, unfinished (published in 1941).

Posthumous Reputation

At his death, many critics dismissed Fitzgerald as a spent talent. Within a few years, however, The Great Gatsby was recognized as a masterwork, and he is now regarded as one of the greatest American novelists of the twentieth century, a leading voice of the Lost Generation and the poet laureate of the Jazz Age.