Synopsis
When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote THE GREAT GATSBY in the early 1920s, the American Dream was already on the skids. Originally based on the idea that the pursuit of happiness involves not only material success but moral and spiritual growth, the dream had by Fitzgerald's time become increasingly focused on money and pleasure--a phenomenon the high-living writer was only too familiar with. In THE GREAT GATSBY, Fitzgerald looks deeply into himself and his milieu to create the story of James Gatz, a self-educated nobody from North Dakota who has amassed a fortune and adopted the persona of Jay Gatsby, an Oxford-educated man about town, for the sole purpose of winning back the heart of Daisy, the woman he loved in his youth. Daisy is now married to Tom Buchanan--a brutal, ignorant racist who embodies the corruption that can come with unlimited wealth. As Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom--and the narrator, Daisy's cousin Nick Carroway, who serves as the author's spokesman--play out the drama in a small Long Island town (the East Hampton of its day), Fitzgerald makes it increasingly clear that life is meaningless when it is based on money and glamour at the expense of the solid American values of self-reliance and hard work--and Gatsby's sad end underscores the point. THE GREAT GATSBY has long been celebrated as the archetypal American novel, and, just as Fitzgerald's book grew out of the tradition that included Henry James and Edith Wharton, its influence on later writers from J. D. Salinger to John O'Hara cannot be overestimated. The book remains vividly alive and widely read years after its writing.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1984-01-01 | | Edition Description: | Illustrated |
Industry Reviews
"There are pages so artfully contrived that one can no more imagine improvising them than one can imagine improvising a fugue."
H. L. Mencken
"Now we have an American masterpiece in its final form: the original crystal has shaped itself into the true diamond."
James Dickey
"The philosopher of the flapper has escaped the mordant, but he has turned grave. A curious book, a mystical glamourous story of today. It takes a deeper cut at life than hitherto has been essayed by Mr. Fitzgerald. He writes well--he always has--for he writes naturally, and his sense of form is becoming perfected."
New York Times Book Review - Edwin Clark (04/19/1925)
"And while he was at his first-rate quantum best, he used everything he knew of society--as critic, as victim--to compose at least one work, 'The Great Gatsby', that in a few pages arcs the American continent and gives us a perfect structural allegory of our deadly class-ridden longings."
Nation - E. L. Doctorow (09/30/1996)
"The novel is one that refuses to be ignored....It is not a book which might...fall into the category of those doomed to investigation by a vice commission, and yet it is a shocking book--one that reveals incredible grossness, thoughtlessness, polite corruption..."
Literary Review - Walter Yust (05/01/1925)
"I have read GATSBY over and over, and each time it comes back to me that it is not a book about a man who goes East, but rather a book about a man who comes from, and brings with him, the values of the West."
Salon - Mary Morris (08/04/2000)
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