The Great Gatsby

Published in 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby unfolds through the eyes of Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner drawn into the glittering world of Long Island’s wealthy elite. At its centre stands Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire whose lavish parties conceal a deeply personal ambition: to recover the love of Daisy Buchanan and reclaim an idealised past.

Beneath its elegance and narrative restraint, the novel exposes the moral emptiness of conspicuous wealth, the exclusions of class and the elusive promise of the American Dream. Fitzgerald’s luminous prose captures the glamour and disillusionment of the Jazz Age, while its recurring images of distance, spectacle and longing give the story its haunting resonance. Initially a modest commercial success, it has since become one of the defining novels of American modernism.

From the book

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

On The Great Gatsby

“The preeminent chronicler of the Jazz Age.”

— Library of America