The Great Gatsby

“Virtuosic … Both imperfect and sublime … I’ve read and loved Gatsby for a very long time… . I’ve always loved it because it shows that Fitzgerald understood unfairness… . I cannot imagine a more persuasive and readable book about lost illusions, class, White Americans in the 1920s, and the perils and vanity of assimilation… . I turn to Gatsby because it gives me the sober wisdom to imagine and revise my own American dream, and for that, it has a lasting hold.” ―Min Jin Lee, from the Introduction

“One of the most quintessentially American novels ever written.” ―Time

“The American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country’s writers.” ―The Washington Post

“No novel has more thrillingly portrayed the corrupting obsessions of love and money… . The romantic myth of self-creation speaks deeply to readers… . The prose, sentence by gorgeous sentence, goes down like spun sugar.” —George Packer, The Atlantic, “The Great American Novels”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and went to Princeton University, which he left in 1917 to join the army. He is said to have epitomized the Jazz Age, which he himself defined as “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre; their traumatic marriage and her subsequent breakdowns became the leading influence on his writing. Among his publications were five novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and The Last Tycoon; six volumes of short stories; and The Crack-Up, a selection of autobiographical pieces.

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