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.

Min Jin Lee (introduction) is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Pachinko-a finalist for the National Book Award and one of The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century-and of the nationally bestselling novel Free Food for Millionaires. She has received the Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence, the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature from South Korea, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and has been inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. She lives in New York City.

Philip McGowan (editor, notes) is an executive board member of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, the president of the European Association for American Studies, a professor of American literature at Queen’s University Belfast, and a co-editor of The Routledge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

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