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. He attended Princeton University, leaving in 1917 to join the army. Fitzgerald is said to have epitomized the Jazz Age, which he defined as “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” In 1920, he married Zelda Sayre. Their tumultuous marriage and her subsequent mental breakdowns became a major influence on his writing. His publications include five novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and The Last Tycoon. He also published six volumes of short stories and The Crack-Up, a collection of autobiographical essays.

Min Jin Lee (introduction) is the author of the New York Times bestselling novels American Hagwon and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award and named one of The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Her other nationally bestselling novel is Free Food for Millionaires. Lee 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. She 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 and the president of the European Association for American Studies. He is 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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