Overview
Set in the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald's novel follows the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his obsessive pursuit of Daisy Buchanan. Through narrator Nick Carraway's eyes, the story exposes the hollowness of the American Dream and the moral decay hidden beneath wealth and glamour.
Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925 to mixed reviews and disappointing sales; he died in 1940 believing the book a failure. It was rediscovered in the 1940s when the Council on Books in Wartime distributed paperback copies to American servicemen. The novel is now regarded as the defining American novel of the twentieth century.
Key Ideas
The illusion of the American Dream
Wealth and status do not guarantee happiness or fulfillment.
The past cannot be recaptured
Gatsby's fatal flaw is his belief that he can repeat the past.
Appearance vs. reality
The glittering surface of high society conceals moral emptiness and cruelty.
Class and privilege
Old money and new money are not the same, and social mobility has strict invisible limits.
Who should read this
Any serious reader. Gatsby is short, perfectly sentence-engineered, and improves on every reading. Particularly useful for writers studying voice — Fitzgerald's narrator Nick Carraway is one of the most carefully constructed unreliable first-persons in American literature.
Who might skip it
Skip it if you need a plot-driven novel — very little happens in Gatsby at the level of action, and the novel's power is in how it says things rather than what it says. Also skip it if you resist the American-dream thematic reading, though Gatsby is about many things besides that.
The verdict
The novel I reread most often because I learn different things every time. At fifteen it was a love story, at twenty-five it was about money, at thirty-five it is about self-invention and the costs of it. Fitzgerald's prose contains some of the most perfect sentences ever written in English. Short enough to read in an evening; deep enough to never really finish.
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
If you liked this
Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald's more ambitious but less perfect novel. The Crack-Up, his late essays, for autobiographical context.