The Great Gatsby (Unabridged)

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

This carefully crafted ebook: " The Great Gatsby (Unabridged)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. "The Great Gatsby" is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story takes place in 1922, during the Roaring Twenties, a time of prosperity in the United States after World War I. The book received critical acclaim and is generally considered Fitzgerald's best work. It is also widely regarded as a "Great American Novel" and a literary classic, capturing the essence of an era. The Modern Library named it the second best English language novel of the 20th century. The novel takes place following the First World War. American society enjoyed prosperity during the "roaring" 1920s as the economy soared. At the same time, Prohibition, the ban on the sale and manufacture of alcohol as mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment, made millionaires out of bootleggers...

• Language: English
• Publisher: e-artnow
• Release date: May 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9788074844904

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota to Edward and Mary Fitzgerald, he was raised in Buffalo in a middle-class Catholic family. Fitzgerald excelled in school from a young age and was known as an active and curious student, primarily of literature. In 1908 the family returned to St. Paul, where Fitzgerald published his first work of fiction, a detective story, at the age of 13. He completed his high school education at the Newman School in New Jersey before enrolling at Princeton University. In 1917, reeling from an ill-fated relationship and waning in his academic pursuits, Fitzgerald dropped out of Princeton to join the Army. While stationed in Alabama, he began a relationship with Zelda Sayre, a Montgomery socialite. In 1919, he moved to New York City, where he struggled to launch his career as a writer. His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), was a resounding success, earning Fitzgerald a sustainable income and allowing him to marry Zelda. Following the birth of his daughter Scottie in 1921, Fitzgerald published his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), a collection of short stories. His rising reputation in New York’s social and literary scenes coincided with a growing struggle with alcoholism and the deterioration of Zelda’s mental health. Despite this, Fitzgerald managed to complete his masterpiece The Great Gatsby (1925), a withering portrait of corruption and decay at the heart of American society. After living for several years in France in Italy, the end of the decade marked the decline of Fitzgerald’s reputation as a writer, forcing him to move to Hollywood in pursuit of work as a screenwriter. His alcoholism accelerated in these last years, leading to severe heart problems and eventually his death at the age of 44. By this time, he was virtually forgotten by the public, but critical reappraisal and his influence on such writers as Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, and Richard Yates would ensure his status as one of the greatest figures in twentieth-century American fiction.

Book preview

9

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,

I must have you!"

THOMAS PARKE D'INVILLIERS

Chapter 1

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the creative temperament.— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day.

I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him — with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe — so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, Why — ye — es, with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog — at least I had him for a few days until he ran away — and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

How do you get to West Egg village? he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college — one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News.— and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the well-rounded man. This isn’t just an epigram — life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York — and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. they are not perfect ovals — like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end — but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. to the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the — well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. my house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. the one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard — it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. it was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires — all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven — a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy — even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach — but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. it was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it — I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens — finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body — he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage — a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked — and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final, he seemed to say, just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are. We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

I’ve got a nice place here, he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motor-boat that bumped the tide offshore.

It belonged to Demaine, the oil man. He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. We’ll go inside.

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it — indeed, I was almost surprised into

Reviews for The Great Gatsby (Unabridged)

[jonfaith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

What's one to do in the wake of this incandescence? I disagree with Nabokov. This is brilliant (though so is Tender Is The Night). Thinking quite a bit today about Pound and Bunny (Wilson). What about Wharton and the Master - Henry James? All this re-imagining, all this space to plot a counter movement, a line of transgression. Prisms of nature are revealed. The viewer's eye is stimulated by money and possibility. The senses blurred in a haze of exhaust fumes and gin. My thinking of this novel now has been colored by Sarah Churchwell's thesis in careless people, that can't be helped. Despite our failures, there's always sex and strange lights.

[booktsunami · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I had the feeling that I had read this book years ago. Maybe I saw it as a movie and now a new version of the movie has come out. At any event, I was really moved to read it because I had started reading a book by Roy Peter Clark called The Art of X Ray Reading. It's really about literary analysis and the first example he uses is "The Great Gatsby" and it piqued my curiosity. And, I rather liked the prose extracts that Clark uses. So I bought the book. And when I found it was so short I read it quite quickly. I'm not really a great reader of fiction but thought Fitzgerald's book was a delight. A tight story line, great characterisation, and the script itself almost like poetry...."For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at the fall of dusk". And this: "There was music from my neighbour's house through the simmer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars." New York in the twenties .....decadence and wealth on display. Casual immorality such as Tom Buchanan keeping a mistress. And Daisy's presumed infidelity......is not really judged by the narrator. He does't condemn doesn't condone...merely reports like a good reporter recording the facts. The mystery surrounding Jay Gatsby develops throughout the book. There are intricate connections such as between the green light at the start of the book and at the end...but also precisely in the middle. The mysterious phone call from Chicago after Gatsby's death about "Young Parke" being in trouble when he handed the bonds over the counter. No other explanations ..a seemingly disconnected piece of information that throws a distinct shadow over Jay Gatsby's financial dealings. The Oxford connection ....assumed by Tom Buchanan to be phony ...but shown to probably be real...and Carraway "had one of those renewals of complete faith in him".Or this: "He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour".I really like the book. Must admit that I have never really been a great fan of some of the other American classics such as "Catcher in the Rye" and "to Kill a Mockingbird". But Gatsby I liked. Was there a moral in there somewhere.....well maybe the idea that money doesn't necessarily buy happiness. Or maybe, in hindsight, that this kind of corrupt lifestyle was setting them up for the great depression. And there is the class stratification clearly drawn between old money in East Egg and new money in West Egg. And the "unutterable truth " that it was not Gatsby that killed Myrtle ...but Daisy......Daisy and Tom ...were careless people...they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or vast carelessness....and let other people clean up the mess they had made. But overall, it was a story well-told. Happy to recommend this book.

[amarillo_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Great American Novel? Discuss.

[stpnwlf · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting rags to riches to oblivion novel.

[cestovatela · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A powerful slice of nouveau riche New York.

[yorkjob_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of the first novels to reach out and speak to the humanity within me. This is an important work.

[hamlet61-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the best books ever written in the English language. It is moving and still; purposeful and lost; tragic and somehow hopeful.

[aapjebaapje · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Borrowed froma friend at Bracklesham Bay. A classic and I can see why. Although a little thin on character it was an excellent story. Almost a sketch for a film!

[kellyholmes-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I "had" to read this in high school and loved it.

[rybeewoods · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Easy read. Good read. Fun read. Who doesn't like the Great Gatsby?

[raphaelmatto · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Perhaps my favorite book. I love the characters, the dialog, & the absence of the narrator.

[fodroy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Everyone should read this book.

[beth.clarke · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The classic novel of the lost American Dream. I love reading this book. I feel like each page necessary and adds to the story. Set in the 1920's with prohibition and dancing creates the perfect setting. I love reading about Daisy, and how my opinion of her has changed since first reading the novel back in high school. BTW - I now find her shallow and a gold-digger. I love that the man trying to relive his past is shown to be a fool. My favorite sections of the book are the vivid scenes that make me feel like I'm there watching. The dress shirts in Gatsby's room - getting drunk in the hotel - the car wreck, etc.

[wrightja2000 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I don't like reading about selfish people. I know that's the point and it's beautifully written but I want to like the people I'm reading about, at least one character. The characters and the story line make me nauseous. Blech....

[marient_5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Jay Gatsby has moved to West Egg in search of his love, Daisy, who is now married to Tom Buchanan. Carraway, Gatsby's next door neithbor narrates the book.

[antao-3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

(Original review, 1981-04-30)“The Great Gatsby” is essentially a love story. Daisy turns out to be as unattainable to Jay as Beatrice was to Dante but this being the US, the hero doesn't elevate his idol to muse status; instead he embarks on a ruthless pursuit that ends up destroying him.It's difficult in the present era of throwaway relationships to comprehend the extent of Gatsby's romantic obsession. The questions are: 1) would he have taken to crime had Daisy returned his love and told her wealthy family to go to hell and 2) did he love Daisy precisely because she was a romantic chimera, a glamorous woman who represented a rarefied world he wished to conquer?Fitzgerald himself never abandoned his sick wife Zelda even when advised to divorce her. He worked himself ragged to pay the high costs of her medical treatments and stays in various clinics. I think it's true to say his own health was ruined because of his devotion and sense of responsibility to his wife.But then Fitzgerald was a man born into a more chivalrous era, so it's not really surprising that he should produce works like Tender is the Night and the Great Gatsby.One interesting bit I'm surprised many have overlooked is that Nick Carraway and Jordan both appear to be gay. Not the first one to think of this-- lots written on the topic - but hard to get more obvious than the scene where, after leaving Myrtle's party, Nick winds up in the bedroom of the effete artist where they are both in their underwear. In the 1920s, Fitzgerald would not have been allowed to write a gay sex scene, but this comes pretty darn close. Many other clues - Nick's massive man crush on Gatsby, the fact that he doesn't date, doesn't seem to have any interest in women beyond Jordan, the mannish female golf pro (Nick's descriptions of her make her seem very mannish anyway), very vague about why he wasn't marrying his former fiancé despite the fact that it was expected of him and he couldn't go through with it.) Nick's homosexuality is interesting as both a side note and for what it says that we are seeing Gatsby through the gaze of someone with a massively illicit (for the time) crush on him who builds him up and then tears him down.The chattering class in Portugal have always had a different definition of the "American Dream" than actual Americans, for whom its essence is owning a home and raising children who have it a bit easier than you did. Both of those aspirations, for that is what the dream is, are in bad shape at the moment. The Portuguese and the Western world in general seem to think the American Dream is some feverish conception of mansions and millions...As for Gatsby, it's the language I enjoy. Should we at abandon wondering at Gatsby to avoid existential bewilderment. Or falter forward and be lost in the aftermath of wonder. Or remain entrenched in conservative certainty. Perhaps it's why so many of us reread this novel. It's also damn fine prose.

[olivia_atlet_writer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald captures the decrepit side of the American Dream, which truly erupted during the 1920s. With a darkness stirring inside Gatsby, a feeling of loneliness takes hold, and his longing for an old flame sparks into reality. Readers come to learn that life as a glamourous host is not all it’s cracked up to be; his heart, head, and identity is jumbled beyond recognition; the person he could have married is seemingly unattainable; the green light he is so set on is merely a feebly lit lantern. All in all, superficiality reigns supreme in the mansion Gatsby calls his “home”.The snazzy millionaire changed everything about himself, from his name to the uneducated dialect of his youth. While watching his story unfold, one uncovers the languished lifestyle of the rich and infamous. Looking for a taste of champagne with a dash of insanity? Pick up this book and join the party, old sport.

[thornton37814 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I read this book in print years ago. I didn't really enjoy it that much then. This time I listened to the audio version narrated by Anthony Heald. As much as I wanted to like the book better, I didn't. I just hate the characters and do not relate to them. While I recognize the writing is quite good, I simply do not like the story.

[vhartpowers · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The beginning i fragmented and awkward, but it picks up speed in the middle.
I immediately liked Owl Eyes. He ends up being one of the very few to attend Gatsby's funeral.
I dislike Daisy and Tom. I feel sorry for Gatsby.
his unethical business partner or the man that made him rich, told Nick Carroway, pg. 180 "Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead." (Meyer Wolfsheim)
I also didn't like the abstract descriptions given, almost out of context.
Most of the characters behave as victims of their lives when they made the choices. (they didn't take responsibility.)
It's an okay book. I don't understand why it's a classic. I don't feel it surpasses time. I didn't understand a lot of the "current lingo" of the book.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

De figuur Gatsby: eigenlijk heel negatief, maar toch sympathiek want passioneel; inhoudsloos leven in functie van obsesssie: liefde voor Daisy. Doordesemd van melancholie. Typische Scott Fitzgerald: Jazz Age, jetset. Opmerkelijk: de ik-figuur spreekt geen oordeel uit, registreert, maar geleidelijk aan toch opinievorming

[helka_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A great read.

[amaraki-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Awesome novel: 'awesome' used in every sense of the word and not as currently popular argot. What a great storyteller Fitzgerald is! What precise, evocative prose that captured the essence of a scene both as sensation and feeling! How thoroughly and lucidly American this novel is! It holds up a mirror not only to those long ago times but to essential American ethos.I've read this book for the first time later in life and was glad of it, as maturity, I think, gave me a deeper appreciation. Can't what to read it again to mark the prose parts I thought were shattering. (couldn't mark up the book the first time, it was too precious) Have to admit I read it slowly over many mornings' coffee, mostly for the prose but the story line also clipped on drawing me to the next chapter the next morning.

[nx74defiant · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Beautifully written about rich vain shallow empty people who live vain shallow empty lives.

[longhorndaniel · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

so i finally read this classic and enjoyed the ending but that was about all; just way way too much silly build up in the story with out enough build up of the characters

[lara335 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Reread in 2017. Think when I first read it as a 17 year old I was seduced by the glamour. Rereading it now, I'm bowled over by the spare writing and the structure - having more down-to-earth Nick Carraway, Gatsby's new neighbour as the narrator and observer.Through Nick we gradually learn how Gatsby has invented himself, his dream being epitomised by his obsessional idea of Daisy, a society girl with the sound of money in her voice.A fantastic evocation of the Roaring Twenties and the hollowness of the American Dream.Glamorous, funny and ultimately very sad. Loved it.

[cdiemert-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, The Great Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--"Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout.

[laurochka-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I just re-read this today. A great short novel. Captures the frivolity and decadence of post WW1 USA. Nick, the Buchanans and all the other fleeting characters create an engaging yet ultimately tragic picture of the jazz age.
13/7/12

[razinha-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I finally read this after avoiding it for so many years (am 47 now) and couldn't decide which was more amazing: that the book was so unimpressive or that so many people consider it to be their favorite. As a story, it was sorely lacking in anything that could keep my attention; I read it in one day, but had to force myself to finish, if only because I wanted to know what the big deal was. I cannot understand how this is considered to be a literary masterpiece (from the back cover).

[locriian · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Oh the drama!

[bookmystique · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Depressing lit.