The Great Gatsby: The Original 1925 Unabridged And Complete Edition (F. Scott Fitzgerald Classics)

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.

The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922. Following a move to the French Riviera, Fitzgerald completed a rough draft of the novel in 1924.

He submitted it to editor Maxwell Perkins, who persuaded Fitzgerald to revise the work over the following winter. After making revisions, Fitzgerald was satisfied with the text, but remained ambivalent about the book's title and considered several alternatives. Painter Francis Cugat's cover art greatly impressed Fitzgerald, and he incorporated its imagery into the novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Global Publishers
• Release date: Mar 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9781915932617

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.

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The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Once again to Zelda

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

Copyright © 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission request, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

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Printed by Amazon.

Contents

Once again to Zelda

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

I

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 anyone, 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 judgements, 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 judgements 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 today.

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 neighbourhood.

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 wonder to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more interesting 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 Hôtel 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 neighbour’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 savours of anticlimax. 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 towards the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials 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 motorboat 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-coloured 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-coloured 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

Reviews for The Great Gatsby

[markm2315 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Ridiculously over-rated.

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

Could have sworn I read this one ages ago but suspect I watched the movie. A treat.

[chris.wolak · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I've read Gatsby three times now and it gets a little better with each reading.

[david_fosco · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A Shakespeare like story of love and tragedy.

[ghost_boy-691444 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is the second time I have read this book and like it better. I mean I liked the book when I read it in high school, but after I saw the Baz Luhrmann movie I had to reread the book. Now, I'm in love with the whole thing again. The first time I read the book I got OBSESSED with the Jazz Age, but reading it a second time I really fell in love with the writing.

The book nails it with descriptions and dialogue. The way the characters talk is so crisp you can almost hear they way they talk as you read the book. Even hearing Gatsby say "old sport" over and over just fits his character so well. Color is another huge importance to this book too. This book isn't just black and white, but it's filled with all the colors of the rainbow. Take Daisy's name for instance, she looks pure on the outside, but she's a coward on the inside and supported by money.

Most of the book I remembered and not even from the movie. Yes the newer movie follows the book really will, word for word almost, but that's not how I remembered the book. In high school we drew storyboards for each section we had to read and that helped me remember the plot of the book. However, this time around I read this in two days and could have been one day if I was focused. Thank God there's no easy for me to write now.

If you are looking to read this book or reread this book, like me, I highly recommend this book in the summer. There really is no other time to read it. It set the mood for a summer afternoon to summer evening perfectly. I can see why this is one of the most important books for Americans to read. There's something very magical about the Great Gatsby.

[benkaboo-51322 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Summary: Great little book about a dreamer who doesn't give up.

Things I liked:

The writing is beautiful.
The story is succinct and efficient.

Things I thought could be improved:

No idea. I enjoyed it from start to finish.

Highlight:

The first time Nick sees Gatsby almost made me cry it was so beautiful. I got chills.

[incognito_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Admittedly not a bad book, but oh! I just want to slap everyone upside the head - some repeatedly.

[agentx216 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

How this is an American classic, I will never know. The book is short and barely has any character development. You don't route for anyone nor really care about finding about anybody's back story - including Gatsby himself. The book does do an ok job of portraying that "rich, post-World War I, 1920s era apathy generation" but the problem with portraying apathy is that your readers are going to be apathetic. There is one part of the book that has some "action" in it but it's so shoe horned in for the sole purpose of rapping up the story that it's almost unbelievable. For those that poo-poo Twilight for "stalker" type mentality of Edward, you have the same behavior in Gatsby as well. I was very underwhelmed and feel sorry for the countless public school students who had to suffer through this book. The one positive thing I can say is that it wasn't as boring as "Wuthering Heights". Final Grade - F

[lunarsong · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

It’s great, if you want to be slapped in the face with symbolism so glaringly obvious that comes off as patronizing, shallow, overly-simplistic, and trite. I found absolutely nothing interesting or redeeming about this book. I honestly have no idea why it’s considered so great. It’s certainly not an example of symbolism done right. It’s an example of symbolism so obvious it’s impossible to miss.

[angelalam-300700 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I didn't like this book when I first read it in high school. Twenty years later, the book makes sense. It's understandable. And it's amazing.

I can relate to the characters: the human foibles and weaknesses, the passions that drive people to become victim to a dream, and the ruthlessness of people who have or don't have money.

What a difference a book can make in the expanse of twenty years...

[kevn57-163679 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well it's a classic for a reason, no need to review just let me say that if you haven't read it you really should just to see what a great writer Fitzgerald was. The movie was good but you miss the language that Fitzgerald uses to tell the story. Also really timely as we see rich folks doing whatever pleases them no matter the cost.

[jorgeousjotts · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I first found the language superfluous, but after a bit found it to be lovely. =P I'll have to watch the Redford and DiCaprio versions now that I've read it.

[nosborm · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Poignant. Beautiful language. I can see why it's a classic. A surprising story. I don't know how I hadn't read it before.

[completely_melanie · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I went into this with really low expectations based on what a lot of people told me about the book, but it wasn't as bad as I was led to believe. It wasn't amazing either, but it was ok.

[librolindsay · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I never got into this book...perhaps I read it too late. Even a dapper young Robert Redford couldn't sway me. Eh.

[dzejncrvena · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

First part was very slow for me.
It got interesting when he visited his cousin.
Wanna know why?
Read it yourself.

[maryreinert · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Each time I read this, I wonder why it's a classic, but then again, it is a complicated plot with believable characters and the setting seems a part of the story. Yet???

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I had read this book many years ago but when I saw it was available as an audiobook download from my public library I thought it was worth a listen. I enjoyed it more this time around than the first time. Perhaps I've become more receptive to Fitzgerald's writing or perhaps the audio presentation suited the format better. I would recommend this audio verson whether you are a Fitzgerald fan or not or just never read any of his works.The story is told by Nick Carroway, a young man working in Manhattan but living on Long Island. His next door neighbour is the wealthy Jay Gatsby. Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom also live on Long Island. Daisy invites Nick to dinner where he meets Daisy's friend, Jordan Baker. Jordan tells him that Tom has a mistress who phones him at home during the dinner. Nick gets a chance to meet the mistress, Myrtle, and attends a party in New York with Tom and Myrtle. He then gets invited to a party at Gatsby's mansion and is soon hobnobbing with Gatsby. He learns that Gatsby and Daisy fell in love before the war but Gatsby was poor then. He went to fight in Europe and Daisy married Tom Buchanan. Now that Gatsby is rich he hopes to convince Daisy to leave Tom and he talks Nick into setting up a reunion. The resulting affair gives Gatsby hope that Daisy will leave Tom but when Tom confronts them Daisy won't choose between them. While driving back to Long Island Gatsby's car hits Myrtle, killing her instantly. When Nick finds Gatsby later that night he learns that it was Daisy driving but Gatsby is going to take the blame. If he thinks that this will cause Daisy to choose him he is about to be disappointed because Daisy and Tom leave town to return to the Midwest. Gatsby is killed by Myrtle's husband and none of the people who came to his parties can be bothered to attend his funeral.As a portrayal of the 1920s this book is really an historical novel now although, of course, it was contemporary at the time it was written. Perhaps that is why the book gained in popularity many years after it was first published in 1925. When Fitzgerald died in 1940 he believed that he was ultimately unsuccessful as a novelist but he is now read widely. This particular book has been adapted for stage and screen numerous times.

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

“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.”I read this in high school, and then again in college, and saw the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio when it came out, and here are the only things I remembered before picking up this book:- a flashing green light- creepy eyes- mint julepsWhen I saw this new audiobook version, I decided this classic deserved another reread, specifically for the narrator, Samwise Gamgee - I mean, Sean Astin - as I received a copy of this audiobook from NetGalley. Overall, I liked his voice and style. Sean Astin was not a bad narrator. I liked his portrayal of Nick Carroway, the "guy-next-door". He added this sincerity to Nick's voice that was reminiscent of Sam in LOTR. While I overall liked his narration style, sometimes the delivery felt a little stilted, and it did detract from the story a bit.Even though the story is nearly 100 years old, it holds up relatively well, at least in overall message -- the desire to achieve the American dream. Rereading the audiobook was a nice change, though part of me wanted to reread a physical copy so I could notate all of the great quotes and symbolism like I was in tenth-grade English class again...Thank you to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for a copy of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts are my own.

[equestrienne · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I first read this book when I was 12 and have re-read it once a year every year since then, so I calculate that I have read it about three dozen times. I never get tired of it; the writing is superb. To me, it is simply the tale of the events of one summer in the 1920's, told from the viewpoint of Nick Carraway. This book has a few very wise observations on human nature. My favorite sub-theme in this novel is the transplanted-Midwesterner-in-New York; Carraway mentions that Tom, Daisy, Jordon, Gatsby and himself have all migrated from the great heartland. I can't help but thinking that Fitzgerald thought that this was a key factor for all the characters and their actions and reactions. After Memorial Day (this book is a summertime book, I can't read it in the winter) I will track this book down, get it out and enjoy it again.

[bbbart-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I think The Great Gatsby is an amazing book. I put off reading it for a long time since I did not enjoy the movie with DiCaprio so much and due to my complete unfamiliarity with 20th-century American literature, I guess.

I found Fitzgeralds work extremely compelling, very dense and written in beautiful prose. I was especially amazed to find dialogue descriptions that were almost - dare I say it? - Dostoyevskian in style and pace.

The description of the early 20th century (upper class) life in New York was also fun to read and compare with the similar time period from Agatha Christies' English backdrops.

A wonderful read on so many levels, greatly recommended!

[payday1999-430350 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I remember reading this in High School and from memory I remember that it was a pretty good book. It is definitely a classic and people should read it.

[karlstar_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After having read this back in high school, I bought this and read it again before the movie came out. I quite enjoyed the book. If you go into it thinking that this is a story of 1920's success and excess, you'll not be disappointed by the shallow, self-centered characters. By shallow, I don't mean they weren't written well, I mean they were shallow people. This really is a great people study story and an interesting one.

[lorifox · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Great Gatsby has been on my TBR list for years, and I finally got around to it via audiobook read by Tim Robbins. The story is tragic yet beautifully written, and Robbins does a great job acting the part of each of the characters. My only complaint of his narration is that sometimes his voice lowers at the end of his sentences, thus making it hard to hear the words so that I had to rewind several times so as not to miss parts of the story. I solved the problem by turning up the volume a bit more than I’m used to listening to it. Otherwise, he is a good voice actor who gives the book a worthy audio performance. Even though I haven’t seen the movie, I saw the trailer enough times that Gatsby will forever look like Leonardo DiCaprio in my mind. 3 stars.

[technodiabla · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Read this in college for a class and decided 25+ years later it might be worth a revisit. I distinctly remember not enjoying it the first time around. I still can't say I enjoyed it. The first 2/3 is a slog of parties, vacuous drama, gluttony, and booze. None of the characters are particularly likable and most of deplorable. The last 1/3 redeems the book for me as important and worth reading (but still not enjoyable.) Fitzgerald's observations of the superficial and feigned "friendships" of the new-wealthy and their hangers-on is spot on as his pointed message about the teflon-like privilege and indifference of old money. Gatsby is a sad character but not good enough to actually like or feel sorry for. I guess I don't see why this book is considered one of the best ever in American Lit (with so many better to choose from). I actually prefer the 2013 film to the novel (very unusual.)

[blbera · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I love [The Great Gatsby], and while this graphic novel adaptation won't replace it, It is a fine homage to the original. As these works from the 1920s start to come into the public domain, it will be interesting to see what people do with them.The advance reader's copy of the graphic novel was not in full color, as the final product will be, the the sample provided fit the art work, with an art decoish palate. The women, Jordan and Daisy are slender flappers who seem to float.Woodman-Maynard as pared the dialog to fit the graphic format and selected the key events of the novel. She has even added some of Fitzgerald's poetic passages. The narrator, Nick, manages to sympathize with Gatsby while at the same time disapproving of him. I felt his portrayal really matched that in the original novel.In the author's note, Woodward-Maynard explains some of the changes she made, which seem appropriate.Fans of the original should be pleased with this.

[leisjenn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

After receiving an early copy of the graphic novel adaptation I thought it was beautifully done. The images are stunning and it is a great new take on the classic tale I already loved.

[darthdeverell · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby remains the classic work of American fiction set during the jazz age, employing metaphoric language to convey all the hopes and tragedies of the era. Plenty has been written about the novel by scholars and fans alike, but Fitzgerald’s visual language remains the most striking part of the work for me. Despite its status as a classic, The Great Gatsby does employ racial and ethnic stereotypes in Fitzgerald’s effort to recreate the various different cultures in 1920s New York City. These may offer a teaching opportunity for some, but K. Woodman-Maynard chose to omit them in her graphic novel adaptation, thereby making the story more accessible for young and middle-readers.

[maowangvater · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The summer of 1922 on Long Island, interrupted by brief day trips onto Manhattan, is the setting of this short, brilliant tragedy of doomed love and the brittle and transitory nature of success in America following the Great War of 1914-1918. Quitting the Midwest to seek his fortune on Wall Street, veteran and ivy league graduate Nick Carraway rents a house in West Egg, Long Island. He describes it as “a weatherbeaten cardboard bungalow.” While his dwelling is modest, it sits right on Long Island Sound, next door to an enormous mansion owned by a Mr. Gatsby. He’s invited to dinner at another great house nearby, in the more fashionable East Egg, just across a small bay from West Egg. It’s the home of Tom Buchanan, a classmate of his at Yale, and his very charming wife, Daisy. Daisy is Nick’s second cousin once removed, originally from Louisville, Kentucky. She’s invited a friend from back home, Jordan Baker, to meet Nick. Miss Baker is an attractive and successful tennis player. Dinner is interrupted when the butler calls Tom to the telephone. When Tom is out of the room, the women confide in Nick that Tom has a mistress, and that all is not happy in the Buchanan home. A few days later Nick gets another invitation. “A chauffeur in a uniform of robin’s-egg blue crossed my lawn that Saturday morning with a surprisingly formal note from his employer: the honor would be entirely Gatsby’s, it said, if I would attend his ‘little party’ that night.” Since Nick has watched trucks full of caterers and crates of oranges and lemons arriving at Gatsby’s for most of the week, he knows that the party is not going to be little. Especially when he witnesses an orchestra arriving. And it’s not. When he arrives, the mansion is filled with crowds of people from the city, most of whom, he thinks, were not invited, they just showed up.All though most of these people are strangers to Nick, he encounters Jordan Baker there, and together they explore the magnificence of the interior of the house and the assorted throngs of people. Many of whom confide in him the latest gossip they’ve heard about the mysterious Gatsby and the source of his wealth with a hint that it might not be entirely legal. As they circulate around, Nick and Jordan encounter their host. Nick is surprised to discover that he’s a young man like himself. He “had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and corpulent person in his middle years.” In fact, his wealthy neighbor is a fellow veteran who is particularly interested in Nick because of his connection to Daisy. He wants Nick to invite her to his house for tea. Gatsby wants to come by while she’s there, as if he were just casually dropping in. Daisy is his first love. In fact, he purchased the expensive mansion next door to Nick, just to be close to her. This British edition produced for an educational market follows the text with a helpful 1967 commentary by J.F. Watt, a bibliography, and notes as well as a glossary of American terms to help U.K. readers decipher unfamiliar term used on the far side of the Atlantic, for example: “Shift: the gear system or gear change on a car (page 104)” and Sidewalks: Pavements (page 96).” Americans may also notice a few British spelling in the text.

[julie.bonjour · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was pleasantly surprised. I really liked it, though I believe reading it in the sun, late spring, really added to my enjoyment of the book.