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"The Great Gatsby" has a reputation that can get in the way of the book itself. It shows up on school reading lists, it has been adapted for the screen, and its title alone has come to stand for champagne and glittering parties. It is easy to feel you already know it. But the novel is short, quick, and surprisingly strange, and it reads very differently from the glossy version most people carry around in their heads.
The author and his time
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and died on December 21, 1940, in Los Angeles. He was the writer who did the most to popularize the phrase "the Jazz Age" for the loud, prosperous, restless years that followed the First World War, most famously through his story collection "Tales of the Jazz Age."
"The Great Gatsby" was published by Charles Scribner's Sons on April 10, 1925. The reviews were generally favorable, but the book sold disappointingly compared with his earlier work, fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Its U.S. copyright expired on January 1, 2021, and the full text is now freely available on Project Gutenberg.
Where the story begins
The narrator is Nick Carraway, a young man from a well-off Midwestern family. He graduated from Yale, served in the war, and came home restless, so he decided to go East and learn the bond business. In the spring of 1922 he rents a small, weather-beaten house on Long Island, in a place called West Egg.
Fitzgerald's Long Island has two egg-shaped points of land facing each other across a bay. West Egg, where Nick lives, is the less fashionable of the two. Across the water is East Egg, where old money lives in white palaces. Nick's house is squeezed between two huge estates, and the one next door is enormous: an imitation of a French town hall, with a tower, a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It belongs to a man named Gatsby, whom Nick has never met.
Early that summer, Nick drives over to East Egg for dinner with his cousin Daisy and her husband, Tom Buchanan, a wealthy former Yale football star whom Nick knew in college. There he meets Jordan Baker, a golfer, who mentions Gatsby in passing. Later that night, back at home, Nick sees a figure standing alone on the neighboring lawn, stretching his arms toward the dark water. When Nick looks out across the bay, all he can make out is a single green light, small and far away.
Who Gatsby is, and what he is reaching for, is the story. I will leave it there.
Why it lasts
Start with the first line:
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
The advice turns out to be about not criticizing people, and Nick tells us it has made him a man who reserves judgment. Keep an eye on that claim. Much of the book's quiet tension comes from the gap between what Nick says about himself and how he actually reacts to the people around him. He is inside the glamorous world and standing slightly outside it at the same time, and that double position shapes everything we see.
Then there is the prose. Fitzgerald packs an enormous amount of feeling into short scenes: the light and noise of a party, a crowded apartment in the city, a quiet moment on a lawn at night. The sentences are lush without being slow, and many of them are worth reading twice. The book is also sharper and funnier than its reputation suggests, especially about money, status, and the people who worry about both.
A tip for first-time readers: the novel is short enough to read in a few sittings, and it rewards that. Reading it quickly lets you feel the pace of one crowded summer. Then, if you can, go back and reread the first chapter. You will notice how much was set up in those opening pages.
Who should read it
"The Great Gatsby" suits readers who like stories about ambition and reinvention, unreliable first impressions, and the distance between how people present themselves and who they are. If you have seen one of the film versions, the novel will give you the voice that no adaptation quite captures. If you read it in school and found it dull, try it again now. It is one of those books that changes as the reader gets older.
Listen for the music drifting over from the house next door, and you will find yourself on Long Island in the summer of 1922.
Sources
- Project Gutenberg, "The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald" (eBook #64317, full text) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64317
- Wikipedia, "F. Scott Fitzgerald" (birth and death dates and places, the "Jazz Age", reception and first-year sales) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald
- Wikipedia, "The Great Gatsby" (publication date and publisher, setting, U.S. public domain date) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby