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Folio Society devotees : The Great Gatsby - FS editions	10 unread / 10	UK_History_Fan, March 2015
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75 Books Challenge for 2013 : GR: The Great Gatsby- get in and read before the film release!	68 unread / 68	TinaV95, April 2013

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Beautifully written and incredibly thought provoking. Fitzgerald's prose is truly unparalleled. (

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fatmashahin | Sep 23, 2017 |

I really enjoyed reading this book. It is a classic to me. The narrator of the story is Nick Carraway, who used to live next door to Jay Gatsby. I was very pleased with the setting and the time period of the story, which was the "roaring 20's." I learned some history about the 1920's and gained some insight on the way life was back then. The setting and the descriptions of the clothes and types of parties that Gatsby would throw, really helped me grasp a visual of the way I viewed the story. Gatsby is incredibly rich and has a high social standing, but does not have the girl of his dreams, Daisy. I also enjoyed the characters because they were a wide variety of different types of people. Gatsby was in love with Daisy, but she was married to Tom. Daisy would show love for Gatsby, but in the end would never be with him. She would lead him on. The style of writing is definitely very engaging, yet suspenseful. However, it is recommended for readers in high school or older. Some points of the book can be a little difficult to understand. The main theme in this book is that being happy is not always about how much money you have or your social standing, but who you are happy with or if you are with the one you love. Unfortunately, Gatsby did not get to see happiness. (

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cpawli1 | Sep 12, 2017 |

Romanzo lento, ma che diventa sempre più avvincente. Non per la storia che rimane lenta, ma perchè resti ammirato dalla profondità di indagine sui personaggi. E scopri la miseria umana che molto spesso non ci accorgiamo anche in noi stessi. Il vuoto di rapporti veri e sinceri lo leggiamo qui, ma è anche troppo spesso in noi. Ci immedesimiamo, credo, nel narratore, perchè è l'unico che legge la realtà che lo circonda e la giudica. E vorremmo essere come lui, ma spesso in realtà siamo come gli amici che scappano (

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SirJo | Sep 4, 2017 |

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. (

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cdiemert | Jul 30, 2017 |

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 (

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longhorndaniel | Jul 19, 2017 |

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▾Published reviews

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thingScore 53

The Great Gatsby is a romance novel that written by American Author F.Scott Fitzgerald.This novel is talk about the New Yorker in 1900s.The Great Gatsby is a classic piece of American fiction. It is a novel full of triumph and tragedy.Nick Carraway is the narrator, or storyteller, of The Great Gatsby, but he is not the story's protagonist, or main character. Instead, Jay Gatsby is the protagonist of the novel that bears his name. Tom Buchanan is the book's antagonist, opposing Gatsby's attempts to get what he wants: Tom's wife Daisy.

The weakness of this book is they using the classic languange and a little difficult to understand.The weakness also about Gatsby affection to Daisy,He spends that money on lavish parties in the hopes that she will show up.When she finally spends time with him, for the first time in many years, he naively believes that she will leave Tom for him but,unfortunately she is not.

However,the strength of this book is the writer are using the unique title so the reader are feel sympathy and curious about it, also the characteristic about Jay Gatsby that teach the reader many lesson.

To conclude,this book is the very recommended book,especially High School students because Fitzgerald’s novel is a portal to the savage heart of the human spirit, and wonders at our enormous capacity to dream, to imagine, to hope and to persevere.

added by Billy_Kululu | editMedia Indonesia, Billy Kululu (Dec 2, 2016)

The great Gatsby is truly a romance book like no other.F.SCOTT.Switzgerald describing about the life of New Yorker in 1900s.This novel is very popular many students if high school are required by their teachers to read this book.The narrator of The Great Gatsby is a young man from Minnesota named Nick Carraway. He not only narrates the story but casts himself as the book’s author.As ive read about this book,Gatsby’s personality was nothing short of “gorgeous.”

moreover,the weakness about this book is hard to understand if u are not really pay attention on it.this novel is about a contradiction,Gatsby's idealism makes him blind.He doesn't see that Daisy can't have love and money, just money. Gatsby can't turn back time.He even doesn't see death coming toward him.

However,the strength of this book something quite different from others,it is the charm and beauty of writing,has many important meanings that should be learned early on in life.

To conclude,what i can say is don't be too obsessed just because you have so much money,money ain't last forever.but overall its a magnificent,fantastically, entertaining and enthralling story.

added by Nadilla-Syawie | editThe New York Times, Nadilla Syawie (Dec 1, 2016)

"The Great Gatsby" is in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that

What gives the story distinction is something quite different from the management of the action or the handling of the characters; it is the charm and beauty of the writing.

added by danielx | editChicago Tribune, HL Mencken (Jan 23, 2015)

I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent; I think we kid ourselves about the lessons it contains. None of this would matter much to me if Gatsby were not also sacrosanct.

There is the convoluted moral logic, simultaneously Romantic and Machiavellian, by which the most epically crooked character in the book is the one we are commanded to admire. There’s the command itself: the controlling need to tell us what to think, both in and about the book. There’s the blanket embrace of that great American delusion by which wealth, poverty, and class itself stem from private virtue and vice. There’s Fitzgerald’s unthinking commitment to a gender order so archaic as to be Premodern: corrupt woman occasioning the fall of man. There is, relatedly, the travesty of his female characters—single parenthesis every one, thoughtless and thin. (Don’t talk to me about the standards of his time; the man hell-bent on being the voice of his generation was a contemporary of Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, not to mention the great groundswell of activists who achieved the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Yet here he is in A Short Autobiography: “Women learn best not from books or from their own dreams but from reality and from contact with first-class men.”)

added by danielx | editVulture, Kathryn Schultz (Jul 4, 2013)

It is an impressive accomplishment. And yet, apart from the restrained, intelligent, beautifully constructed opening pages and a few stray passages thereafter—a melancholy twilight walk in Manhattan; some billowing curtains settling into place at the closing of a drawing-room door—Gatsby as a literary creation leaves me cold. Like one of those manicured European parks patrolled on all sides by officious gendarmes, it is pleasant to look at, but you will not find any people inside.

Indeed, The Great Gatsby is less involved with human emotion than any book of comparable fame I can think of. None of its characters are likable. None of them are even dislikable, though nearly all of them are despicable. They function here only as types, walking through the pages of the book like kids in a school play who wear sashes telling the audience what they represent: OLD MONEY, THE AMERICAN DREAM, ORGANIZED CRIME.

added by Nickelini | editNew York Magazine, Kathryn Shultz (May 13, 2013)

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▾Other authors

» Add other authors (15 possible)

Author name	Role	Type of author	Work?	Status
F. Scott Fitzgerald	—	primary author	all editions	calculated
Abarbanell, Bettina	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Amberg, Bill	Cover designer	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Bickford-Smith, Coralie	Cover artist	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Bradbury, Malcolm	Introduction	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph	Preface	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Burgess, Anthony	Introduction	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Burns, Tom	Illustrator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Bush, Ken	Editor	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Cirlin, Edgard	Cover artist	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Colomb, Stephanie	Editor	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Cornils, L.	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Cugat, Francis	Cover artist	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Dean, Bruce	Illustrator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Ekvall, Christian	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Ellsworth, Johanna	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Folch i Camarasa, Ramon	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Gyllenhaal, Jake	Narrator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Hope, William	Narrator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Janssen, Susan	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Li, Cherlynne	Cover designer	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Liona, Victor	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Meyer, Fred	Illustrator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Meyers, Jeffrey	Editor	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Muller, Frank	Narrator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Niiniluoto, Marja	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Olzon, Gösta	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Pivano, Fernanda	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Prigozy, Ruth	Editor	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Reynolds, Guy	Introduction	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Robbins, Tim	Narrator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Schürenberg, Walter	Preface	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Scourby, Alexander	Narrator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Siegel, Hal	Illustrator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Sloan, Sam	Foreword	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Soosaar, Enn	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Tanner, Tony	Introduction	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Tournier, Jacques	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Tredell, Nicolas	Editor	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Wolff, Lutz-W.	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed

▾Work-to-work relationships

Is contained in

The "Great Gatsby" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" (Collector's Library) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby / Tender Is The Night / The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The great Gatsby ; Tender is the night ; This side of paradise ; The beautiful and the damned ; The last tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby & The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tender Is the Night / This Side of Paradise / The Great Gatsby / The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby / The Beautiful and the Damned / Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

(show 1 more)

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD PREMIUM 9 BOOK COLLECTION (5 NOVELS & 40 SHORT STORIES) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Is retold in

Jake, Reinvented by Gordon Korman

Has the adaptation

The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Adaptation by Nicki Greenberg

Inspired

The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian

Gorsky by Vesna Goldsworthy

Daisy Buchanan's Daughter by Tom Carson

Has as a study

Jay Gatsby (Bloom's Major Literary Characters) by Harold Bloom

Has as a student's study guide

CliffsNotes on Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby by Philip Northman

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald by Brian Phillips

The Great Gatsby: A Study. by Frederick John Hoffman

Brodie's Notes on F.Scott Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby" and "Tender Is the Night" (Brodies Notes) by Graham Handley

(show 2 more)

F. Scott Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby (Barron's Book Notes) by Anthony S. Abbott

Fitzgerald -- The Great Gatsby: Notes by Coles Notes

Has as a teacher's guide

The Great Gatsby (Teacher Guide) by Novel Units

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▾Common Knowledge

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For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.

Series (with order)

Canonical title

Original title

The Great Gatsby

Alternative titles

Original publication date

1925

People/Characters

Jay Gatsby (protagonist)

Nick Carraway (narrator)

Important places

North Shore, Long Island, New York, USA

East Egg, Long Island, New York, USA (fictional place)

West Egg, Long Island, New York, USA (fictional place)

New York, New York, USA

Important events

World War I (1914 ∙ 1918)

Related movies

The Great Gatsby (1949 ∙ IMDb)

The Great Gatsby (1926 ∙ IMDb)

The Great Gatsby (1974 ∙ IMDb)

The Great Gatsby (2000 ∙ IMDb)

The Great Gatsby (2013 ∙ IMDb)

Awards and honors

Waterstones Books of the Century (1997, No 12)

Time's All-Time 100 Novels selection

BBC's Big Read (Best loved novel, 2003, No 43)

The Modern Library's 100 Best Novels: The Board's List (002)

The Modern Library's 100 Best Novels: The Reader's List (13)

(show all 36 items)

Epigraph

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

Dedication

ONCE AGAIN
TO
ZELDA

First words

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

Quotations

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

All right ... I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

"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 rented a house ... on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of new york -- 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 seprated 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 ... but their physical resembalnce must be a source of perpetual wonder to the gullsthat fly overhead.

(show all 11 items)

. . . he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts,breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed things up and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic 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 —

"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."

And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties their isn't any privacy.

“If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock."

Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

Last words

(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)

Disambiguation notice

This work is the book.

Wordsworth Classics publication of "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, KS3 Success Workbook Maths Levels 5-8, and "Driving Democracy: Do Power-Sharing Institutions Work?" by Norris, Pippa were falsely combined. This seemed to be driven by the ISBNs.

Publisher's editors

Blurbers

Dickey, James

Publisher series

Everyman's Library New Series (19)

Penguin F Scott Fitzgeralds Reimagined

Penguin Modern Classics (746)

Scribner Classics

The Great Writers : their lives, works and inspiration (37)

(show all 15 items)

Original language

English

▾References

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (8)

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald bibliography

George Kao

Jay Gatsby

Robert Keable

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer

The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Warwick Village Historic District

▾LibraryThing members' description

Book description

[R.L. 7.3, 8 pts]
Set in the 1920s, this is the tragic love story of Jay Gatsby, a dashing, enigmatic millionaire, obsessed with an elusive, spoiled young woman, Daisy Buchanan.

Haiku summary

New neighbor is rich
and throws wild parties for friends.
The American dream.

▾Book descriptions

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0743273567, Paperback)

In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, 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, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. 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 all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.

(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 12 Mar 2015 18:20:48 -0400)

(see all 8 descriptions)

▾Library descriptions

Jay Gatsby had once loved beautiful, spoiled Daisy Buchanan, then lost her to a rich boy. Now, mysteriously wealthy, he is ready to risk everything to woo her back. This is the definitive, textually accurate edition of a classic of twentieth-century literature, The Great Gatsby. The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan has been acclaimed by generations of readers. But the first edition contained a number of errors resulting from Fitzgerald's extensive revisions and a rushed production schedule.… (more)

» see all 38 descriptions