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CGlanovsky: Shady social upstarts rising to prominence in societies dealing with fundamental class upheaval and entertaining romantic aspirations outside their traditional spheres.
lottpoet: This book features a well-off family, pillars of the community, taking things to quite tragic lengths. It follows an African-American family and so adds colorism and racism to the mix.
elenchus: Unfinished Season is set in the 1950s in and around Chicago, but elsewise an interesting parallel to The Great Gatsby in terms of setting and basic plot: class and manners among the society elite, and a young man wrestling with changes in family, caste, and personal relations.… (more)
Anonymous user: Ten times longer, a hundred times harder to read, and a thousand times greater than Fitzgerald's lame and hysterical melodrama. Published only eight months later and nowadays largely forgotten, Dreiser's magnum opus is a much more powerful depiction of the rich and poor in America of the 1920s.… (more)
Scott Fitzgerald is not a literary writer. He's the king of what I call faux-literature: fill your bowl with plot, add a dash of panache, a cup of nostalgia, three whiffs of yearning, and a drop of insight, and ice it with some fruity prose. Bang, you're done.
But people love him. And who am I to stop the people from having their fun? Like many young people, I adored Gatsby on first reading it during my 17th year. Its exquisite art deco finishing, its sublime sense of pathos, its richness without being threatening like all those disturbing Modernists... Of course, with each passing year, my appreciation of its values lessens, but my appreciation of that feeling remains strong. And perhaps that's the real secret of Gatsby? Like so many folk tales, we can never disassociate the book from the way it drew out our youthful sense of envy, of pain, of ambition, and ultimately of loss. This novel lives within me, and within so many, even though it no longer forms a conscious part of how I view the world. (And say what you will about him; few people have written a closing paragraph as perfect as what Fitzgerald does here.)
A towering piece of 20th century American fiction, nevertheless. ( )
Alright, so it's not bad, but to me it was boring and also the fact that he just automatically assumes, Daisy drove the car makes me angry honestly. ( )
The Great Gatsby is like the Queen (the band, I mean, though Her Majesty might work just the same) of literature: they're both exceedingly overrated (hope I'm not ruffling too many feathers here, but I had to say it). That's not to say they're bad, per se, I just don't understand all the hype. Honestly, the only reason I think the Great Gatsby gets all the acclaim is because it was so American at the time, and so of course, the Yankees went wild (it's just a joke; please don't kill me). But I would never consider this novel the "Great American Novel" over the Grapes of Wrath, especially with lines like this:
“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
I really tried to read this because I had heard how wonderful it was. Well, about half way through I just gave up. Its was very dated in its language and just not interesting. ( )
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.
. . . 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
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Amidst the decadence of wealthy Jazz Age society, an enigmatic millionaire is obsessed with an elusive, spoiled young woman.
▾Library descriptions
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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.
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The Great Gatsby - FS editions
Wikipedia in English (8)
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