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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
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The Great Gatsby (original 1925; edition 1995)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingConversations / Mentions
68,044110614 (3.85)4 / 1278
For use in schools and libraries only. A young man, newly rich, tries to recapture the past and win back his former love, despite the fact that she is married.
Member:bigal123
Title:The Great Gatsby
Authors:F. Scott Fitzgerald
Info:Scribner (1995), Edition: Reprint, Paperback
Collections:Your library
Rating:*****
Tags:None

Work Information

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

  1. 166
    The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (themephi, sturlington)
    sturlington: Great novels of the Jazz Age.
  2. 51
    Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (chwiggy)
  3. 41
    Flappers, Flasks and Foul Play by Ellen Mansoor Collier (TomWaitsTables)
  4. 31
    The Red and the Black by Stendhal (CGlanovsky)
    CGlanovsky: Shady social upstarts rising to prominence in societies dealing with fundamental class upheaval and entertaining romantic aspirations outside their traditional spheres.
  5. 31
    The Green Hat by Michael Arlen (Rebeki)
    Rebeki: Also narrated by a shadowy "outsider" figure and set in the glamorous 1920s.
  6. 10
    Look at Me by Anita Brookner (KayCliff)
  7. 21
    Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier (mountebank)
  8. 21
    The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (kara.shamy)
  9. 21
    Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood (LottaBerling)
  10. 10
    The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James (lottpoet)
    lottpoet: similarly has a peripheral narrator showing rich people behaving badly about some of the strangest things
  11. 10
    Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda (bluepiano)
    bluepiano: Garden by the Sea is set in same period & similar milieu & leaves behind a deeper impression.
  12. 10
    A Whistling Woman by A. S. Byatt (KayCliff)
  13. 21
    Trust by Cynthia Ozick (citygirl)
  14. 11
    A Hundred Summers by Beatriz Williams (FFortuna)
  15. 00
    An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (Anonymous user)
    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)
  16. 11
    Kleider machen Leute by Gottfried Keller (chwiggy)
  17. 11
    The Doll by Bolesław Prus (sirparsifal)
  18. 44
    Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller (FFortuna)
  19. 00
    Entitlement by Jonathan Bennett (ShelfMonkey)
  20. 11
    Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor (lottpoet)
    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.

(see all 29 recommendations)

1920s (1)
AP Lit (46)
100 (18)
Read (2)
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» See also 1278 mentions

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Showing 1-5 of 1041 (next | show all)
Gatsby's gaffes after being "exposed" were in fact the realization of a sense of unease. However, the romantic Gatsby to death would get angry because of the difference between self-made and inherited wealth. Those upper-class people who were intoxicated with money did not understand why, probably because the destination of their actions was money, and they were willing to trade superficial things with original emotions. Gatsby needed to use his rich status as a complete tool to reach the green light in his dream. In this sense, Gatsby is not as decadent as the "upper class" people. The unattainable America Dream (green light) gradually became clear on the dark sea, but what Gatsby was shot and fell into was only a pool covered with copper odor. What he relied on was just antagonized by what he hoped for, which was a tragedy of hanging himself.
  Maristot | Jun 5, 2023 |
Great imagery, lack of plot, not enough reason to read this book. ( )
  calenmarwen | May 29, 2023 |
847530298X
  archivomorero | May 21, 2023 |
(this review was originally written for bookslut)

When I started reading The Great Gatsby I believed two things: First, that Gatsby was on our 100 best books list, and second, that I had read it before in high school. I now know the first to be untrue and suspect the second. Although there are a great number of books I read in high school that I now only vaguely remember (Wuthering Heights being the other book that I can recall almost nothing of now), I really think I could not have read Gatsby before, as unfamiliar as it is to me now.

But really, more importantly, how in the world did The Great Gatsby not end up on our list of books? Jessa just happened to call me shortly after reading it, as I had a list of the 100 books in my hands and had just realized that not only was Gatsby not on *my* list of books to read, but it wasn't on the list at all! Jessa was also shamed by our oversight, but neither of us are at all interested in changing the list now. As much work as it took to make it, I don't want to have to decide which book comes off to make room for it!

So how about I just tell you what I thought of the book, as if I were reviewing it for the list anyway? By now, everyone should know the basic plot: Gatsby, a tremendously rich man, is terribly and secretly in love with Daisy, who is married and lives across the harbour on Long Island. The story is told from the point of view of Nick, Gatsby's neighbor and Daisy's distant cousin, who of course gets deeply enmeshed in the whole affair.

Now this is a book to read slowly, which is difficult to do as it is so short and the temptation to race through it is overwhelming. (Especially if you do most of your reading, as I do, sitting in a chair facing a wall of unread and accusatory books.) However if you don't read it slowly, you'll regret it, as it will all race by far too quickly, you'll be left wanting more, and the only thing to do for it will be to read it again. Which I would do, if I were not already knee-deep in The Plague, which actually is on the list even though it is not nearly as enjoyable as Gatsby.

The Great Gatsby is ultimately a tragedy, a beautifully wrought tragedy. It paints a not too flattering picture of the American Dream through a story as layered as it is simple, as off-putting as it is charming. It is one of those rare books that stays with you after you have put it down. I find that I am warming to it even now, becoming more fond of the characters, appreciating the storyline more.... Yes, I do think I will read this book again before the summer is over.

The Great Gatsby is an American classic. If no one made you read it in high school (or if they did, and you can't remember it anyway), you should go read it now. If you do, look for the authorized text, which corrects some annoying mistakes in previous versions. And please, above all, read it slowly. ( )
  greeniezona | May 7, 2023 |
The Original 1925 Edition of The Great Gatsby is a literary marvel that encapsulates the ethos of the tumultuous twenties through an unforgettable ensemble and riveting plotline. The novel tells the story of Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire who throws lavish parties in the hopes of winning back the love of his life, Daisy Buchanan.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing style is elegant and evocative, transporting the reader to a world of glamour and excess that is both alluring and tragic. The characters are complex and multi-dimensional, and Fitzgerald's exploration of themes such as love, wealth, and the American Dream is masterful.

The original 1925 edition of The Great Gatsby is a must-read for anyone who loves classic literature. This edition includes Fitzgerald's original text, complete with its unique punctuation and formatting, as well as a helpful introduction that provides context for the novel's historical and cultural significance.

Overall, The Great Gatsby: The Original 1925 Edition is a literary masterpiece that deserves its place among the great works of American literature. It is a novel that will stay with readers long after they have finished reading, and its enduring legacy is a testament to Fitzgerald's talent and vision. ( )
  mandarin7752 | May 3, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 1041 (next | show all)
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.
 

» Add other authors (55 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Fitzgerald, F. Scottprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Abarbanell, BettinaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Amberg, BillCover designersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Bickford-Smith, CoralieCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Bradbury, MalcolmIntroductionsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Bruccoli, Matthew JosephPrefacesecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Burns, TomIllustratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Bush, KenEditorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Cavagnoli, FrancaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Cirlin, EdgardCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Colomb, StephanieEditorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Cornils, L.Translatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Cugat, FrancisCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Dean, BruceIllustratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Demkowska, Ariadnasecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Ekvall, ChristianTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Ellsworth, JohannaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Folch i Camarasa, RamonTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Gyllenhaal, JakeNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Heald, AnthonyNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Hope, WilliamNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Janssen, SusanTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Li, CherlynneCover designersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Liona, VictorTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Meyer, FredIllustratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Meyers, JeffreyEditorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Muller, FrankNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Murakami, HarukiTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Niiniluoto, MarjaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Nippoldt, RobertIllustratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Olzon, GöstaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Pauley, JaneNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Piñas, E.Translatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Pivano, FernandaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Prigozy, RuthEditorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Reynolds, GuyIntroductionsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Robbins, TimNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Schürenberg, Waltersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Schürenberg, WalterTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Scourby, AlexanderNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Siegel, HalIllustratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Sloan, SamForewordsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Soosaar, EnnTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Stephens, ChelseaNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Tait, KyleNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Tanner, TonyIntroductionsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Tournier, JacquesTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Tredell, NicolasEditorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Tsaneva, MariaIllustratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Wolff, Lutz-W.Translatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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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.
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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This work is the book.
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For use in schools and libraries only. A young man, newly rich, tries to recapture the past and win back his former love, despite the fact that she is married.

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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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Penguin Australia

7 editions of this book were published by Penguin Australia.

Editions: 0141182636, 0140007466, 0141023430, 0141037636, 024195147X, 1922079553, 0734306865

Urban Romantics

2 editions of this book were published by Urban Romantics.

Editions: 1907832564, 1907832572

 

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