The Great Gatsby

Description

Everybody who is anybody is seen at Jay Gatsby's glittering Long Island parties. Yet Gatsby himself is reserved, unknowable. He seems always to be watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. When he finally draws the beautiful Daisy Buchanan back into his orbit, he sets in motion a series of tragedies. And F. Scott Fitzgerald gives us what many claim to be the greatest American novel - a crystalline portrait of society obsessed with status and wealth, and a doomed love story.

F. Scott Fitzgerald published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. His masterpieces include The Beautiful and the Damned and Tender is the Night. He died at the age of fourty-four. After his death, the New York Times said that Fitzgerald "was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a generation."

'Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that it is Fitzgerald's masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country's writers... If from all of our country's books I could have only one, The Great Gatsby would be it.' - Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post