
Having obtained a great fortune, Gatsby sets out to win her back again.Ī profound indictment of class privilege in the Jazz Age and beyond, The Great Gatsby explores the conflict between decency and self-indulgence. Instead she married Tom Buchanan, a wealthy classmate of Nick's. Daisy pledged to wait for his return from the war. Though Daisy is a married socialite and a mother, Gatsby still worships her as his "golden girl." They first met when she was a young lady from an affluent family and he was a working-class military officer. From the lawn of his sprawling mansion, Gatsby can see the green light glowing on her dock, which becomes a symbol in the novel of an unreachable treasure, the "future that year by year recedes before us." Jay Gatsby's decadent parties are thrown with one goal: to attract Daisy, who lives across the bay in the more fashionable East Egg.

As Nick learns more about Gatsby, every detail about him seems questionable, except his love for the charming Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby claims to have attended Oxford University, but the evidence is suspect. He is rumored to be a hero of the Great War. A mysterious man of thirty, Gatsby is the subject of endless fascination to the guests at his lavish all-night parties. Having left the Midwest to work in the bond business in the summer of 1922, Nick settles in West Egg, Long Island, among the nouveau riche epitomized by his next-door neighbor Jay Gatsby. Army during World War I, moved to New York after the war, and questions-even while participating in-high society. Like Fitzgerald himself, Nick is from Minnesota, attended an Ivy League university, served in the U.S. Unfolding in nine concise chapters, The Great Gatsby concerns the wasteful lives of four wealthy characters as observed by their acquaintance, narrator Nick Carraway. Although it was not a commercial success for Fitzgerald during his lifetime, this lyrical novel has become an acclaimed masterpiece read and taught throughout the world.

Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby is a tragic love story, a mystery, and a social commentary on American life. Though The Great Gatsby runs to fewer than two hundred pages, there is no bigger read in American literature. The story of Jay Gatsby's desperate quest to win back his first love reverberates with themes at once characteristically American and universally human, among them the importance of honesty, the temptations of wealth, and the struggle to escape the past. Since its publication in 1925, Fitzgerald's masterpiece has become a touchstone for generations of readers and writers, many of whom reread it every few years as a ritual of imaginative renewal. The Great Gatsby may be the most popular classic in modern American fiction.
