The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Standard Ebooks

About this ebook

The Great Gatsby is a novel that needs no introduction for a certain generation of American readers. Long taught as required reading in American schools, critics have consistently held it up alongside Moby Dick, Huck Finn, and To Kill a Mockingbird as perhaps the quintessential Great American Novel.

Nick Carraway is a young Midwestern man freshly arrived in New York to make his fortune. He rents a shabby apartment in Long Island next door to a sumptuous mansion: the home of the mysterious and wealthy Jay Gatsby. Carraway spends time catching up with his distant cousin Daisy and her industry-baron husband Tom before being invited to one of Gatsby’s wildly lavish weekend parties. There he meets Jordan, a flapper and a golf star, and an intricate web of romances and betrayals begins to unfold.

The novel is a colorful study of America’s Jazz Age—a term said to be coined by Fitzgerald himself—complete with wealthy socialites living in hedonistic abandon, libertine flappers, jazz bands, roaring roadsters, and greasy speakeasies populated with shady grifters. Contrasted against the glamorous lives of wealthy socialites is the entrenched lower class, who live in gray, dingy squalor among smoldering ash-heaps. Fitzgerald uses the setting to examine the American Dream: the idea that anyone in America can achieve success through hard work and dedication. Gatsby has spent his life reaching for his dream. Some say he’s already achieved it. But has he? Is the dream even real for the hard-working poor that Gatsby and Tom race past in their glittering cars on the way to the decadent city?

Fitzgerald wrote much of his real life into the novel. Like Carraway, he was a Midwesterner educated at an Ivy-league school who went to live on Long Island. Despite his meager finances he hobnobbed with socialites, and spent his career struggling for money to maintain the grand style his romantic interests were accustomed to.

The cover art, titled Celestial Eyes, was commissioned from Francis Cugat, who completed it before the novel was finished. The huge eyes gazing down on the blazing city so moved Fitzgerald that he wrote them into the story.

Fitzgerald saw the novel as a purely artistic work, free of the pulp pandering required by his shorter commissions—but despite that, contemporary reviews were mixed, and it sold poorly. Fitzgerald thought it a failure, and died believing the novel to be fatally obscure. Only during World War II did it come back to the public consciousness, buoyed by the support of a ring of writers and critics and printed as an Armed Service Edition to be sent to soldiers on the front. Now it is an American classic.

This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Ratings and reviews

ABSOLUTELY LOVE this book! Been a HUGE fan of it for YEARS! I discovered it when I was pretty young, and in some love trouble myself. There's more, keep reading--> I read some online reviews prior to when I accidentally came across a trailer for the 2013 film where Leonardo DiCaprio portrayal of Gatsby himself. First, I did see the movie, then I FINALLY got my hands on the actual book itself, I read it and LOVED IT as well! If you're thinking of reading this book, I highly recommend it. This book got me into the millionaire money-making mindset that I carry on to this day. Hopefully, it will work wonders on you as well and put you in that money-making mindset as well. Remember, you haven't actually READ a book if you didn't even FEEL it, and after reading this one, I KNOW I felt this one!

As a published author, I always admire this book for its mastery. This author had written tons of short stories and two books before he wrote this tale and his state of mind was probably just spectacular, very creative, with a huge vocabulary, and at its height. He got into that godlike zen and then just wrote this defining artwork. This truly is a very wonderful story and crowning achievement of literature.

I can see why this book is so well revered, its amazing, a true classic among literature. Every page hooks you into reading more and more. Fitzgerald was an amazing writer