The Great Gatsby : Om Illustrated Classics

F Scott Fitzgerald

Nov 2018 · Om Books International

About this ebook

  In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald introduces the reader to the
post-war America and offers a gripping social commentary on
the themes of power, crime, betrayal, greed and a vivid peek into the
American life in the 1920s, also known as the ‘Roaring Twenties’.
In the summer of 1922, Nick Carraway arrives in New York in pursuit
of the big American dream. Nick, the story’s narrator, moves in next
door to the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, the host of lavish
weekly parties for the rich and the fashionable. Across the bay reside
Nick’s distant cousin Daisy and her philandering husband, Tom, an
old classmate from Yale. Being the only link between Gatsby and his
long lost love, Nick gets drawn into the enthralling world of the
rich and takes the reader along on the ride, as he bears witness to
their follies and emerges a new enlightened man.

About the author

F(rancis) Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. He was educated at Princeton University and served in the U.S. Army from 1917 to 1919, attaining the rank of second lieutenant. In 1920 Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre, a young woman of the upper class, and they had a daughter, Frances. Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the finest American writers of the 20th Century. His most notable work was the novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). The novel focused on the themes of the Roaring Twenties and of the loss of innocence and ethics among the nouveau riche. He also made many contributions to American literature in the form of short stories, plays, poetry, music, and letters. Ernest Hemingway, who was greatly influenced by Fitzgerald's short stories, wrote that Fitzgerald's talent was "as fine as the dust on a butterfly's wing." Yet during his lifetime Fitzgerald never had a bestselling novel and, toward the end of his life, he worked sporadically as a screenwriter at motion picture studios in Los Angeles. There he contributed to scripts for such popular films as Winter Carnival and Gone with the Wind. Fitzgerald's work is inseparable from the Roaring 20s. Berenice Bobs Her Hair and A Diamond As Big As The Ritz, are two short stories included in his collections, Tales of the Jazz Age and Flappers and Philosophers. His first novel The Beautiful and Damned was flawed but set up Fitzgerald's major themes of the fleeting nature of youthfulness and innocence, unattainable love, and middle-class aspiration for wealth and respectability, derived from his own courtship of Zelda. This Side of Paradise (1920) was Fitzgerald's first unqualified success. Tender Is the Night, a mature look at the excesses of the exuberant 20s, was published in 1934. Much of Fitzgerald's work has been adapted for film, including Tender is the Night, The Great Gatsby, and Babylon Revisited which was adapted as The Last Time I Saw Paris by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1954. The Last Tycoon, adapted by Paramount in 1976, was a work in progress when Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, in Hollywood, California. Fitzgerald is buried in the historic St. Mary's Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland.