The Great Gatsby: The Only Authorized Edition

F. Scott Fitzgerald

May 2003 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

The only authorized edition of the twentieth-century classic, featuring F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and a new introduction by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.

Ratings and reviews

This is a book I am required to read in class, and I'm supposed to be on chapter 5, but I'm still squirming through chapter 1! This book probably has a good story, and I may like it, but the way the story is told is just... extremely difficult to understand. My strategy for understanding difficult books is to summarize and paraphrase the whole thing, but even that isn't working well for me. This book is for extremely literate people who enjoy having complex words shoved down their throats, not teenagers.

While the book is universally praised as a masterpiece of world literature, I couldn't help but feel that the narrative was slightly lacking. I felt like I knew what was going to happen the entire time, up until a slight turn at the end. Other than that I found most of the characters interesting and appreciated Gatsby's mysteriousness because without it he becomes a stereotype out of a typical romance tale. And having the storytold through the view of a supporting character was truly genius.

At first I really hated this book and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. I think think the author focused on using beautiful metaphor's and nothing else. The story is dull and the character development is terrible I didn't care about any of them when Gatsby died I felt nothing. I makes me sad because this book could've been so much more but in the end it fell flat on its face.

About the author

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and for the next decade the couple lived in New York, Paris, and on the Riviera. Fitzgerald’s masterpieces include The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.