The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925 and set on Long Island in the Jazz Age.

Nick Carraway narrates, and much of the book's force comes from his position as a guest: he is Daisy Buchanan's cousin, a Midwesterner recently out of the war, and a neighbour on the less fashionable of two egg-shaped peninsulas in the bay. Gatsby's parties fill his lawn with strangers, but Gatsby himself wants only one guest, and the reunion he has been planning for five years turns out to be the least of what he has built his life around. Around that hope Fitzgerald arranges other people's marriages, an affair conducted between Long Island and a garage on the road to the city, the social difference between old money and the newly rich, and a small set of objects that keep turning up, including a green light at the end of a dock. The book is short and tightly made, and the narrator only gradually admits how far his own account is shaped by what he wanted to believe. Fitzgerald wrote a rough draft while living on the French Riviera in 1924, revised it after his editor Maxwell Perkins asked him to, and drew on a youthful romance of his own and the parties he had attended on Long Island's North Shore two years earlier.

The dust jacket painting by Francis Cugat, Celestial Eyes, was finished while Fitzgerald was still working, and he wrote its imagery into the novel.