The Great Gatsby

By (author) F. Scott Fitzgerald; By (author) Fitzgerald, F Scott
Short description/annotation
Jay Gatsby is a self-made man famed for his decadent champagne-drenched parties. Despite being surrounded by Long Island''s bright and beautiful, he longs only for Daisy Buchanan. In shimmering prose, Fitzgerald shows Gatsby pursue his dream to its tragic conclusion.
Review quote
The Great Gatsby remains not just one of the greatest works of American literature, but a timeless evocation of the allure, corruption and carelessness of wealth...a gilded society intoxicated by wealth, dancing its way into the Great Depression. * The Times * Gatsby is a connoisseur''s guide to the glamour and glitter of the Jazz Age, but it''s also a nearly prophetic glimpse into the world to come. Writing at the height of the boom, in the midst of the Roaring Twenties, Fitzgerald detected the ephemerality, fakery and corruption always lurking at the heart of the great American success story... A haunting meditation on aspiration, disillusionment, romantic love - and a blistering expose of the materialism, duplicity, and sexual politics driving what Fitzgerald calls America''s true "business": "the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty" * The Times * It is a marvellously suggestive novel...a parable of modern America, and by extension of modern life * Daily Telegraph * The first and greatest modern novel, it has beautiful women, lavish parties, romance, betrayal and murder woven together in an intricately structured plot. A prescient comment on the dying days of a gilded age that is brilliant entertainment with a very eloquent insight * Mirror * His masterpiece, an elegy for the American Dream, the greatest lost cause of them all * Los Angeles Times *
Biographical note
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 -1940) is widely considered the poet laureate of the Jazz Age. He wrote many short stories and four novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Nightand The Great Gatsby. An unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously.
Biographical note
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 -1940) is widely considered the poet laureate of the Jazz Age. He wrote many short stories and four novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Nightand The Great Gatsby. An unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously.