Published 1926 / Length 188 pages
The Great Gatsby is arguably the greatest American novel ever written. Jay Gatsby is an enigmatic millionaire who lives in a grand villa on Long Island Sound, across the bay from Nick Carraway, the narrator, and from Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby is obsessed with Daisy, his childhood sweetheart, who is also Nick’s cousin. With Nick’s help, Gatsby meets Daisy and the two begin an affair, as the summer turns into a round of opulent parties at Gatsby’s house. Although Tom is also having an affair, he becomes jealous and begins to spread word that Gatsby is a bootlegger and a criminal. Emotions heighten, cars crash and wrong assumptions are made, ending, as we discover very early on in the book, with Gatsby dead. Nick is the only person who attends his funeral: all the partygoers, even his criminal accomplices, have abandoned him. It is a novel of fine observations and fabulous flourishes, such as its famous final sentence.
‘Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that it is Fitzgerald’s masterwork, but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country’s writers.’ – The Washington Post
• ‘So we beat on, boats against the current …’ The Great Gatsby has one of the most famous last sentences in literature. How does it sum up the themes of the book?
• By the end of the novel, Nick Carraway is thoroughly disgusted with Tom and Daisy. Do you agree with this opinion? Is Nick really in a position to judge them?
• How many real-life Great Gatsbys can you think of? Did Robert Maxwell have something of Gatsby about him, for example?
• What is it about Gatsby that people don’t like? It can hardly be his occupation as a bootlegger, as all the other characters drink alcohol.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald is widely credited with having first coined the phrase which named the era of 1920s America as ‘the jazz age’.
• The Great Gatsby has been filmed four times, most famously in 1974 by Jack Clayton, with a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola. Truman Capote wrote the original screenplay for this production, but it was never filmed; it suggested that Nick and Gatsby were gay.
• An American edition of The Great Gatsby has a famous painting by Francis Cugat on the cover, which was completed before the novel was finished and ‘written into the novel’, according to Fitzgerald.
• Tender Is the Night by F. SCOTT FITZGERALD – another classic and much-filmed story of doomed love among the wealthy.
• Vile Bodies by EVELYN WAUGH – once again we are among the rich young things of the 1920s and 1930s.
• Twilight Sleep by EDITH WHARTON – explores the glittering New York scene of the 1920s and its effects on its key players.