The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Summary
Nick Carraway rents a small house on Long Island next to the mansion of Jay Gatsby, a man of mysterious wealth who throws lavish parties every weekend without ever quite explaining, even to his own guests, why he is throwing them. The real reason turns out to be Daisy Buchanan, Nick's cousin and Gatsby's lost love from years before the war, now married to the brutal, unfaithful Tom Buchanan across the bay; Gatsby has built his entire fortune and his whole glittering life within sight of the green light at the end of her dock, hoping to win her back. When Tom discovers the renewed affair, a confrontation at a New York hotel forces everything into the open, and on the drive home that night Gatsby's car, with Daisy actually behind the wheel, strikes and kills Tom's mistress Myrtle Wilson. Gatsby takes the blame to protect Daisy, but Tom quietly tells Myrtle's grieving husband George that the car belongs to Gatsby, and George shoots Gatsby dead in his own swimming pool before turning the gun on himself. Nick, sickened by how easily the Buchanans' wealth lets them walk away from the wreckage they caused, arranges a small, sparsely attended funeral and leaves New York for good, closing the novel on Gatsby's faith in that green light and the famous last image of boats borne back ceaselessly into a past none of them can outrun.
Fitzgerald compresses an entire portrait of Jazz Age excess into a slim, tightly controlled tragedy, and the novel reads fast, its short chapters and Nick's watchful, slightly detached narration carrying a reader through parties and heartbreak alike without ever slowing down to explain what it all means. That refusal to spell out its own argument is part of what makes a second reading turn up things the first one missed.
Fitzgerald wavered over what to call the book, weighing titles including Trimalchio in West Egg and Under the Red, White, and Blue before reluctantly settling on The Great Gatsby, and the cover painting he commissioned from the artist Francis Cugat, a pair of disembodied eyes floating over a carnival lit skyline, was finished before the novel itself was, so that details of the image found their way back into the text rather than the other way around.
Historical Context & Significance
The Great Gatsby sold fewer than twenty thousand copies in its first six months and earned Fitzgerald roughly two thousand dollars in royalties, a disappointment next to his earlier novels; reviews split sharply, with the New York Times calling it a mystical and glamorous tale and H. L. Mencken praising its elegant, careful finish while dismissing the plot as slight, against other critics who predicted it marked the start of Fitzgerald's decline. The 1926 Pulitzer for the novel went instead to Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, which Lewis himself refused to accept, still angry at the board for overturning the jury's earlier recommendation of his own Main Street five years before.
Gatsby's afterlife dwarfs its first reception. The Council on Books in Wartime distributed some 155,000 copies to American troops between 1942 and 1945 through the Armed Services Editions program, seeding the critical revival that Edmund Wilson helped lead, and the novel now sells roughly half a million copies a year, assigned in close to half of American high schools by the mid 2000s and read in a form no royalty statement from 1925 ever hinted was coming.