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A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.
It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.
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Subjects
Rich people, Mistresses, In library, Traffic accidents, Open Library Staff Picks, First loves, Revenge, Fiction, Protected DAISY, Popular Print Disabled Books, Accessible book, Man-woman relationships, Wealth, Readers, OverDrive, Economic conditions, American fiction, Literature, Facsimiles, Manuscripts, Upper class, Social life and customs, American Manuscripts, Married women, Long Now Manual for CivilizationPeople
Nick Carraway, Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Tom BuchananPlaces
Long Island, New York (State), United States, East Egg, West EggTimes
1918-1945Book Details
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first sentence
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Feedback?February 8, 2022 | Edited by AgentSapphire | Merge works |
April 30, 2020 | Edited by Lisa | Update covers |
April 30, 2020 | Edited by Lisa | reverted to revision 45 |
April 30, 2020 | Edited by lisaBot | redirect duplicate work |
October 15, 2019 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |