The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby, novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Set in Jazz Age New York, it tells the story of Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire, and his pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy young woman whom he loved in his youth.
Commercially unsuccessful when it was first published, The Great Gatsby—which was Fitzgerald’s third novel—is now considered a classic of American fiction and has often been called the Great American Novel.
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Plot summary
The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a Yale University graduate from the Midwest who moves to New York after World War I to pursue a career in bonds. He recounts the events of the summer he spent in the East two years later, reconstructing his story through a series of flashbacks not always told in chronological order.
Life in West Egg and East Egg
In the spring of 1922, Nick takes a house in the fictional village of West Egg on Long Island, where he finds himself living among the colossal mansions of the newly rich. Across the water in the more refined village of East Egg live his cousin Daisy and her brutish, absurdly wealthy husband Tom Buchanan. Early in the summer Nick goes over to their house for dinner, where he also meets Jordan Baker, a friend of Daisy’s and a well-known golf champion, who tells him that Tom has a mistress in New York City. In a private conversation, Daisy confesses to Nick that she has been unhappy. Returning to his house in West Egg, he catches sight of his neighbor Jay Gatsby standing alone in the dark and stretching his arms out to a green light burning across the bay at the end of Tom and Daisy’s dock.
Early in July Tom introduces Nick to his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, who lives with her spiritless husband George Wilson in what Nick calls “a valley of ashes”: an industrial wasteland presided over by the bespectacled eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, which stare down from an advertising billboard. Meeting her at the garage where George works as a repairman, the three of them go to Tom and Myrtle’s apartment in Manhattan. They are joined by Myrtle’s sister and some other friends who live nearby, and the evening ends in heavy drunkenness and Tom punching Myrtle in the nose when she brings up Daisy. Nick wakes up in a train station the morning afterward.
As the summer progresses, Nick grows accustomed to the noises and lights of dazzling parties held at his neighbor’s house, where the famous and newly rich turn up on Saturday nights to enjoy Gatsby’s well-stocked bar and full jazz orchestra. Nick attends one of these parties when personally invited by Gatsby and runs into Jordan, with whom he spends most of the evening. He is struck by the apparent absence of the host and the impression that all of his guests seem to have dark theories about Gatsby’s past. However, Nick meets him at last in a rather quiet encounter later in the evening when the man sitting beside him identifies himself as Gatsby. Gatsby disappears and later asks to speak to Jordan privately. Jordan returns amazed by what he has told her, but she is unable to tell Nick what it is.
Resurfacing Gatsby’s past
Nick begins seeing Jordan Baker as the summer continues, and he also becomes better acquainted with Gatsby. One afternoon in late July when they are driving into Manhattan for lunch, Gatsby tries to dispel the rumors circulating around himself, and he tells Nick that he is the son of very wealthy people who are all dead and that he is an Oxford man and a war hero. Nick is skeptical about this. At lunch he meets Gatsby’s business partner Meyer Wolfsheim, the man who fixed the World Series in 1919 (based on a real person and a real event from Fitzgerald’s day). Later, at tea, Jordan Baker tells Nick the surprising thing that Gatsby had told her in confidence at his party: Gatsby had known Nick’s cousin Daisy almost five years earlier in Louisville and they had been in love, but then he went away to fight in the war and she married Tom Buchanan. Gatsby bought his house on West Egg so he could be across the water from her.
At Gatsby’s request, Nick agrees to invite Daisy to his house, where Gatsby can meet her. A few days later he has them both over for tea, and Daisy is astonished to see Gatsby after nearly five years. The meeting is at first uncomfortable, and Nick steps outside for half an hour to give the two of them privacy. When he returns, they seem fully reconciled, Gatsby glowing with happiness and Daisy in tears. Afterward they go next door to Gatsby’s enormous house, and Gatsby shows off its impressive rooms to Daisy.
As the days pass, Tom becomes aware of Daisy’s association with Gatsby. Disliking it, he shows up at one of Gatsby’s parties with his wife. It becomes clear that Daisy does not like the party and is appalled by the impropriety of the new-money crowd at West Egg. Tom suspects that Gatsby is a bootlegger, and he says so. Voicing his dismay to Nick after the party is over, Gatsby explains that he wants Daisy to tell Tom she never loved him and then marry him as though the years had never passed.
Gatsby’s wild parties cease thereafter, and Daisy goes over to Gatsby’s house in the afternoons. On a boiling hot day near the end of the summer, Nick arrives for lunch at the Buchanans’ house; Gatsby and Jordan have also been invited. In the dining room, Daisy pays Gatsby a compliment that makes clear her love for him, and, when Tom notices this, he insists they drive into town.
Daisy and Gatsby leave in Tom’s blue coupe, while Tom drives Jordan and Nick in Gatsby’s garish yellow car. On the way, Tom stops for gas at George Wilson’s garage in the valley of ashes, and Wilson tells Tom that he is planning to move west with Myrtle as soon as he can raise the money. This news shakes Tom considerably, and he speeds on toward Manhattan, catching up with Daisy and Gatsby.
The whole party ends up in a parlor at the Plaza Hotel, hot and in bad temper. As they are about to drink mint juleps to cool off, Tom confronts Gatsby directly on the subject of his relationship with Daisy. Daisy tries to calm them down, but Gatsby insists that Daisy and he have always been in love and that she has never loved Tom. As the fight escalates and Daisy threatens to leave her husband, Tom reveals what he learned from an investigation into Gatsby’s affairs—that he had earned his money by selling illegal alcohol at drugstores in Chicago with Wolfsheim after Prohibition laws went into effect. Gatsby tries to deny it, but Daisy has lost her resolve, and his cause seems hopeless. As they leave the Plaza, Nick realizes that it is his 30th birthday.
A deadly crash and a shooting
Gatsby and Daisy leave together in Gatsby’s car, with Daisy driving. On the road they hit and kill Myrtle, who, after having a vehement argument with her husband, had run into the street toward Gatsby’s passing car, thinking it was Tom. Terrified, Daisy continues driving, but the car is seen by witnesses. Coming behind them, Tom stops his car when he sees a commotion on the road. He is stunned and devastated when he finds the body of his mistress dead on a table in Wilson’s garage.
Wilson accusingly tells him it was a yellow car that hit her, but Tom insists it was not his and drives on to East Egg in tears. Back at the Buchanans’ house in East Egg, Nick finds Gatsby hiding in the garden and learns that it was Daisy who was driving, though Gatsby insists that he will say it was he if his car is found. He says he will wait outside Daisy’s house in case Tom abuses Daisy.
The next morning Nick goes over to Gatsby’s house, where he has returned, dejected. Nick advises him to go away, afraid that his car will be traced. He refuses, and that night he tells Nick the truth about his past: he had come from a poor farming family and had met Daisy in Louisville while serving in the army, but he was too poor to marry her at the time. He earned his incredible wealth only after the war (by bootlegging, as Tom discovered).
Reluctantly, Nick leaves for work, while Gatsby continues to wait for a call from Daisy. That afternoon, George Wilson arrives in East Egg, where Tom tells him that it was Gatsby who killed his wife. Wilson makes his way to Gatsby’s house, where he finds Gatsby in his pool. Wilson shoots Gatsby and then himself. Afterward the Buchanans leave Long Island. They give no forwarding address. Nick arranges Gatsby’s funeral, although only two people attend, one of whom is Gatsby’s father. Nick moves back to the Midwest, disgusted with life in the East.
Setting and historical context
Set in the Jazz Age (a term popularized by Fitzgerald), The Great Gatsby vividly captures its historical moment: the economic boom in America after World War I, the new jazz music, the free-flowing illegal liquor. As Fitzgerald later remarked in an essay about the Roaring Twenties, it was “a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure.”
According to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the 1920s witnessed “a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure.”
The brazenly lavish culture of West Egg is a reflection of the new prosperity that was possible during Prohibition, when illegal schemes involving the black-market selling of liquor abounded. Such criminal enterprises are the source of Gatsby’s income and finance his incredible parties, which are probably based on parties Fitzgerald himself attended when he lived on Long Island in the early 1920s.
The racial anxieties of the period are also evident in the novel; Tom’s diatribe on The Rise of the Colored Empires—a reference to a real book published in 1920 by the American political scientist Lothrop Stoddard—points to the burgeoning eugenics movement in the United States during the early 20th century.
Publication history, legacy, and adaptations
Fitzgerald finished The Great Gatsby in early 1925 while he was living in France, and Scribner’s published it in April of the same year. Fitzgerald struggled considerably in choosing a title, toying with Trimalchio and Under the Red, White and Blue, among others; he was never satisfied with the title The Great Gatsby, under which it was ultimately published.
The illustration for the novel’s original dust jacket was commissioned by Fitzgerald’s editor Maxwell Perkins seven months before he was in possession of the finished manuscript. It was designed by Francis Cugat, a Spanish-born artist who did Hollywood movie posters, and depicts the eyes of a woman hanging over the carnival lights of Coney Island. The design was well-loved by Fitzgerald, and he claimed in a letter to Perkins that he had written it into the book, though whether this refers to the eyes of Doctor Eckleburg or something else is uncertain. Cugat’s painting is now one of the most well-known and celebrated examples of jacket art in American literature.
While Fitzgerald considered The Great Gatsby to be his greatest achievement at the time it was published, the book was neither a critical nor a commercial success upon publication. Reviews were mixed, and the 20,000 copies of its first printing sold slowly. It was printed one more time during Fitzgerald’s life, and there were still copies unsold from this second printing when he died in 1940.
The Great Gatsby was rediscovered a few years later and enjoyed an exponential growth in popularity in the 1950s, soon becoming a standard text of high-school curricula in the United States. It remains one of Scribner’s best sellers, and it is now considered a masterpiece of American fiction. In 2021 it entered the public domain in the United States.
There have been several film adaptations of the novel, most notably a production directed by Jack Clayton in 1974, starring Robert Redford as Gatsby, and one in 2013 directed by Baz Luhrmann, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
The meaning of The Great Gatsby
Above all, The Great Gatsby has been read as a pessimistic examination of the American Dream. At its center is a remarkable rags-to-riches story, of a boy from a poor farming background who has built himself up to fabulous wealth. Jay Gatsby is someone who once had nothing but who now entertains rich and celebrated people in his enormous house on Long Island. However, even though Gatsby’s wealth may be commensurate with the likes of Tom Buchanan’s, he is ultimately unable to break into the “distinguished secret society” of those who were born wealthy. His attempt to win Daisy Buchanan, a woman from a well-established family of the American elite, ends in disaster and his death.
This tension between “new money” and “old money” is represented in the book by the contrast between West Egg and East Egg. West Egg is portrayed as a tawdry, brash society that “chafed under the old euphemisms,” full of people who have made their money in an age of unprecedented materialism. East Egg, in contrast, is a refined society populated by America’s “staid nobility,” those who have inherited their wealth and who frown on the rawness of West Egg. In the end, it is East Egg that might be said to triumph: while Gatsby is shot and his garish parties are dispersed, Tom and Daisy are unharmed by the terrible events of the summer.
The Great Gatsby is memorable for the rich symbolism that underpins its story. Throughout the novel, the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock is a recurrent image that beckons to Gatsby’s sense of ambition. It is a symbol of “the orgastic future” he believes in so intensely, toward which his arms are outstretched when Nick first sees him. It is this “extraordinary gift for hope” that Nick admires so much in Gatsby, his “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.” Once Daisy is within Gatsby’s reach, however, the “colossal significance” of the green light disappears. In essence, the green light is an unattainable promise, one that Nick understands in universal terms at the end of the novel: a future we never grasp but for which we are always reaching. Nick compares it to the hope the early settlers had in the promise of the New World. Gatsby’s dream fails, then, when he fixates his hope on a real object, Daisy. His once indefinite ambition is thereafter limited to the real world and becomes prey to all of its corruption.
The valley of ashes—an industrial wasteland located between West Egg and Manhattan—serves as a counterpoint to the brilliant future promised by the green light. As a dumping ground for the refuse of nearby factories, it stands as the consequence of America’s postwar economic boom, the ugly truth behind the consumer culture that props up newly rich people like Gatsby. In this valley live men like George Wilson who are “already crumbling.” They are the underclasses that live without hope, all the while bolstering the greed of a thriving economy. Notably, Gatsby does not in the end escape the ash of this economy that built him: it is George Wilson who comes to kill him, described as an “ashen” figure the moment before he shoots Gatsby.
Over the valley of ashes hover the bespectacled eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, which appear on the advertising billboard of an oculist. These eyes almost become a moral conscience in the morally vacuous world of The Great Gatsby; to George Wilson they are the eyes of God. They are said to “brood” and “[keep] their vigil” over the valley, and they witness some of the most corrupt moments of the novel: Tom and Myrtle’s affair, Myrtle’s death, and the valley itself, full of America’s industrial waste and the toiling poor. However, in the end they are another product of the materialistic culture of the age, set up by Doctor Eckleburg to “fatten his practice.” Behind them is just one more person trying to get rich. Their function as a divine being who watches and judges is thus ultimately null, and the novel is left without a moral anchor.
Julia Martinez