Discussed in
A Moveable Feast
Hemingway recounts reading Fitzgerald's novel and recognizing the scale of his talent, setting that judgment against the personal and financial pressures he believed obstructed Fitzgerald's work.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel of love, money, and the Jazz Age — written mostly in France, and often called the great American novel.
- 1925
- Elegiac
- Atmospheric
- Melancholy
- lyrical
- plot-driven
- dark
About F. Scott Fitzgerald
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeNick Carraway rents a cottage on Long Island next to a mansion that throws parties nobody is invited to and everybody attends. His neighbor, Jay Gatsby, turns out to have built the entire glittering machine for an audience of one: Daisy, the girl across the bay, married to someone else. What follows is the great American story about the past — wanting it back, buying it back, and what that costs. Fitzgerald wrote most of it in France in 1924; it is the Paris generation's American masterpiece.
The story, in more detail
He wrote most of it on the Riviera in the summer and fall of 1924 — between the marital crisis the Murphys watched and the parties he was taking notes on — and revised it in Rome that winter, sharpening it under Max Perkins's careful letters. Titles came and went (Trimalchio in West Egg survived almost to press); Cugat's cover painting of eyes over a carnival skyline arrived before the book was done, and Fitzgerald claimed he wrote it in.
Publication, in April 1925, disappointed him badly: about twenty thousand copies sold — respectable, but far below This Side of Paradise, and he had wanted greatness acknowledged. The praise that mattered came privately: T. S. Eliot read it three times and called it the first step American fiction had taken in a generation, and Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast, records reading it and concluding that a man who could write that well had to be forgiven everything else.
Fitzgerald died in 1940 believing the book forgotten; his royalties that year came to a few dollars. The war changed that. The Armed Services Editions shipped over 150,000 copies to soldiers, postwar critics re-read it, and by mid-century the failure of 1925 had become the most widely taught novel in America.
The full plot
Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner selling bonds in New York in the summer of 1922, rents a small house on West Egg, Long Island, next door to the mansion of a mysterious host named Gatsby, whose enormous parties run on champagne and rumor. Across the bay live Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom — polo money, casual cruelty, and a mistress named Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a garage keeper out along the ash heaps. Gatsby, it emerges, wants exactly one thing from Nick: a tea invitation for Daisy, whom he loved as a young officer five years before and has built the entire glittering apparatus of his life to win back.
For a summer it works. The reunion trembles into an affair; the parties reveal their purpose and then stop; and the shirts, the shore-front lawn, the green light at the end of Daisy's dock all declare Gatsby's single article of faith — that the past can be repeated. Against it moves Tom Buchanan, who digs into where the money actually comes from — bootlegging, and the gambler Meyer Wolfshiem — and forces the confrontation in a stifling Plaza Hotel suite, where Daisy proves unable to say the one sentence Gatsby needs: that she never loved her husband.
How it ends — spoilers ahead
Driving home from the Plaza in Gatsby's yellow car, Daisy Buchanan runs down and kills Myrtle Wilson — Tom's mistress, rushing into the road — and does not stop. Gatsby takes the blame without hesitation and stands vigil outside Daisy's house, watching for a signal that never comes, while inside Tom and Daisy compose themselves over cold chicken. The next afternoon Myrtle's husband George, steered by Tom toward the yellow car's owner, walks to Gatsby's pool and shoots him dead, then himself. Almost no one comes to the funeral — not Daisy, not the party hundreds; only Nick, Gatsby's ruined father with a boyhood self-improvement schedule, and one drunk from the library. Nick, done with the East, returns west with the book's closing meditation: the green light, the future receding as we reach it, the boats beaten back ceaselessly into the past.
Themes and analysis
The light across the bay
The green light enters the novel before Nick can explain what Gatsby wants. Watching from a distance, he is unsure even of the trembling he thinks he sees or whether the light marks a dock. The reader first encounters desire through a gesture whose meaning remains unavailable. Gatsby’s earlier air of possession, as though surveying a personal share of the sky, gives way to reaching across darkness. That change makes his wealth look less like fulfillment than a vantage point from which to register something still beyond him.
The past in the room
At the reunion, Gatsby tries to appear casually at ease and nearly knocks over Nick’s stopped clock. Catching it saves the object, not the performance: everyone remains painfully conscious of the mishap. Daisy describes their separation vaguely, while Gatsby supplies the exact span in years and months. The contrast suggests how insistently he has been keeping account of their absence from one another. Time becomes both a fragile household object and an unevenly shared memory, making the imagined perfect meeting stumble over the ordinary present.
Quotes from The Great Gatsby
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.
“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
Documented connections
Why we recommend it
The sentences
Fitzgerald at twenty-eight wrote the most quoted prose in American fiction — the parties, the shirts, the green light, and a final page that readers memorize without meaning to.
It belongs to the Paris shelf
Written mostly on the Riviera in 1924, published in April 1925 — weeks before its author walked into the Dingo Bar and the era's most famous friendship began.
The story about wanting more
Gatsby believes the past can be bought back; the novel shows what that belief costs. A century on, it is still the definitive American story about ambition.
What this book explores
The people in its pages
Jay Gatsby
He throws the biggest parties on Long Island. He built all of it to win back Daisy Buchanan, who lives across the bay.
Nick Carraway
The narrator. A young Midwesterner selling bonds in New York, Daisy's cousin, and Gatsby's next-door neighbour.
Daisy Buchanan
Tom Buchanan's wife and Nick's cousin. Gatsby has been in love with her for five years.
Tom Buchanan
Daisy's husband. Rich, a former college football star, and openly keeping a mistress in the city.
Jordan Baker
A tournament golfer and an old friend of Daisy's. She spends the summer with Nick, and tells him what Gatsby wants.
Myrtle Wilson
Tom Buchanan's mistress. She is married to a garage keeper out on the ash heaps, and Tom keeps a flat for her in the city.
George Wilson
Myrtle's husband. He runs a failing garage on the road into New York.
Meyer Wolfshiem
Gatsby's business partner, and a gambler. Gatsby says he is the man who fixed the 1919 World's Series.
Dan Cody
The mining millionaire who took Gatsby onto his yacht at seventeen. He died years before the novel begins.
Also in the book
Michaelis
He runs the coffee shop next to Wilson's garage, and has been Wilson's neighbour for four years.
Catherine
Myrtle's sister. She tells Nick most of what he learns about the affair, and gets a good deal of it wrong.
Owl Eyes
A drunk guest Nick meets in Gatsby's library. He is one of only three people who come to the funeral.
Henry C. Gatz
Gatsby's father. He comes from Minnesota for the funeral, carrying a photograph of his son's house.
Real people in this book
Ginevra King
- Muse
Inspired by
Scholarship traces Daisy Buchanan in part to Ginevra King, the Chicago socialite Fitzgerald courted from 1915. The debt is an interpretive one drawn from his letters and ledger rather than a statement Fitzgerald made about the character.
Joseph Conrad
- Author
Inspired by
Fitzgerald's decision to tell Gatsby's story through Nick Carraway, a narrator present at the events but reconstructing them afterwards, follows the method Joseph Conrad built around Marlow.
The real history
Weeks after Gatsby published, its author introduced himself to Hemingway at the Dingo Bar — a friendship of vouching, editing, rivalry, and wreckage, told round by round in our journal.
Read the full story in the journalIn images
Timeline
1924
Fitzgerald writes most of the novel on the French Riviera through the summer and fall, then revises it in Rome that winter under Max Perkins's letters.
1925
Scribner publishes it in April. It sells about twenty thousand copies — a disappointment against his earlier success, though T. S. Eliot reads it three times and praises it.
1940
Fitzgerald dies believing the book forgotten; his royalties that year come to a few dollars.
1940s
The war revives it: Armed Services Editions ship over 150,000 copies to soldiers, postwar critics re-read it, and by mid-century it is the American novel.
Book editions
Paperback
- Paperback
Ebook
- Ebook
Audiobook
- Audiobook
Reader reviews
Readers may also like
The Sun Also Rises
Published a year apart by the same house — and Fitzgerald's editorial letter persuaded Hemingway to cut the novel's original opening chapters.
Read our takeA Moveable Feast
Contains Hemingway's unforgettable, unmerciful chapters on Fitzgerald — the Lyon road trip above all. Read Gatsby first and weigh the portrait against the talent.
Read our take
Tender Is the Night
The Riviera at its most enchanted, and the marriage underneath it — nine years after Gatsby, the deeper, sadder masterpiece.
Read our takeThe Great Gatsby: frequently asked questions
Who wrote The Great Gatsby?
F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was published in 1925 and is his best-known novel.
What is The Great Gatsby about?
On Long Island, narrator Nick Carraway watches his mysterious neighbor Jay Gatsby, who built a fortune and throws lavish parties to win back Daisy, a woman married to someone else. It is the great American story about wanting the past back — and what that costs.
Where did Fitzgerald write The Great Gatsby?
Mostly in France, on the Riviera, in the summer and fall of 1924, revised in Rome that winter. It is the Paris generation's American masterpiece.
Why is The Great Gatsby considered a classic?
For its compressed, luminous prose, its symbolism — the green light across the bay — and its portrait of the Jazz Age's glamour and hollowness. It is often called a candidate for the great American novel.
Is The Great Gatsby in the public domain?
Yes. It entered the United States public domain in 2021 and can now be read and reprinted freely.
If you like F. Scott Fitzgerald
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The Brooklyn dropout who arrived in Paris broke at thirty-eight and wrote the exuberant, banned books that ended American censorship.
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References
References
The sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document The Great Gatsby, its publication, and its place in literary history.
1The Great Gatsby
NovelF. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925Used forThe primary text represented by this page, used for descriptions of the work’s contents and for any quoted passages shown here.
2The Great Gatsby (Gutenberg transcription)
WebsiteProject GutenbergUsed forPrimary-text transcription used for the end of chapter I and the reunion in chapter V. No manuscript or first-edition collation is claimed.
3A Fitzgerald Chronology — Bruccoli Collection
ArchiveUniversity of South Carolina LibrariesUsed forArchival evidence used to document the historical record connected to The Great Gatsby.
4Max Perkins: Editor of Genius
BiographyE. P. Dutton, 1978Used forBiographical evidence used to verify chronology, relationships, and historical context connected to The Great Gatsby.
5Princeton's Fitzgerald Collections
ArchivePrinceton University LibraryUsed forPrinceton's Fitzgerald archive documents the autograph manuscript, corrected first edition, galleys and publishing papers for the novel.
6The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway–Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, 1925–1947
LettersScribner, 1996Used forThe Fitzgerald–Perkins correspondence supplies primary evidence for the novel's drafting, editing and publication.
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Why these sources are here
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
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