Tom Buchanan
Daisy's husband. Rich, a former college football star, and openly keeping a mistress in the city.
To be the man he was at twenty-one, when he was one of the best college football players in the country. Nick Carraway says he peaked then, and that everything since has felt to him like an anticlimax.
The book
At a glance
- Tom Buchanan of Chicago, thirty — Daisy's husband, Nick's Yale acquaintance
- A red-and-white Georgian Colonial on East Egg, with a sunken Italian garden and a lawn a quarter of a mile long
- Family wealth; even at college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach
- A year in France, then wherever people played polo and were rich together
- Polo ponies from Lake Forest, and a flat on 158th Street for Myrtle Wilson
- William H. Mitchell — investment broker, polo player, and Ginevra King's husband · 1895–1987 · Chicago
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeTom Buchanan is thirty, enormously wealthy, and one of the most powerful ends ever to play football at New Haven — a national figure at twenty-one, which Nick reads as the problem: everything afterward savoured of anticlimax. He and Daisy have spent a year in France and drifted about wherever people played polo and were rich together, and have now settled on East Egg with a string of polo ponies brought down from Lake Forest.
He keeps Myrtle Wilson, a garage keeper's wife from the ash heaps, in a flat on 158th Street, and takes no particular trouble to conceal it. He is also the one character who investigates Gatsby rather than gossiping about him, and the investigation is accurate. Nick's account of him is physical before it is anything else: a hard mouth, a supercilious manner, and a cruel body.
How the book draws them
- The bodyStraw-haired, thirty, with two shining arrogant eyes and a great pack of muscle shifting under his thin coat. Nick's phrase is “a body capable of enormous leverage — a cruel body.”
- New HavenOne of the most powerful ends ever to play football there. Nick classes him with men who reach an acute limited excellence at twenty-one and spend the rest of their lives in the aftermath.
- The polo poniesHe came East from Chicago with a string of them brought down from Lake Forest. Nick finds it hard to realize that a man his own age is wealthy enough to do that.
- The dinner-table theoryHe recommends The Rise of the Coloured Empires by “this man Goddard,” says the white race will otherwise be utterly submerged, and adds that it is all scientific stuff, it has been proved. Daisy's comment is that Tom reads deep books with long words in them.
- Myrtle's noseAt the flat on 158th Street, Myrtle shouts Daisy's name at him and will not stop. “Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.” Then bloody towels on the bathroom floor, and the party continues.
- The sudden family manAt the Plaza, having spent the summer with a mistress in the city, he objects that nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they will throw everything overboard.
Tom Buchanan quotes
Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.
I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.
Civilization’s going to pieces. I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things.
Tom wins. He tells George Wilson who owns the yellow car, , and he and Daisy leave Long Island before the funeral. Nick meets him outside a jeweller's on Fifth Avenue that autumn and hears him explain that he had it coming, and that he cried when he went to give up the flat and found the box of dog biscuits still in the sideboard. Nick shakes his hand anyway, having decided there is no point, and files the verdict: they were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.
Fitzgerald built Tom out of the Lake Forest set he had watched from outside. William H. Mitchell married Ginevra King in 1918: a banking family, an investment broker, a Navy pilot in the war, a serious polo player, later a director of Texaco. He and Ginevra divorced in 1939. He lived to 1987, ninety-two years old, seven decades after the summer he was written into.