The Great Gatsby, Supreme Achievement of F. Scott Fitzgeralds' Career

The Great Gatsby is probably one of the best novels of its time in the sense that it depicts the disillusionment of the Jazz Age to a tee! Gatsby's love for Daisy is not "love" in the sense that you know, but a kind of sick perversion or more aptly put - the inability for him to come to terms with his past. The need to have money and the need to be known in the Jazz Age is forever present in the book, and, from what we know of Gatsby's past, is something that Gatsby strove for his entire life.

In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby (1925), arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

This exemplary novel of the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgeralds' third book, The Great Gatsby , stands as the supreme achievement of his career. T. S. Eliot read it three times and saw it as the "first step" American fiction had taken since Henry James; H. L. Mencken praised "the charm and beauty of the writing," as well as Fitzgerald's sharp social sense; and Thomas Wolfe hailed it as Fitzgerald's "best work" thus far. The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when, The New York Times remarked, "gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession," it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s that resonates with the power of myth. A novel of lyrical beauty yet brutal realism, of magic, romance, and mysticism, The Great Gatsby is one of the great classics of twentieth-century literature.

The first edition of The Great Gatsby contained many errors resulting from Fitzgerald's extensive revisions and a rushed production schedule, and subsequent editions introduced further departures from the author's intentions. This critical edition draws on the manuscript and surviving proofs of the novel, along with Fitzgerald's later revisions and corrections, to restore the text to its original form. It is The Great Gatsby as Fitzgerald intended it.

When download The Great Gatsby PDF ebook or buy The Great Gatsby kindle ebook, the characters all play their roles in the development of the story. Shallow figures fill Gatsby's parties, but show their true level of concern for him when they all absent themselves from his funeral. The class distinctions between Daisy, a true upper class maiden, who can never lower herself to accept Gatsby, the aspirant to a class rank which wealth and parties cannot buy. Gatsby's source of wealth is hinted at by his association with Meyer Wolfsheim, the gambler who fixed the World Series. Like others, he will associate with Gatsby in life, but has no time for him in death.

The setting of The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald plays an important role in the development of the novel. The unique way that Fitzgerald never refers to a specific year or era leaves it up for you to decide when you would like the novel to occur. Most people assume that the 1920's would be the most likely time period for the book to take place, but it is just as easy to say it took place in 1990. The way Fitzgerald did this leaves the book for the reader to enjoy as he or she so likes. Fitzgerald did, however, describe some of the setting. The West Egg and East Egg are perfect examples of this. He does not go into great depth to describe the shapes, colors, and proportions of these locations, but rather the characters surrounding them. During most of the book the characters you follow show you the atmosphere they are in, again leaving it up to the reader to chose how these places look. Fitzgerald's writing technique leaves it open for the reader to use their imagination more than any other book