‘A classic, perhaps the supreme American novel’ John Carey, Sunday Times Books of the Century. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a brilliant fable of the hedonistic excess and tragic reality of 1920s America, and the subject of a major film from director Baz Luhrmann (Romeo+Juliet, Moulin Rouge!), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Tony Tanner.
When writer Nick Carraway enters the decadent orbit of Jay Gatsby’s Long Island mansion — where youth, beauty and staggering wealth seem to make the party endless — he finds himself drawn into the mystery of Gatsby’s origins and desires. For beneath the dazzling surface lies a secret: a profound and silent longing that can never be satisfied. As that destructive obsession tightens its grip, Gatsby’s glittering world begins to come apart. Fitzgerald captures both the disillusionment of post-war America and the moral hollowness of a society consumed by wealth and status, while Gatsby’s doomed pursuit of his dream speaks to the universal conflict between illusion and reality across every age.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) has attained a mythical standing in American literary history to rival that of his most famous creation. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre — dubbed ‘the first American Flapper’ — and their turbulent marriage and her gradual descent into insanity cast a long shadow over his writing. Fitzgerald published five novels: This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night, and The Last Tycoon, which was unfinished at the time of his death. After he died, The New York Times wrote that ‘in fact and in the literary sense he created a “generation”‘. Many consider The Great Gatsby the ‘great American novel’.
ISBN 13: 9780141182636
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
