The Great Gatsby

Description

One of the great American novels–and one of America’s most popular–featuring a new introduction by Min Jin Lee, the New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko, and extensive resources to enhance discussion of it in classrooms

The basis for the Broadway musical starring Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Young, handsome, and fabulously rich, Jay Gatsby seems to have everything. But at his mansion east of New York City, in West Egg, Long Island, where the party never seems to end, he’s often alone in the glittering Jazz Age crowd, watching and waiting, as speculation swirls around him–that he’s a bootlegger, that he was a German spy during the war, that he even killed a man. As writer Nick Carraway is drawn into this decadent orbit, he begins to see beneath the shimmering surface of the enigmatic Gatsby, for whom one thing will always be out of reach: Nick’s cousin, the married Daisy Buchanan, whose house is visible from Gatsby’s just across the bay.

A brilliant evocation of the Roaring Twenties and a satire of a postwar America obsessed with wealth and status, The Great Gatsby is a novel whose power remains undiminished after a century. This edition, based on scholarship dating back to the novel’s first publication in 1925, restores Fitzgerald’s masterpiece to the original American classic he envisioned, and features an introduction addressing how gender, race, class, and sexuality complicate the pursuit of the American Dream and suggestions of a wide variety of multimedia resources for exploring the novel’s themes.“Virtuosic . . . Both imperfect and sublime . . . I’ve read and loved Gatsby for a very long time. . . . I’ve always loved it because it shows that Fitzgerald understood unfairness. . . . I cannot imagine a more persuasive and readable book about lost illusions, class, White Americans in the 1920s, and the perils and vanity of assimilation. . . . I turn to Gatsby because it gives me the sober wisdom to imagine and revise my own American dream, and for that, it has a lasting hold.” ―Min Jin Lee, from the Introduction

“One of the most quintessentially American novels ever written.” ―Time
 
“The American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country’s writers.” ―The Washington Post

“No novel has more thrillingly portrayed the corrupting obsessions of love and money. . . . The romantic myth of self-creation speaks deeply to readers. . . . The prose, sentence by gorgeous sentence, goes down like spun sugar.” —George Packer, The Atlantic, “The Great American Novels”F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and went to Princeton University, which he left in 1917 to join the army. He is said to have epitomized the Jazz Age, which he himself defined as “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre; their traumatic marriage and her subsequent breakdowns became the leading influence on his writing. Among his publications were five novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and The Last Tycoon; six volumes of short stories; and The Crack-Up, a selection of autobiographical pieces.

Min Jin Lee (introduction) is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Pachinko, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of The New York Times Book Review‘s Ten Best Books of 2017, and of the nationally bestselling novel Free Food for Millionaires. A writer in residence at Amherst College and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, she lives in New York.

Philip McGowan (editor, notes) is an executive board member of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, the president of the European Association for American Studies, a senior lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, and the editor of the Oxford University Press centenary edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise.

Jennifer Buehler (suggestions for further exploration) is an associate professor of educational studies at Saint Louis University and a past president of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the National Council of Teachers of English.US

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