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The Great Gatsby: The Only Authorized Edition Paperback – EveryBook, September 30, 2004
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Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously 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 noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.
- Reading age9 - 12 years
- Print length180 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Lexile measure1010L
- Dimensions5.25 x 0.6 x 8 inches
- PublisherScribner
- Publication dateSeptember 30, 2004
- ISBN-109780743273565
- ISBN-13978-0743273565
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER I
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave
me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever
since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me,
“just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had
the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually
communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he
meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m
inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up
many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of
not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect
and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal
person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly
accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret
griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were
unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or
a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that
an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the
intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in
which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred
by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of
infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if
I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly
repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled
out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to
the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded
on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point
I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from
the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in
uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted
no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the
human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to
this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented
everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If
personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then
there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened
sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one
of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten
thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do
with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under
the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary
gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have
never found in any other person and which it is not likely I
shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the
end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in
the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my
interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of
men.
* * *
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this
Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are
something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re
descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual
founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came
here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and
started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries
on to-day.
I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like
him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting
that hangs in father’s office. I graduated from New
Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and
a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration
known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly
that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm
center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the
ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn
the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business,
so I supposed it could support one more single man. All
my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a
prep school for me, and finally said, “Why—ye-es,” with very
grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year,
and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought,
in the spring of twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was
a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns
and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested
that we take a house together in a commuting town,
it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weatherbeaten
cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last
minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out
to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a
few days until he ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish
woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered
Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man,
more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I
was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually
conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves
growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had
that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again
with the summer.
There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much
fine health to be pulled down out of the young breathgiving
air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit
and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red
and gold like new money from the mint, promising to
unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and
Mæcenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading
many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—
one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials
for the Yale News—and now I was going to bring back
all such things into my life and become again that most limited
of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t
just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at
from a single window, after all.
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house
in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was
on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of
New York—and where there are, among other natural
curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles
from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour
and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most
domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere,
the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not
perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are
both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical
resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the
gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting
phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except
shape and size.
I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the
two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the
bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My
house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the
Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for
twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was
a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation
of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one
side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble
swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and
garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know
Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion, inhabited by a gentleman of
that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small
eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the
water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling
proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.
Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable
East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer
really begins on the evening I drove over there to have
dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second
cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college. And just
after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments,
had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football
at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those
men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one
that everything afterward savors of anticlimax. His family were
enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with
money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago
and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away;
for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies
from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own
generation was wealthy enough to do that.
Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year
in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and
there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich
together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the
telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s
heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a
little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable
football game.
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I
drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely
knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I
expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion,
overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and
ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping
over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally
when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines
as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken
by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected
gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom
Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart
on the front porch.
He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he
was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard
mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant
eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him
the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. 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.
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the
impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch
of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—
and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.
“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,”
he seemed to say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a
man than you are.” We were in the same senior society, and
while we were never intimate I always had the impression that
he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some
harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.
We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.
“I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing
about restlessly.
Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat
hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken
Italian garden, a half acre of deep, pungent roses, and a
snub-nosed motor-boat that bumped the tide offshore.
“It belonged to Demaine, the oil man.” He turned me
around again, politely and abruptly. “ We’ll go inside.”
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosycolored
space, fragilely bound into the house by French
windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming
white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little
way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew
curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags,
twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling,
and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a
shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an
enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed
up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in
white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they
had just been blown back in after a short flight around the
house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the
whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on
the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the
rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room,
and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned
slowly to the floor.
The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was
extended full length at her end of the divan, completely
motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing
something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she
saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—
indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for
having disturbed her by coming in.
The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she
leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then
she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed
too and came forward into the room.
“I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.”
She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and
held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face,
promising that there was no one in the world she so much
wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur
that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve
heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people
lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less
charming.)
At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me
almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head
back again—the object she was balancing had obviously
tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a
sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of
complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.
I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions
in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear
follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of
notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and
lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate
mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that
men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a
singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she
had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there
were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.
I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on
my way East, and how a dozen people had sent their love
through me.
“Do they miss me?” she cried ecstatically.
“The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear
wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent
wail all night along the north shore.”
“How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. To-morrow!” Then
she added irrelevantly: “You ought to see the baby.”
“I’d like to.”
“She’s asleep. She’s three years old. Haven’t you ever seen
her?”
“Never.”
“Well, you ought to see her. She’s——”
Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about
the room, stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.
“What you doing, Nick?”
“I’m a bond man.”
“Who with?”
I told him.
“Never heard of them,” he remarked decisively.
This annoyed me.
“You will,” I answered shortly. “You will if you stay in the
East.”
“Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he said, glancing
at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something
more. “I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.”
At this point Miss Baker said: “Absolutely!” with such suddenness
that I started—it was the first word she had uttered
since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much
as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft
movements stood up into the room.
“I’m stiff,” she complained, “I’ve been lying on that sofa
for as long as I can remember.”
“ Don’t look at me,” Daisy retorted, “I’ve been trying to
get you to New York all afternoon.”
“No, thanks,” said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in
from the pantry, “I’m absolutely in training.”
Her host looked at her incredulously.
“You are!” He took down his drink as if it were a drop in
the bottom of a glass. “How you ever get anything done is
beyond me.”
I looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she “got
done.” I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, smallbreasted
girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by
throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young
cadet. Her gray sun-strained eyes looked back at me with
polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented
face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a
picture of her, somewhere before.
“You live in West Egg,” she remarked contemptuously. “I
know somebody there.”
“I don’t know a single——”
“You must know Gatsby.”
“Gatsby?” demanded Daisy. “What Gatsby?”
Product details
- ASIN : 0743273567
- Publisher : Scribner; First Edition (September 30, 2004)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 180 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780743273565
- ISBN-13 : 978-0743273565
- Reading age : 9 - 12 years
- Lexile measure : 1010L
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.25 x 0.6 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #19,322 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #183 in Friendship Fiction (Books)
- #772 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #2,178 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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The Great Gatsby
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About the author
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, short story writer and screenwriter. He was best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he popularized. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works amid the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson completed and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death.
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Fitzgerald is unmatched when it comes to character studies. He has used his own real life experience among the elite, to peel away the beautiful artifice and show us the truly ugly, heartless soul inside these people. Daisy and Tom are unhappy and unfulfilled people. Tom uses Myrtle to escape from the boredom and inanity of Daisy. He could care less if it all turns out badly. Consequences, morality and decency are not qualities that one finds in the likes of Tom and Daisy. They take what they want and try to steal moments of happiness at the expense of the humanity of those who are manipulated and played like chess pieces. Life is a game to them, a game to be played out in grand style and if someone gets crushed in the process, so be it.
Fitzgerald finds his own voice in his narrator, the conscientious and astute Nick Carraway. He is the observer, watching the carnage and emotional wreckage unfold before his eyes. Through him, we see the horror of what Tom and Daisy do to those who have the misfortune to those who cross their path. Initially, Nick is enchanted to be in their company, but by the end as he surveys the tragedy and destruction that has been wrought, he is repelled and wants only to put as much distance as he can between himself and these monsters. Fitzgerald's own ideas and thoughts are expressed through Nick. It's a masterful way of illuminating the reader. Nick is the moral compass in this novel. He sees the truth, the ugly reality of what makes up the rich and famous, their lack of character, their emptiness, their need to lose themselves. In the end we feel the way he does. The beauty and lavishness of the lives of these people are just a brittle exterior, covering up the hideousness that lies underneath.
As I read this novel again, years later and much older, it has taken on a whole other dimension. I have enough life experience now to truly appreciate the dark and sinister reality that can lie behind beauty and wealth. It is now a richer experience, because Fitzgerald's novel is timeless. He provided a stinging, harsh critique of the kind of people he knew all too well, of an era, a time in which people satisfied their greediness at the expense of others. The book can never become outdated, because what it says about people who have too much money and time on their hands with too little humanity, applies to generations through the years.
This is a seminal work, a beautifully crafted tale about a time that was captured forever in these richly drawn characters. Fitzgerald had the most distinctive style of writing I have ever experienced. No one else has ever even come close to his genius. He can dissect and carve out the essence of his characters using the most lovely prose. His descriptive phrases still leave me breathless. I am only sorry that he died prematurely in 1940 at the too young age of 44, thereby depriving us of the privilege of reading more of his magnificent writing. We must make do with what he was able to give us in the brief time he was on this earth.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby is a wonderful tale. I choose it for many reasons. My brother recommended the book, expounding it was the best he’d ever read, and it’s considered one of the supreme achievements of 20th century literature. The story falls under the category of realistic fiction, and romance. I will now explain the setting of this tale.
The story takes place during the 1920s in East and West egg, New York. These are two peninsulas in New York City resembling eggs. Although the main story takes place over a summer, many flashbacks predate 10 years. The characters all play vital roles. Nick, the narrator, oversees the entire ordeal. Gatsby is absurdly wealthy, and is attempting to reunite in love once again with Daisy. Daisy and Tom are married rather unhappily with each other. The story is a beautifully crafted tale, and I will now explain it.
The fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby had a deep love of Daisy Buchanan, residing from a long ago dead relationship. Daisy had gotten married to a man named Tom during their separation. Gatsby attempted to impress her with this lavish and overgrown parties on Long Island. Tom, however, spotted his doings. As Daisy and Gatsby regrew closer and closer, Tom began to attempt to interfere. On a fateful day, Gatsby's fate was sealed. A heated and primitive encounter over Daisy between Tom and Gatsby leaves Daisy emotionally exhausted. Gatsby rides home with her, and makes an irreversible mistake: he let Daisy drive. Unaware of what she was doing, she struck a woman with her car, fatally injuring her. Gatsby proves his devotion to Daisy by taking the blame. I’ll leave it at this as to not ruin the story. The theme is determination. Gatsby is determined to reunite with Daisy, despite knowing she’s with Tom. Although not all goes to plan, he does get to spend some time with her at his parties.
The Great Gatsby is a wonderful tale. It tells of “Lyrical beauty yet brutal realism, of magic, romance, and mysticism.” The story is grim as though real, as the brutality that Tom shows, and how Gatsby acquired his wealth in such a taboo way. It is a tale that will leave one thinking, not who is right or wrong, but a more broad question, of how complicated human emotion is. The book lures one into thinking they’ll leave with a simple romance novel, in tears or with hopes, but this book leaves questions, questions with no answer, only weak opinions. I would recommend it to not all, but those who seek a new, higher level, thought provoking tale. The book was written as though it wouldn’t be complete if a single sentence was missing. The dilemmas the book displayed still linger at the back of my mind, as though an itch of thought, and to me, a book that well written, thought out, deserves a number one spot on my favorite book list.
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Well, what a fantastic book club meeting last evening. The Great Gatsby was hailed as the greatest novel ever written and F. Scott Fitzgerald quite rightly earned his place as the finest writer of his or any other generation. It was also the first book in Farsley Book Club history to score a full house 100% approval rating!
What? What do you mean? Tell the truth, that was the truth wasn't it?
Well, a bit like Jay Gatsby himself I was a little guilty of embracing a fantasy and attempting to manipulate the outcome in my favour. It was my choice after all.
Okay, okay, let me pull the lever and flush out the lies....It wasn't exactly like that. So, let me tell it as it was old sport.
Very much described as a class book and not as many thought a die hard love story full of romance. No, this is about a man who aspires to love but is so cruelly denied.
The Gatsby parties were the stuff of legend but meant little to Gatsby himself who like a proud peacock wanted to demonstrate to Daisy (his former and would be future lover) the lofty position he had attained through less than honest ways. Surely Daisy would love him now?
This is ultimately the problem with the characters in The Great Gatsby. They are superficial, lacking in character, depth and meaning. So long as the money poured in and the champagne never ran dry they could all forget their empty miserable lives.
Oh, but the 1920s Jazz Age, the parties, I mean who wouldn't (despite the above attendees) want to be a part of the celebration? I know I would. "A Gin Ricky bartender, if you would be so kind."
Alas, the party couldn't last forever and the coming crash, depression, and the increased suicides notably by those who attended such parties are in the 1930s waiting.
It was Gatsby, the dreamer, weak and uncertain, fearful and lonely, the representation of new money and garage owner Wilson representing the working man who became the major victims of this work by Fitzgerald (not forgetting the unfortunate Myrtle Wilson). Both had humble beginnings and although Gatsby climbed the ladder of success it seemed to mean nothing without Daisy who he attempted to protect after Myrtle's own death. His most heroic act that led to nothing but separation from her permanently.
The book does suffer a terrible anticlimax with the bloody demise of Gatsby at the hands of George Wilson who in turn then takes his own life believing Gatsby to be responsible for his wife's death. Consequently the party moved on and there were few mourners at Gatsby's funeral, as one attendee at his funeral observed, "the poor son-of-a-bitch!" Nick Carraway, Gatsby's friend became the custodian of his legacy which had to have greater meaning than just his possessions and Nick attempted to inject this meaning after Gatsby's death.
I'm sure the money attached themselves to other parties seemingly getting away with drinking and dancing and forgetting poor Gatsby. They would not always get of scott free, if you'll pardon the pun.
Fitzgerald himself was familiar with this club and as a noted drunk and party animal he himself would have recognised all to well the life Gatsby and his 'friends' would have led and would also recognise the empty shells with which he mingled.
In the end, tragically, it killed him as well having suffered a fatal heart attack at the crazy age of 44. The famous wit Dorothy Parker quick to draw parallels between Fitz and Gatsby was heard to quip at his funeral, "The poor son-of-a- bitch."
It was suggested that Fitzgerald wove into his narrative a homosexual encounter between Nick and Mr. McKee at the end of Chapter 2 and this suggestion is perhaps supported by Nick's description of Tom Buchanan (Daisy's unlikable husband), his admiration for Gatsby himself and his reluctance to press for any relations with the female sex. The evidence is there and It's very difficult to argue against. Read it for yourself If you don't agree.
But, isn't that great? That Fitzgerald was prepared to weave this thread into his masterpiece demonstrates what a forward thinking writer he was. He deliberately embraced a theme that in 1925 would seem crazy and unthinkable and yet there it is. Fitz of course knew this world as he had friends of this persuasion and perhaps this nod was him acknowledging his support in a public way in a world that wasn't ready to accept it. I think this is a further demonstration of his greatness.
Despite a few of the collective not taking easily to Fitz's style of writing and the emptiness/shallowness of the characters the book was well received. Many prepared to read it again.
So, we can add The Great Gatsby by The Great F. Scott Fitzgerald to the Farsley Book Club Portfolio with an amazing approval rating of 72.9%.
Rest in Peace Jay Gatsby and F. Scott Fitzgerald.