Publisher edition artwork
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · First published 1925
A short book about money, longing and the American refusal to accept a closed door.
Essential
Easy · Very short — around 180 pages
Why Read It?
It is 180 pages and contains more about class and self-invention than most libraries.
What It's About
A bootlegger of obscure origin buys a house across the bay from the woman he lost, and hosts parties in the hope she will walk in.
Why It Matters
It defined the aesthetic of the 1920s for a century afterwards — the linen, the cars, the light on the water — and remains the sharpest American novel about the price of arrival.
The Review
Everyone is made to read it at seventeen, which is precisely the wrong age. At forty it is a different novel: not a romance but a study of how a man invents himself, spends enormously to be admitted somewhere, and discovers that admission was never on offer. Fitzgerald's sentences are the most quoted in American letters because they are the best built.
Note how little happens. Parties, a hotel room in the heat, a car. The novel's power is in what Nick chooses to tell us and when — and in the final page, which remains the best last paragraph in the language.
Best Read
One sitting, late, with a whisky. It is a night book.
Three Things You'll Take From It
- 01
Wealth is easy to acquire and almost impossible to counterfeit socially.
- 02
Nostalgia is an appetite, not a memory.
- 03
The people who break things always have somewhere to retreat to.
Better Read or Heard?
Jake Gyllenhaal's narration is unusually good and runs under five hours.
If You Like This…
Tender Is the Night — F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Riviera, longer and sadder.
Find it on AmazonThe Talented Mr. Ripley — Patricia Highsmith
Self-invention with worse manners.
Find it on Amazon
The Edition to Own
Penguin Clothbound Classics for the shelf; the Cambridge edition for the textual notes if you care about such things.
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