The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel about Jay Gatsby's attempt to recover his past with Daisy Buchanan. Nick Carraway recounts the story from the margins of the wealthy Long Island society Gatsby hopes to enter. Parties, houses, and carefully managed appearances conceal insecurity and moral carelessness. Gatsby's longing gives the narrative emotional force, but the novel also exposes the harm done when other people become instruments of a private dream. Its account of ambition and disappointed hope is inseparable from the class divisions of 1920s America.