The Great Gatsby

For generations of enthralled readers, the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby has come to embody all the glamour and decadence of the Roaring Twenties.

To F. Scott Fitzgerald s bemused narrator, Nick Carraway, Gatsby appears to have emerged out of nowhere, evading questions about his murky past and throwing dazzling parties at his luxurious mansion. Nick finds something both appalling and appealing in the intensity of his new neighbor s ambition, and his fascination grows when he discovers that Gatsby is obsessed by a long-lost love, Daisy Buchanan.

But Daisy and her wealthy husband are cynical and careless people, and as Gatsby s dream collides with reality, Nick is witness to the violence and tragedy that result. The Great Gatsby's remarkable staying power is owed to the lyrical freshness of its storytelling and to the way it illuminates the hollow core of the glittering American dream.

With a new introduction by John Grisham.

Leseprobe:

from the INTRODUCTION by Malcolm Bradbury

The uncertainties of 1919 were over there seemed little doubt about what was going to happen America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it. The whole golden boom was in the air its splendid generosities, its outrageous corruptions and the tortuous death struggle of the old America in prohibition. All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them. --F. Scott Fitzgerald, Early Success (1937)

No writer ever set out more determinedly to capture and condense in fiction the tone, the style, the spirit, the noise, the excitement, the hope and the despair of his own decade than Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. The decade was, of course, the American 1920s the era when, in the wake of the Great War, the United States became modern and a leading world power, and in an era of economic boom and unprecedented change the nation entered on what Fi tzgerald himself tagged the greatest, gaudiest spree in history. The great, gaudy spree was not merely something that Fitzgerald observed and then wrote about. Beside his flamboyant wife Zelda, herself a Fitzgerald flapper heroine and the obvious source for the headstrong new women who populate his five novels and his many short stories, Fitzgerald went on to live out the times as a great and glorious spectacle. He gave himself so thoroughly to the task, that it all became personal; on behalf of Ameicans at large, Fitzgerald publicly performed the Twenties. From the moment when his first novel, This Side of Paradise, came out in 1920, just as the new decade started, to win immediate success because it seemed so exactly to voice the spirit, hopes and anxieties of the new post-war generation, he became a cultural icon, an embodiment of what was happening. I who knew less of New York than any reporter of six months standing and less of its society than any hall-room boy in a Ritz stag line, was pushed into the position not only of spokesman for the time but of the typical product of the same moment, he noted later. So it was Fitzgerald who ensured that the more frankly sexual and independent young men-women of this golden age were known as flappers, and that the age itself acquired, from the sound of its most novel and freewheeling music, the title of the jazz age. It was he who could be counted on to bring to fiction the new songs and dances, the new hairstyles, the new manners and mores of dating and petting, the glitz of the new urban amusements, the style of the decades parties, he who could voice the disillusionment of the young with their elders and sense the shifting rhythms of excitement and unease that belonged to a decade that was, more than most, in rapid and modernizing transition and, more than most, in a state of apocalyptic anxiety.

In a famous essay, The Crack-Up, written in the mid-1930s when the bubble had burst and his yo unger generation was no longer young and no longer carelessly wealthy, he summed up this singular identification between writer and times. The historical development of America from the weary decadence of the immediately post-war years, through the rising excitements of growing wealth, change and excess, represented, he said, his own psychic curve. The Great Crash of 1929, when the whole flimsy structure suddenly settled earthward, and the free credit was called in, was the exact analogy of his own and Zelda s breakdown, when the psychic price was paid. The grim political assessments of the Depression Thirties, when glitter gave way to breadlines and dancing gave way to dustbowl, was the match for his onw bitter and struggling endeavor to put his spiritual and historical house in rder. Unlike some other American writers, who had watched the shift from expa