Summary | Author | Reviews | Discussion Questions


The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
143 pp.

In Brief
The story is narrated by Nick Carraway, who after serving in World War I moves from the midwest to New York's Long Island. There he picks up with a college friend Tom Buchanan and his wife Daisy, Caraway's second cousin—a feckless, self-indulgent couple of privilege. He also befriends his mysterious neighbor Jay Gatsby, whose mansion is the scene of lavish nightly parties. Gatsby reveals to Caraway that, as a young man without wealth, he had met and fallen in love with Daisy during the war. Now moneyed, Gatsby is obsessed with winning her back. What follows are the tragic consequences of his pursuit—and Carraway's return to his roots in the midwest to contemplate, with new found cynicism, the moral decay and carelessness of privileged.

top of page


About the Author

• Birth—September 24, 1896
• Where—St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
• Death—December 21, 1940
• Where—Hollywood, California
• Education—Princeton University


F. Scott Fitzgerald was named for his famous relative, Francis Scott Key, though he was always referred to as "Scott." Minnesota born and Princeton educated, Fitzgerald published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920 to critical and popular acclaim. That same year, He married Zelda Sayre, the queen of Montgomery, Alabama youth society, and the two lived a boisterous, decadent life in New York City. (See LitCourse 5 with Fitzgerald's story "Babylon Revisited" for an idea of their life.) To better afford their extravagant lifestyle, the couple moved to France, where Fitzgerald befriended Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, becoming part of the legendary group of expatriate writers and artists, which Stein labeled the "Lost Generation." In Paris he wrote his finest novel, The Great Gatsby (1925).

Zelda was eventually hospitalized in 1930 for the first of many breakdowns, and Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood (William Faulkner was there, too), where his heavy drinking ended his screen writing career. In 1934 he published Tender Is the Night. He died of a heart attack six years later at the age of 44.

More
The 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald's development. The Great Gatsby, Scott's masterpiece, was published in 1925. Hemingway greatly admired The Great Gatsby and wrote in his A Moveable Feast "If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one" (153). Hemingway expressed his deep admiration for Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald's flawed, doomed character, when he prefaced his chapters concerning Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast with:

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless. (129)

Much of what Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast helped to create the myth of Fitzgerald's eventual demise and Zelda's hand in that demise. Though much of Hemingway's text is factually correct, it is always tinged with his disappointment with Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald began working on his fourth novel during the late 1920s but was sidetracked by financial difficulties that necessitated his writing commercial short stories, and by the schizophrenia that struck Zelda in 1930. Her emotional health remained fragile for the rest of her life. In 1932, she was hospitalized in Baltimore, Maryland.

Scott rented an estate in the Baltimore suburb of Towson and began work on Tender Is the Night, the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist who falls in love with and marries one of his patients. Some critics have seen the book as a thinly-veiled autobiographical novel recounting Fitzgerald's problems with his wife, the corrosive effects of wealth and a decadent lifestyle, his own egoism and self-confidence, and his continuing alcoholism. Indeed, Fitzgerald was extremely protective of his material (their life together). When Zelda published her own version of their lives in Europe, Save Me the Waltz, Fitzgerald was angry and succeeded in getting her doctors to keep her from writing any more.

Tender was finally published in 1934, and critics who had waited nine years for the follow up to The Great Gatsby had mixed opinions about it. The novel did not sell well upon publication, but the book's reputation has since risen significantly.

Although he reportedly found movie work degrading, Fitzgerald was once again in dire financial straits and spent the second half of the 1930s in Hollywood, working on commercial short stories, scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (including some unfilmed work on Gone with the Wind), and his fifth and final novel, posthumously published as The Last Tycoon (based on the life of film executive Irving Thalberg). Scott and Zelda became estranged; she continued living in mental institutions on the east coast, while he lived with his lover Sheilah Graham, a well-known gossip columnist, in Hollywood.

Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and became notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily heavy drinking, leaving him in poor health by the late 1930s. According to Zelda's biographer, Nancy Milford, Scott claimed that he had contracted tuberculosis. Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in late 1940, and on December 21, while awaiting a visit from his doctor, Fitzgerald collapsed in Graham's apartment and died. He was 44. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

top of page


Critics Say. . .
The new American humor [is] a conflict of spirituality caught fast in the web of our commercial life. Both boisterous and tragic, it animates this new novel by Mr. Fitzgerald with whimsical magic and simple pathos that is realized with economy and restraint.... A curious book, a mystical, glamourous story of today. It takes a deeper cut at American life than hitherto has been essayed by Mr. Fitzgerald.
Edwin Clark - New York Times, 4/19/1925

Readers Say...
(Occasionally, when few critical reviews are available, we include helpful reviews by Barnes & Noble customers.)

Amazing: Nick is the main character through whose eyes we see the story. Fitzgerald's vivid language is captivating. When referring to the polluted city the words he uses sounds like choking - a gagging sound you can hear if you pay attention. There is so much symbolism. You feel awful for Gatsby at the end of this story. Don't forget the green light is hope.
A reviewer - an I.B. student, 01/01/06



Wonderful tale of the American Dream Gone Wrong: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most well known work, The Great Gatsby, eloquently paints a realistic picture of the Jazz Age’s American Dream. This glorious and ever satiable craving for the 'American Dream' leads Jay Gatsby to desperately need it. He devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means—and to the pursuit of Daisy, his now-married sweetheart, which amounts to the same thing.
   While on the brink of obtaining them, his world collapses. An accident, for which his is falsely blamed, sets off a sequence of disastrous events that culminate in his murder. Yet, the compelling message of Gatsby affirms that romanticism is within us all—there is such an incorruptible truth. If Gatsby had not fallen prey to greed, lust, and money, he could have actualized it and brought it into the reality. This book is the great drama written pertaining to the corruption of the American Dream. Simply amazing. A must read for everyone.
Reviewer - Lit Student in AZ, 03/29/05



An Excellent Book: The Great Gatsby is one of those novels that gets better and better each time you read it. Unfortunately, most people only read it once in high school, and don't appreciate what an amazing achievement it is. Gatsby resonates, it's polished and deep and beautiful.
    It epitomizes not only a generation, but the American Dream, our belief in the past and the future, in all that is symbolized by the green light across the lake. It creates a certain mood, a tragic, romantic tone that lingers throughout the book. There are some passages that are absolutely brilliant. I've read quite a bit, but there are few novels that stand on the same level as this one. This is definitely one of the masterpieces of American Literature. For those who appreciate great literature that penetrates both the mind and the heart, I highly recommend this novel.
Joe Vogel, a writer and student in London, 07/11/03

A Journey Back in Time: The first time I encountered The Great Gatsby was as an assignment in a high school English class. My recent re-read occurred after my son had read it in his high school English class. The reread brought back memories of a form of academic study from which I have been separated for many years.
    The Great Gatsby is an excellent book in which to study the writer’s art. In this short book the reader can detect a collection of symbolic details which make the story much more than the tale which appears on the surface: the ash heap, as a symbol of the waste of American society; the green light on Daisy’s dock, which means so much to Gatsby as a symbol, until he again meets Daisy, when it again becomes, for Gatsby, as for everyone else, just a light. The characters all play their roles in the development of the story. Shallow figures fill Gatsby’s parties, but show their true level of concern for him when they all absent themselves from his funeral. The class distinctions between Daisy, a true upper class maiden, who can never lower herself to accept Gatsby, the aspirant to a class rank which wealth and parties cannot buy.
    Gatsby’s source of wealth is hinted at by his association with Meyer Wolfsheim, the gambler who fixed the World Series. Like others, he will associate with Gatsby in life, but has no time for him in death. The unnatural core of Gatsby’s world is illustrated by his act of moving east, rather than the traditional westward migration, in order to achieve freedom and advancement. Tom and Daisy Buchanan represent old money, which will not accept Gatsby and, in the end, destroys him.
    Nick Carraway is the one character in the book who develops his own moral sense. His role as narrator permits us to see Gatsby’s world through his eyes. It is he who sees, and is repelled by, the rotten cores of Gatsby and the worlds in which lives and into which he aspires. He sees the corruption deep inside Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Most of all, we see the innate goodness in Tom. Observing, but not entering Gatsby’s world, he is able to understand and judge it. His final evaluation of Gatsby’s world is seen when he abandons it all to return to his native Midwest.
    As I re-read The Great Gatsby I remembered what I had not liked about it the first time I read it. The causal acceptance of infidelity seems at odds with what I have always viewed as the ideal as well as the reality. As one studies the commentaries of this book, with all of its symbolisms, I often wonder if the symbols were really in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mind as he wrote the book, or whether they are constructs of later commentators. Either way, they give the book a depth which so many others lack. When my son speaks of other books he reads in English class, he always says “It’s no Great Gatsby.” The more I think of it, few of novels are.
Jim Gallen - lawyer in St. Louis, Missouri, 03/21/20

top of page



Book Club Discussion Questions

Just great. The publisher has not provided questions for this book.

But don't despair. Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

   • Generic Discussion Questions
   • Read-Think-Talk About a Book


Also, use our LitLovers discussion points below.

1. This book is infused with symbolism, particularly the green light at which Jay Gatsby gazes so intently, and the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg on the billboard. What do these symbols suggest? (Symbolic meanings are fluid, not fixed; they often mean different things to different observers/readers. See LitCourse 9 on symbolism.)

2. Is Jay Gatsby great? In other words, is Fitzgerald's title sincere...or ironic?

3. Discuss the four main characters. Who, if any, do you find most sympathetic? Most important, in what way do the events of the novel affect Nick Carraway? How, or to what degree, does he change? (Some see this work as a coming-of-age story.)

4. What statement might Fitzgerald be making about the mores or ethos of American culture—particularly the American Dream?

5. Quite frankly, I have never liked this book...or any of Fitzgerald's novels. Why?