Hardcover, 176 pages

English language

Published Sept. 26, 1991 by Everyman's Library.

ISBN:
978-1-85715-019-3
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OCLC Number:
694247614

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Scott Fitzgerald was called the laureate of the Jazz Age. The Great Gatsby (1926) is a cynical celebration of the post-Great War Long Island/ New York world of get-rich-quick. The narrator, Nick Carraway, sympathetically records the pathos of Gatsby’s romantic dream which founders on the reality of corruption, the insulated selfishness of Tom and Daisy, and the cutting edge of violence. ‘His style sings of hope, his message is despair’, wrote Cyril Connolly. It is terse, spare, lucid, imperishable, a novel of compassion, wry wisdom and narrative verve.

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25 editions

A gem and worth revisiting.

I was forced to read this book for school English class when I was 15, and I loathed it. I read it again recently because, ironically, I have a student who must study the book for school English class. The second reading was a superior experience. This time I could appreciate Fitzgerald's bag of writing tricks that really do make this novel an 'American Classic'. I have not watched either film version of this book, nor do I intend to. Fitzgerald's beautiful use of language to conjure images of the Jazz age and it's cynical hollowness is something that film will never capture. This book is a gem and worth revisiting.

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Subjects

  • Modern fiction
  • Fiction