The Great Gatsby

Based on Wikipedia: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing he was a failure. His masterpiece had sold fewer than twenty thousand copies. His dreams of wealth from writing had crumbled. The year was 1940, and The Great Gatsby seemed destined for obscurity.

Then came World War II, and everything changed.

The Council on Books in Wartime began distributing free paperbacks to American soldiers serving overseas—compact, affordable editions designed to fit in a uniform pocket. Among these books was Fitzgerald's slim novel about a mysterious millionaire, a green light across the bay, and the hollow promise of the American Dream. Soldiers read it in foxholes and barracks across Europe and the Pacific. By the time they came home, The Great Gatsby had begun its transformation from commercial disappointment into what many now consider the Great American Novel.

A Romance That Wouldn't Die

To understand The Great Gatsby, you have to understand the wound that inspired it.

In 1915, an eighteen-year-old Fitzgerald met Ginevra King, a sixteen-year-old Chicago socialite. He fell desperately in love. She loved him back. But her wealthy family saw this young man from Minnesota—talented, yes, but poor—as entirely unsuitable. Her father reportedly delivered a devastating verdict: "Poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls."

That rejection shaped everything that followed.

Fitzgerald enlisted in the Army during World War I, stationed at Camp Sheridan in Alabama while awaiting deployment to France. He half-hoped to die in combat. Instead, he met Zelda Sayre, a vivacious seventeen-year-old Southern belle who would become the great love and great tragedy of his life. When Ginevra married a wealthy Chicago businessman named William Mitchell, Fitzgerald proposed to Zelda. She accepted—but with a condition. She would wait until he became financially successful.

This pattern—the poor young man desperate to prove himself worthy of a woman accustomed to wealth—became the engine of Fitzgerald's fiction. "The whole idea of Gatsby," he later explained to a friend, "is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it."

The Geography of Money

By 1922, Fitzgerald had achieved the success Zelda demanded. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, had made him famous at twenty-three. He and Zelda married in New York and moved to Great Neck on Long Island's North Shore—an area that would provide the novel's essential landscape.

Long Island in the 1920s was divided by an invisible but absolute line. On one side lived families whose wealth stretched back generations—the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the old aristocracy of American money. On the other side lived the newly rich: bootleggers, entertainers, speculators who had made fortunes in the chaos of the postwar boom. The Fitzgeralds' neighbors included the writer Ring Lardner and the comedian Ed Wynn—talented, wealthy, but unmistakably new money.

Fitzgerald transformed this geography into fiction. Great Neck became West Egg, home to the nouveau riche. Across the bay, the established families of Manhasset Neck became East Egg. The distinction wasn't merely about wealth—both communities were spectacularly rich. It was about the difference between money you earned and money you inherited, between wealth that proved your cleverness and wealth that proved your pedigree.

One of the Fitzgeralds' most intriguing neighbors was a man named Max Gerlach. A World War I veteran who claimed to have served as a major, Gerlach had become what people delicately called a "gentleman bootlegger"—someone who made his fortune selling illegal alcohol during Prohibition but maintained the lifestyle and manners of the upper class. He was fond of addressing people as "old sport."

Gerlach would become one model for Jay Gatsby.

The Novel's Heart

The story Fitzgerald crafted from these materials is deceptively simple.

Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate from the Midwest, moves to New York in the spring of 1922 to work as a bond salesman. He rents a small bungalow in West Egg, next door to a palatial estate owned by a mysterious millionaire named Jay Gatsby. Gatsby throws legendary parties—hundreds of guests, fountains of champagne, orchestras playing until dawn—but he himself stands apart from the revelry, watching, waiting.

What is he waiting for?

Across the bay, in fashionable East Egg, lives Nick's cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan. Tom is everything Gatsby is not: born wealthy, educated at Yale, a former football star, secure in his position atop American society. He is also brutal, unfaithful, and casually cruel. His mistress, Myrtle Wilson, lives in the "valley of ashes"—a wasteland between the glittering eggs and Manhattan where the ash from coal-burning furnaces has created a gray apocalyptic landscape.

Gatsby, we eventually learn, met Daisy five years earlier, before she married Tom. He was a young military officer with no money and no prospects. She was a beautiful debutante from a wealthy Louisville family. They fell in love, but when Gatsby shipped overseas to fight in the war, Daisy couldn't wait. She married Tom Buchanan and his millions.

Everything Gatsby has done since—the fortune accumulated through bootlegging, the mansion purchased directly across the bay from Daisy's home, the parties designed to attract her attention—has been in service of one impossible goal: to erase those five years and win her back.

The Green Light

At the end of Daisy's dock, visible from Gatsby's lawn, burns a green light.

It becomes the novel's central symbol—representing hope, desire, the future we reach for but can never quite grasp. Gatsby has spent years staring at that light, building his fortune, constructing an identity, all to bridge the impossible distance between West Egg and East Egg, between who he is and who he needs to be.

Nick arranges a reunion between Gatsby and Daisy. They begin an affair. For a brief moment, it seems like Gatsby might actually achieve his dream.

But dreams built on illusions cannot survive contact with reality.

When Tom discovers the affair, he exposes Gatsby's criminal connections. Daisy, confronted with the choice between her bootlegger lover and her brutal but respectable husband, cannot bring herself to leave the security of old money. On the drive home from their confrontation, Daisy—at the wheel of Gatsby's car—strikes and kills Myrtle Wilson, Tom's mistress, who has run into the road believing Tom is driving.

Gatsby takes the blame to protect Daisy. Tom tells Myrtle's husband, George, that Gatsby owns the car that killed her. George, assuming the car's owner must have been Myrtle's lover, shoots Gatsby dead in his swimming pool, then kills himself.

Daisy and Tom leave town. They do not attend the funeral.

The Casualties

The novel's characters represent different relationships with the American Dream.

Jay Gatsby believes absolutely in reinvention. Born James Gatz in North Dakota to unsuccessful farmers, he has constructed an entirely new identity—complete with an Oxford education he only briefly attended, war heroism he may have embellished, and a fortune built on crime. He believes that with enough money and determination, he can repeat the past, that he can become worthy of Daisy by becoming someone else entirely.

Tom Buchanan never had to become anything. His wealth and status were inherited, facts of birth as immutable as his physical bulk. He cheats on his wife openly, espouses white supremacist views casually, and destroys lives without consequence. The novel's deepest outrage is reserved for people like Tom—not because they are evil in any dramatic sense, but because their carelessness is protected by privilege.

Daisy is harder to pin down. Fitzgerald based her partly on Ginevra King, but where Ginevra was forbidden to Fitzgerald by her family, Daisy chooses security over passion. Her voice, Nick tells us, is "full of money"—a quality that sounds like a promise but turns out to be a warning. She is not simply a victim of her era's limited options for women; she is complicit in her own moral emptiness.

Nick Carraway, our narrator, presents himself as an honest observer. He is "inclined to reserve all judgments," he tells us in the novel's opening pages. But as the story unfolds, we watch his midwestern optimism curdle into disgust. By the end, he has come to see the East as a place of moral corruption, where the careless rich smash things and people and then retreat "back into their money."

A Book Reborn

When Fitzgerald finished a rough draft in 1924, having moved to the French Riviera to escape Long Island's distractions, he sent it to his editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's. Perkins saw genius in the manuscript but pushed Fitzgerald to revise extensively over the following winter.

The result, published in April 1925, received respectful reviews but disappointing sales. Critics praised Fitzgerald's prose but some felt the book lacked the sweep of his earlier novels. The public, caught up in the very Jazz Age excess Fitzgerald was critiquing, seemed uninterested in his cautionary tale.

Fitzgerald never stopped believing in the novel's worth. He was particularly proud of one element most readers never saw: the dust jacket.

Artist Francis Cugat had painted an image called "Celestial Eyes"—a woman's face floating in a dark blue night sky above the carnival lights of an amusement park, her eyes melancholy, her lips a crimson bow. Fitzgerald was so taken with the image that he wrote it into the novel, creating the famous billboard of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg—giant faded eyes behind spectacles that watch over the valley of ashes like the eyes of God.

It took a world war to resurrect the book. Those Armed Services Editions—small, cheaply printed, distributed by the millions—introduced Gatsby to a generation of readers. Soldiers who might never have encountered Fitzgerald in peacetime found themselves reading about another generation's disillusionment, another era's false promises.

After the war, the novel entered American high school curricula. It became required reading, analyzed in countless term papers, quoted in graduation speeches. The green light became a cultural shorthand for American aspiration and American disappointment.

What It Means

Scholars have spent decades unpacking the novel's themes.

There is the critique of the American Dream—the belief that anyone can become anything through hard work and determination. Gatsby works hard and is determined, but he cannot overcome the fundamental division between those born to wealth and those who acquire it. No matter how many shirts he owns, how many parties he throws, he will always be "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere" to people like Tom Buchanan.

There is the examination of class in America, a country that likes to pretend class doesn't exist. The geography of East Egg and West Egg literalizes distinctions Americans prefer to keep invisible. Old money looks down on new money. Both look down on the valley of ashes, where people like George and Myrtle Wilson struggle in gray obscurity.

There is the novel's treatment of race, embodied in Tom Buchanan's enthusiasm for a white supremacist tract he's been reading. Fitzgerald does not editorialize; he simply lets Tom's views sit alongside his violence and his entitlement, inviting readers to draw their own conclusions.

And there is the novel's environmental consciousness, unusual for its era. The valley of ashes—that hellscape of industrial waste between the eggs and the city—represents the hidden cost of all that glittering prosperity. Someone has to pay for the parties, and it isn't the people drinking the champagne.

The Fitzgerald Paradox

What makes The Great Gatsby endure is partly Fitzgerald's own ambivalence.

He was drawn to wealth even as he despised it. He attended the parties even as he found them morally disquieting. He wanted to belong to a world he knew was hollow. This tension—between desire and judgment, between wanting in and seeing through—gives the novel its particular power.

Fitzgerald understood the seduction of money because he felt it himself. He knew the humiliation of being told he wasn't good enough because he had lived it. He could write Gatsby's impossible hope with such conviction because some part of him shared it.

The novel's famous final lines capture this ambivalence perfectly. Nick, standing on Gatsby's lawn one last time, meditates on the green light and what it represented—not just to Gatsby but to the Dutch sailors who first glimpsed Long Island's shore, and to all of us who believe tomorrow will be better than today.

We beat on, Fitzgerald wrote, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

It is one of the most quoted passages in American literature. It acknowledges both the beauty of our dreams and their impossibility. It honors Gatsby's hope even as it mourns his fate. It is, like the novel itself, both elegy and indictment.

After Gatsby

Fitzgerald would publish only one more novel in his lifetime, Tender Is the Night, in 1934. It was another commercial disappointment. By the late 1930s, he was in Hollywood, writing screenplays for money, his reputation in eclipse. Zelda was in and out of psychiatric hospitals. The Jazz Age he had chronicled so brilliantly had ended with the stock market crash of 1929.

He died of a heart attack in December 1940, age forty-four, working on a novel about Hollywood that would be published unfinished as The Last Tycoon. At the time of his death, all his books were out of print.

Today, The Great Gatsby sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year. It has been adapted for film at least five times, for stage, for opera, for video games. It entered the public domain in 2021, unleashing a flood of sequels, prequels, and reimaginings.

Fitzgerald never saw any of it. He died believing himself forgotten, never knowing that the novel he wrote about the impossibility of recapturing the past would itself be recaptured by generation after generation of readers, each finding in it something that speaks to their own disappointed dreams.

That may be the most Gatsby-like irony of all.