The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Summary
Narrator Nick Carraway moves next door to the mysterious, endlessly hopeful Jay Gatsby, whose lavish parties on Long Island mask a single minded pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, the married woman he loved and lost years earlier. Fitzgerald compresses the excess and moral rot of the Jazz Age into a slim, exactly calibrated tragedy about the corruption of the American dream. Though it sold modestly during his lifetime, the novel is now widely regarded as one of the greatest achievements in American fiction.
Historical Context & Significance
The 1926 Pulitzer for fiction went to Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, which Lewis himself refused to accept in protest of the prize's earlier treatment of Main Street. Gatsby sold poorly on release and only found its now towering reputation after a surge of postwar interest in the 1940s and 1950s.