THE GREAT GATSBY

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts Nick Carraway's interactions with Jay Gatsby, the mysterious millionaire with an obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan. The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922. Following a move to the French Riviera, Fitzgerald completed a rough draft of the novel in 1924. He submitted it to editor Maxwell Perkins, who persuaded Fitzgerald to revise the work over the following winter. Painter Francis Cugat's dust jacket art, an illustration named Celestial Eyes, greatly impressed Fitzgerald, and he incorporated its imagery into the novel. After publication in April 1925, The Great Gatsby received generally favorable reviews, though some literary critics believed it did not equal Fitzgerald's previous efforts. The novel was a commercial disappointment. It sold fewer than 20,000 copies by October. When Fitzgerald died in 1940, he believed himself to be a failure and his work forgotten. During World War II, the novel experienced an abrupt surge in popularity when the Council on Books in Wartime distributed free copies to American soldiers serving overseas. This new-found popularity launched a critical and scholarly re-examination, and the work soon became a core part of most American high school curricula and a part of American popular culture. Numerous stage and film adaptations followed in the subsequent decades. Gatsby still receives popular and scholarly attention. Scholars emphasize the novel's treatment of class, inherited versus self-made wealth, gender, race, and enviro- mentalism, and its cynical attitude towards the American Dream. The Great Gatsby is considered to be a literary masterpiece and one of the great American novels.