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Scott Fitzgerald’s final revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and a new introduction by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.","descriptionHtml","The only authorized edition of the twentieth-century classic, featuring F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and a new introduction by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward.

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers.

The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.","featuredImage",{"_41":1946,"_54":1947,"_56":1948,"_50":1949,"_1950":-5},"gid://shopify/ProductImage/48061511008497","https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0674/5433/7265/files/9780743273565_p0.jpg?v=1771080981",1312,2000,"altText","priceRange",{"_1953":1954},"minVariantPrice",{"_1955":1956,"_1957":1958},"amount","17.0","currencyCode","USD","availableForSale","compareAtPriceRange",{"_1953":1962,"_1964":1965},{"_1955":1963,"_1957":1958},"0.0","maxVariantPrice",{"_1955":1963,"_1957":1958},"variants",{"_1968":1969},"nodes",[1970],{"_41":1971,"_1959":59,"_1972":-5,"_708":1973,"_1974":1975,"_1976":1977,"_1978":1979,"_1984":1940,"_71":1983,"_1985":-5},"gid://shopify/ProductVariant/46224794026225","compareAtPrice",{"_41":1946,"_54":1947,"_1950":-5,"_56":1948,"_50":1949},"price",{"_1955":1956,"_1957":1958},"product",{"_71":1937,"_824":1940},"selectedOptions",[1980],{"_797":1981,"_1982":1983},"Title","value","Default Title","sku","unitPrice",{"_1982":1987},"[\"Classroom Literature & Nonfiction (p5500)\",\"B|Bestseller|#007C6C (p7858)\",\"The Books You've Always Meant to Read (p10565)\",\"Celebrate the United States Semiquincentennial (p10659)\",\"BADGE - Best Seller (p7883)\"]","ean",{"_1982":1940},"metafields",[1992,-5,-5,1999,2002,-5,2005,2009,2013,2017,2021,-5,2025,2027,-5,2029,2034],{"_41":1993,"_1994":1995,"_1996":1997,"_1982":1998},"gid://shopify/Metafield/38823504969969","namespace","bnb","key","keyContributor","[{\"contributorId\":148678,\"fullName\":\"F. Scott Fitzgerald\",\"jobName\":\"Author\",\"sequenceNumber\":1}]",{"_41":2000,"_1994":1995,"_1996":2001,"_1982":1939},"gid://shopify/Metafield/38823505297649","parentSecondaryFormat",{"_41":2003,"_1994":1995,"_1996":2004,"_1982":1939},"gid://shopify/Metafield/38823504675057","parentFormat",{"_41":2006,"_1994":1995,"_1996":2007,"_1982":2008},"gid://shopify/Metafield/38823505363185","formatId","121",{"_41":2010,"_1994":1995,"_1996":2011,"_1982":2012},"gid://shopify/Metafield/38823506116849","commentary","[{\"id\":\"3030345T\",\"type\":\"Excerpt\",\"linkText\":\"Read an Excerpt\",\"typeId\":\"1005\",\"abbr\":\"EXC\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"1\",\"authorName\":null,\"sourceName\":null,\"displayOrder\":\"1\",\"text\":\"

The Great Gatsby

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

Scribner

Copyright © 1925 Charles Scribner's Sons
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-743-24639-X

Chapter One

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

\\\"Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,\\\" he told me, \\\"just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.\\\"

He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought - frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon - for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction - Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the \\\"creative temperament\\\" - it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No - Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

I never saw this great-uncle but I'm supposed to look like him - with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe - so I decided to go east and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said \\\"Why - ye-es\\\" with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

\\\"How do you get to West Egg Village?\\\" he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees - just as things grow in fast movies - I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college - one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the \\\"Yale News\\\" - and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the \\\"well-rounded\\\" man. This isn't just an epigram - life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals - like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed fiat at the contact end - but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly over-head. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the - well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard - it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion. Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn and the consoling proximity of millionaires - all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white places of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven - a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savours of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy - even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach - but now he'd left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it - I had no sight into Daisy's heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens - finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body - he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage - a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked - and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

\\\"Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final,\\\" he seemed to say, \\\"just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are.\\\" We were in the same Senior Society and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

\\\"I've got a nice place here,\\\" he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore.

\\\"It belonged to Demaine the oil man.\\\" He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. \\\"We'll go inside.\\\"

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling - and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it - indeed I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise - she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression - then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

\\\"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness.\\\"

She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I've heard it said that Daisy's murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

At any rate Miss Baker's lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again - the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Copyright © 1925 by Charles Scribner's Sons. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

\"},{\"id\":\"126483206T\",\"type\":\"Excerpt\",\"linkText\":\"Read an Excerpt\",\"typeId\":\"1005\",\"abbr\":\"EXC\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"1\",\"authorName\":null,\"sourceName\":\"PAPERBACK COMMENTARY\",\"displayOrder\":\"2\",\"text\":\"from the INTRODUCTION by Malcolm Bradbury

“The uncertainties of 1919 were over – there seemed little doubt about what was going to happen – America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it. The whole golden boom was in the air – its splendid generosities, its outrageous corruptions and the tortuous death struggle of the old America in prohibition. All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them.” --F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Early Success” (1937)

No writer ever set out more determinedly to capture and condense in fiction the tone, the style, the spirit, the noise, the excitement, the hope and the despair of his own decade than Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. The decade was, of course, the American 1920s—the era when, in the wake of the Great War, the United States became modern and a leading world power, and in an era of economic boom and unprecedented change the nation entered on what Fitzgerald himself tagged the “greatest, gaudiest spree in history.” The great, gaudy spree was not merely something that Fitzgerald observed and then wrote about. Beside his flamboyant wife Zelda, herself a Fitzgerald flapper heroine and the obvious source for the headstrong new women who populate his five novels and his many short stories, Fitzgerald went on to live out the times as a great and glorious spectacle. He gave himself so thoroughly to the task, that it all became personal; on behalf of Ameicans at large, Fitzgerald publicly performed the Twenties. From the moment when his first novel, This Side of Paradise, came out in 1920, just as the new decade started, to win immediate success because it seemed so exactly to voice the spirit, hopes and anxieties of the new post-war generation, he became a cultural icon, an embodiment of what was happening. “I who knew less of New York than any reporter of six months standing and less of its society than any hall-room boy in a Ritz stag line, was pushed into the position not only of spokesman for the time but of the typical product of the same moment,” he noted later. So it was Fitzgerald who ensured that the more frankly sexual and independent young men-women of this golden age were known as “flappers,” and that the age itself acquired, from the sound of its most novel and freewheeling music, the title of “the jazz age.” It was he who could be counted on to bring to fiction the new songs and dances, the new hairstyles, the new manners and mores of dating and petting, the glitz of the new urban amusements, the style of the decades’ parties, he who could voice the disillusionment of the young with their elders and sense the shifting rhythms of excitement and unease that belonged to a decade that was, more than most, in rapid and modernizing transition and, more than most, in a state of apocalyptic anxiety.

In a famous essay, “The Crack-Up,” written in the mid-1930s when the bubble had burst and his younger generation was no longer young and no longer carelessly wealthy, he summed up this singular identification between writer and times. The historical development of America from the weary decadence of the immediately post-war years, through the rising excitements of growing wealth, change and excess, represented, he said, his own psychic curve. The Great Crash of 1929, when the whole flimsy structure suddenly settled earthward, and the free credit was called in, was the exact analogy of his own and Zelda’s breakdown, when the psychic price was paid. The grim political assessments of the Depression Thirties, when glitter gave way to breadlines and dancing gave way to dustbowl, was the match for his onw bitter and struggling endeavor to put his spiritual and historical house in rder. Unlike some other American writers, who had watched the shift from expatriation in Paris, Fitzgerald had been no distant observer of the great American change. It was nothing less than the story of his own life, his parvenu expectations, his obsession with success, fame, glittering wealth and beauty—and his rising sense of disaster, because he had the steady Calvinistic feeling that for all these amusements and fragile splendours there was an ultimate, and inward, price that would duly have to be paid.

Yet so lovingly had Fitzgerald given himself over to the great gaudy bubble that for a long time the critics doubted him and his works; indeed he came to doubt them himself. They saw him chiefly as a stylish chronicler, a literary popularizer, a writer so thoroughly immersed in the unworthy dreams of an age that, in retrospect, seemed so politically naïve and economically foolish that its discredit often became his. He was a writer who had involved himself so deeply with the themes and dreams, the extravagances and wastes, of an uncriticial age that he never himself found the time or the artistic strength to stand back, to examine, to criticize, and certainly not to produce a fully serious, detached and considered work of art. To a certain point (he acknowledged as much himself), the charges were deserved. No writer was apparently more willing to be taken along by the seductive rhythms of success and popular adulation. None granted more to the special and yet specious wonder of the American rich, the grandees of a time of confident American power, nor fell more readily under the sexual spell of its exotic, expensive and often self-destructive women. None seemed more wasteful of his own evident charm, more careless of his own obvious talent. Much of what he wrote seemed a writing of glitzy surfaces, deliberately designed for impermanence. This story was written, he was happy to suggest, to pay for the champagne at one of his famous and newsworthy parties; that novel was produced at speed to equip Zelda with the expensive squirrel coat that she craved and, since craving had to be satisfied, really had to have. As even his good friend Edmund Wilson, who had discovered his promising talents when both were students at Princeton, once said, “he has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without many ideas to express.”

This view of Fitzgerald persisted well after his early death from alcoholism in Hollywood in 1940, when he had been doing boring work as a screenwriter and when his reputation had fallen low. In 1951, Arthur Mizener produced an excellent and important biography, The Far Side of Paradise, which, along with other studies of the time, did much to rehabilitate his reputation as one of the great modern American writers. Yet the book takes the form of a Modernist tragedy (indeed, with the suicide of Ernest Hemingway in 1961, it increasingly came to seem that most of the tales of the major American novelists of the 1920s took the shape of a tragedy). Mizener’s version seemed to confirm Fitzgerald’s own dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. His Fitzgerald is an American dreamer who squanders his talents, loses his way, finds himself trapped in an unhappy marriage which was to culminate in Zelda’s final madness, caught in a world of bills, economic and emotional, that proved too great ever to pay. He was a man who admitted himself, using a favorite economic analogy, that all his investments had gone wrong, who had “been drawing on resources that I did not possess, . . . mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.” His writing came from a singular identification with the life of his times – “my material” – but the demands of popular fiction persistently discouraged him from seriousness. In later life his powers cracked, and he became, in Hemingway’s famous and condescending phrase, “poor Fitzgerald.” It was a familiar American literary tragedy, the story of the writer who always meant to write something “maybe great,” but granted too much to his own glossy, impermanent culture, and who therefore could never acquire the detachment, the originality, to achieve what his talent and ambitions seemed to promise.

To a considerable extent this still remains the “myth” of Fitzgerald, the myth that sees him as what Lionel Trilling once called him, the “maimed hero” of modern writing. It has encouraged the still very common view that of the truly important and genuinely radical modern writers—Hemignway, Stein, Faulkner, Dos Passos—who emerged in the United States during the remarkable literary decade of the 1920s, when the American novel was totally transformed and when it acquired the dignity and character of a true world literature, Fitzgerald, though of the greatest representative importance, was one of the most profligate and least realized authors of the generation. So, where Hemingway, through style, achieved a pure and hard perfection of modernist prose, and Faulkner and Dos Passos, through complex formal experiment, achieved the experimental radicalism of modernist vision, Fitzgerald was to stay the eternal amateur who never mastered what his talent and imagination offered. It is certainly true that Fitzgerald was one of the less obviously experimental writers of experimental times; but that was largely because he made the first object of his experiment not the literary text, rather life itself in an experimental time which he sought to understand in its contradiction and complexity. For Fitzgerald, style in life and style in art were always to be inextricably interwoven, and his writing is in endless passage from one to the other. It is of course entirely true that, of the many short stories Fitzgerald wrote and indeed lived by, many were slight and trivial. It is also true that, of the five novels he wrote, the first two—This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, so popular in their time—were works of youthful charm but indulgent and imperfect method, while the last two –the brilliant Tender Is the Night and the final The Last Tycoon, which were largely disliked in their time—were works of vast ambition that were nonetheless, for different reasons, never truly finished. This, however, still leaves us with a good deal worthy of the highest respect. There remain many remarkable short stories, some cunning and subtle criticism and commentary, of which the once despised “Crack-Up” essays are a distinguished example, and one novel so perfect that it surely stands among the finest of twentieth-century American novels. That book, the book T. S. Elio called “the first step the American novel has taken since Henry James,” the book that in fact offers the most profound and critical summing up we have of the ironies and disorders behind the wonderful glow of the Twenties, the great novel of the American Dream in its modern condition, was The Great Gatsby.

. . .
\"},{\"id\":\"68664673T\",\"type\":\"Excerpt\",\"linkText\":\"Read an Excerpt\",\"typeId\":\"1005\",\"abbr\":\"EXC\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"1\",\"authorName\":null,\"sourceName\":\"PAPERBACK COMMENTARY\",\"displayOrder\":\"3\",\"text\":\"CHAPTER I

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

\\\"Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,\\\" he told me, \\\"just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.\\\"

He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought-frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction-Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the \\\"creative temperament\\\"-it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No-Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

* * *

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

I never saw this great-uncle, but I'm supposed to look like him-with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counterraid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe-so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, \\\"Why-ye-es,\\\" with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog-at least I had him for a few days until he ran away-and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

\\\"How do you get to West Egg Village?\\\" he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and M¾cenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college-one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News-and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the \\\"well-rounded man.\\\" This isn't just an epigram-life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York-and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals-like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end-but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the-well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard-it was a factual imitation of some H™tel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming-pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby's mansion. Or, rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires-all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I'd known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven-a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax. His family were enormously wealthy-even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach-but now he'd left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away; for instance, he'd brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came East I don't know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn't believe it-I had no sight into Daisy's heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens-finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body-he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage-a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked-and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

\\\"Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final,\\\" he seemed to say, \\\"just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are.\\\" We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

\\\"I've got a nice place here,\\\" he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half-acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motor-boat that bumped the tide offshore.

\\\"It belonged to Demaine, the oilman.\\\" He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. \\\"We'll go inside.\\\"

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eye she gave no hint of it-indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise-she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression-then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

\\\"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness.\\\"

\"},{\"id\":\"3366530T\",\"type\":\"Excerpt\",\"linkText\":\"Read an Excerpt\",\"typeId\":\"1005\",\"abbr\":\"EXC\",\"maxToDisplay\":\"1\",\"authorName\":null,\"sourceName\":null,\"displayOrder\":\"4\",\"text\":\"

CHAPTER I

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

\\\"Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,\\\" he told me, \\\"just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.\\\"

* * *

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that weÕre descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfatherÕs brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

Salon.com's Best Nonfiction of 2009

Salon.com's Best Nonfiction of 2009