Editorial Reviews:
Noted Fitzgerald biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli draws upon years of research to present the Fitzgerald's Jazz Age romance exactly as he intended according to the original manuscript, revisions, and corrections--with explanatory notes. Reprint.
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream. It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.
Customer Reviews:
Displaying 1 to 5 of 1124 total reviews (Page 1 of 225):
 The not so Great Gatsby
The Margin
I have to say Gatsby, by Fitzgerald was another classic disappointment. Like Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, both drew world-wide acclaim, but for me neither went anywhere. That is to say there was an absence of substance. Another tale by a sad author about pathetic rich folk in the 1920's. I suppose the story is worth reading just to lay claim to that fact, for boasting purposes. It is short and from time to time there is a smidgeon, contrary to what I said earlier, of depth.
Marvin Wiebener, author of The Margin. Click on the above icon and read about a rancher and a discovery and the consequences that follow. You'll enjoy it.  What Can I Add?
This book has over 1000 reviews. There is, essentially, nothing that I can say that has not already been said.
The novel is nice, well-written, and an enjoyable read. The characters are all plausible, believable, and entertaining. They are all three-dimensional, and none of them are useless. The book is extremely well-written, and I would recommend it to just about anyone. I wouldn't call it flawless, though.
Perhaps because of the hype, perhaps because it lacks some sort of jenais se quas, I can't quite bring myself to give this book five stars.
B+
Harkius  As American as apple pie...
This is absolutely my favorite novel of all time. No matter how many times I go back and re-read this book (that I was first introduced to as a sophomore in high school), it never fails to take me to a different time and place.
I love the descriptions of the lazy and decadent ways of these characters and the struggle Nick Carroway has to be a part of them. I love the scandals that are around every curve. But, most of all, I love the easy-going manner of Gatsby himself. He's quite possibly the greatest character in all of American literature and I feel that, often times, he's the least appreciated too.
I've heard many say that this novel is "too slow" or "too descriptive". But, I really feel that Fitzgerald was trying to completely overwhelm the reader with excess. It's an underlying theme in this novel and his writing style makes the reader feel the fact that money can not buy happiness. Sure this novel is wordier than some - But there's beauty in each and every carefully chosen one. The Summer of '22
Aside from the narrator, Mr. Carroway, who chances to be Gatsby's perceptive neighbor, we are the only ones who ever come to know the man. Everyone else sees only a fragment of him... if that. And he is far from what he appears to be. We ultimately know him as delusional, obsessive, pitiable, and needy. The fact is he's quite a bit like many of us; the difference is in the contrast between his external persona and his internal one. Fitzgerald's remarkable achievement in this book is in portraying Gatsby's dimensionality so completely in 180 pages. From shadowy playboy to abandoned corpse in 180 pages. And in the process Fitzgerald treats is to his remarkable craft:
"Instead of rambling, this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside - East Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gayety."
"...there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings."
"Everyone suspects himself of at least one cardinal virtue..."
"He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could `come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden."
"...I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes."
"There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind..."
"At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the room."
The Great Gatsby
Today is one of those days when I long for a book such as "The Great Gatsby"
It is inseparably associated with a point in history F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed to despise. He is both the quintessential Jazz-Age writer and probably his era's harshest critic. Complex and timeless. Who could ask for more?
My favorite passage -
"Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder." More Customer Reviews:
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