The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby unfolds in the summer of 1922 through the eyes of Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner who moves East to learn the bond business and rents a modest cottage in West Egg, Long Island, next door to the mansion of the mysterious, fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby. Famous for his lavish parties, Gatsby is secretly consumed by his love for Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan, now married to the brutish, philandering Tom. As Nick is drawn into their world, Gatsby's desperate bid to recover his lost romance spirals toward jealousy, a fatal accident, and tragedy.
Fitzgerald's slender novel is a defining portrait of the Jazz Age and a piercing meditation on the American Dream. Through Gatsby's doomed idealism, it examines wealth and class, illusion and reinvention, and the gulf between who we are and who we long to become. Its lyrical prose and haunting final images have made it an enduring American classic.
How it begins
“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.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.