The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was educated at Princeton University and served in the United States Army during World War I. His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), was a national bestseller; Fitzgerald followed it with three more complete novels and hundreds of popular short stories. The Great Gatsby (1925), a timeless story of social class, race, and gender in America, remains his best-known work. Fitzgerald was living in Los Angeles, working on movie screenplays and a novel he called The Love of the Last Tycoon, when he died of a heart attack on December 21, 1941, at the age of 44. David J. Alworth is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard, where he teaches in the Department of English, the Program in History and Literature, and the Program in American Studies. He also codirects Novel Theory Across the Disciplines, a seminar at Mahindra Humanities Center. He has published Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form (2016) and The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature, with designer Peter Mendelsund (2020). Alworth’s essays and articles have appeared in American Literary History, New Literary History, ELH, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books.