The Great Gatsby

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age – a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published in 1920 and was a tremendous critical and commercial success. Fitzgerald followed with The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. He was working on The Last Tycoon when he died, in Hollywood, in 1940.

The Great Gatsby remains not just one of the greatest works of American literature, but a timeless evocation of the allure, corruption and carelessness of wealth...a gilded society intoxicated by wealth, dancing its way into the Great Depression.—The TimesGatsby is a connoisseur's guide to the glamour and glitter of the Jazz Age, but it's also a nearly prophetic glimpse into the world to come. Writing at the height of the boom, in the midst of the Roaring Twenties, Fitzgerald detected the ephemerality, fakery and corruption always lurking at the heart of the great American success story... A haunting meditation on aspiration, disillusionment, romantic love - and a blistering exposé of the materialism, duplicity, and sexual politics driving what Fitzgerald calls America's true "business": "the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty"—The TimesIt is a marvellously suggestive novel...a parable of modern America, and by extension of modern life—Daily TelegraphThe first and greatest modern novel, it has beautiful women, lavish parties, romance, betrayal and murder woven together in an intricately structured plot. A prescient comment on the dying days of a gilded age that is brilliant entertainment with a very eloquent insight—MirrorHis masterpiece, an elegy for the American Dream, the greatest lost cause of them all—Los Angeles TimesHis glorious prose captures ephemeral glamour magically—IndependentHis talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings—Read it again, forever—Boston Globe