Great Gatsby

<p><i>The Great Gatsby</i> is a novel that needs no introduction for a certain generation of American readers. Long taught as required reading in American schools, critics have consistently held it up alongside <i><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/herman-melville/moby-dick">Moby Dick</a></i>, <i><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/mark-twain/the-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn">Huck Finn</a></i>, and <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i> as perhaps the quintessential Great American Novel.</p> <p>Nick Carraway is a young Midwestern man freshly arrived in New York to make his fortune. He rents a shabby apartment in Long Island next door to a sumptuous mansion: the home of the mysterious and wealthy Jay Gatsby. Carraway spends time catching up with his distant cousin Daisy and her industry-baron husband Tom before being invited to one of Gatsby’s wildly lavish weekend parties. There he meets Jordan, a flapper and a golf star, and an intricate web of romances and betrayals begins to unfold.</p> <p>The novel is a colorful study of America’s Jazz Age—a term said to be coined by <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/f-scott-fitzgerald">Fitzgerald</a> himself—complete with wealthy socialites living in hedonistic abandon, libertine flappers, jazz bands, roaring roadsters, and greasy speakeasies populated with shady grifters. Contrasted against the glamorous lives of wealthy socialites is the entrenched lower class, who live in gray, dingy squalor among smoldering ash-heaps. Fitzgerald uses the setting to examine the American Dream: the idea that anyone in America can achieve success through hard work and dedication. Gatsby has spent his life reaching for his dream. Some say he’s already achieved it. But has he? Is the dream even real for the hard-working poor that Gatsby and Tom race past in their glittering cars on the way to the decadent city?</p> <p>Fitzgerald wrote much of his real life into the novel. Like Carraway, he was a Midwesterner educated at an Ivy-le