Life & Background
Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1896 into a family whose money came from his mother's side, a circumstance that gave him a lifelong sense of being an outsider among the rich. He left Princeton without graduating, joined the army, and met Zelda Sayre in Alabama; she agreed to marry him only after the success of This Side of Paradise in 1920. The couple became public symbols of the decade they helped name, living expensively in New York, Paris, and the Riviera while Fitzgerald wrote high-paying magazine stories to fund the life. The Great Gatsby sold poorly in 1925. Zelda's mental illness, his own alcoholism, and mounting debt marked the 1930s; he worked as a Hollywood screenwriter and died of a heart attack in 1940 at forty-four, believing himself a failure, with The Last Tycoon unfinished.
The Great Gatsby
Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner newly arrived to work in bonds, rents a small house on Long Island next to the mansion of Jay Gatsby, who throws enormous parties nobody is invited to. Across the bay live Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan and her wealthy, brutal husband Tom. Gatsby, Nick learns, built his fortune on bootlegging in order to win back Daisy, whom he loved before the war and who married Tom while he was overseas. Their affair resumes; Tom exposes Gatsby's criminal money in a confrontation at the Plaza Hotel. Driving home, Daisy kills Tom's mistress Myrtle with Gatsby's car. Gatsby takes the blame and waits for a call that never comes. Myrtle's husband shoots him in his swimming pool. Almost nobody attends the funeral.
The novel's power comes from Nick's narration — a participant who claims to reserve judgement and does nothing but judge, and whose lyricism supplies Gatsby with a grandeur the plot denies him. Its symbolic economy is unusually tight: the green light, the valley of ashes between the money and the city, the blind eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg on a billboard. The central argument is about class and repetition — Gatsby's belief that the past can be recovered and that money can be acquired rather than inherited, both of which the Buchanans' careless survival disproves. The closing image of the boats borne back ceaselessly into the past turns a Long Island summer into a judgement on American history.
Why Fitzgerald Matters
The Great Gatsby is the standard American novel of class, aspiration, and the dream's underside, and its compression — under two hundred pages — makes it the most taught American novel in the world. Fitzgerald named and diagnosed the Jazz Age from inside it, and his short stories, particularly Babylon Revisited, are staples of the form. His arc from celebrity to obscurity to posthumous canonisation is also a standard case study in reputation: the novel's revival dates from cheap editions distributed to American troops in the Second World War.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- This Side of Paradise1920
- Tales of the Jazz Age1922
- The Beautiful and Damned1922
- The Great Gatsby1925
- Tender Is the Night1934
- The Crack-Up1936
- The Last Tycoon1941