The Great Gatsby

Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner recently returned from the First World War, moves east to learn the bond business and rents a modest cottage in West Egg, Long Island, next door to the enormous mansion of the mysterious Jay Gatsby. Across the bay in East Egg live Nick’s cousin Daisy Buchanan and her wealthy, arrogant husband Tom, a former Yale football star with a mistress in the city. Over dinner Nick meets Jordan Baker, a professional golfer and Daisy’s friend, who first hints that Tom is unfaithful. Returning home that night, Nick sees Gatsby for the first time, stretching his arms towards a single green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Soon afterwards Tom takes Nick to meet his mistress Myrtle Wilson, who lives above a garage in the Valley of Ashes, a desolate industrial wasteland overlooked by the giant fading eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg on a weathered billboard.

Nick begins to attend Gatsby’s famous parties, where hundreds of strangers pour through the gardens every weekend drinking champagne and speculating about their host’s fortune. Jordan tells Nick the truth: Gatsby and Daisy had a romance in Louisville in 1917 before he was shipped to France, and he has bought the mansion across the bay specifically to win her back. At Gatsby’s request Nick arranges a reunion over tea, and the two are awkwardly, then ecstatically, reunited. Gatsby shows Daisy around his house, throwing his monogrammed shirts onto the table until she weeps into them. He has invented himself — his real name is James Gatz, a poor farm boy from North Dakota — and has made his money through bootlegging and other shadowy enterprises connected to the gambler Meyer Wolfshiem, who is said to have fixed the 1919 World Series.

On the hottest day of the summer the Buchanans, Gatsby, Nick and Jordan drive into New York and take a suite at the Plaza Hotel, where the tension finally breaks. Tom confronts Gatsby, exposes his criminal business dealings, and forces Daisy to admit that she cannot say she never loved her husband. The party drives home in two cars. Daisy is at the wheel of Gatsby’s yellow car when it strikes and kills Myrtle Wilson, who has run out into the road, probably believing it to be Tom, whom she saw driving it that afternoon. Gatsby takes the blame to protect Daisy and keeps vigil outside her house that night, while inside Tom and Daisy reconcile over cold chicken. The next afternoon Myrtle’s grief-stricken husband George, convinced by Tom that Gatsby was the driver, walks to West Egg, shoots Gatsby dead in his swimming pool, and then kills himself.

Gatsby’s funeral is attended by almost no one. Daisy and Tom have left town without forwarding address; Gatsby’s business associates vanish; only Nick, Gatsby’s elderly father Henry Gatz, a handful of servants and a man Nick calls Owl Eyes stand at the graveside in the rain. Disillusioned with the East, Nick moves back to the Midwest. In the novel’s closing pages he reflects on Gatsby’s extraordinary capacity for hope, on the green light he reached for, and on the impossibility of recapturing the past. Tom and Daisy, he concludes, were careless people who smashed up things and creatures and retreated into their money, leaving other people to clean up the mess they had made.

Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby during the mid-1920s, at the height of the Jazz Age boom he himself had named. The First World War had ended in 1918, leaving a generation disillusioned with the ideals that had sent them to the trenches, and America emerged from the conflict as the dominant economic power of the Atlantic world. Stock-market prices climbed year on year, mass-produced cars and radios transformed everyday life, and a new culture of conspicuous consumption spread from New York to the rest of the country. The novel’s extravagant parties and bright young things belong to this moment of speculative exuberance, only four years before the Wall Street Crash of 1929 would end it.

Prohibition, in force from 1920 to 1933, is the unspoken engine of Gatsby’s wealth. The national ban on the manufacture and sale of alcohol created a vast illegal market, and the men who supplied that market — bootleggers, speakeasy owners, gamblers — became some of the richest in America. Gatsby’s partner Meyer Wolfshiem is a fictionalised version of Arnold Rothstein, the real New York gangster widely believed to have fixed the 1919 World Series. Fitzgerald uses this criminal economy to show how the supposedly meritocratic dream of wealth in the 1920s was inseparable from organised lawbreaking.

The novel is also shaped by the racial and cultural tensions of the decade. The Harlem Renaissance was transforming American literature and music a few miles north of Gatsby’s parties, and jazz — a predominantly Black art form — provided the soundtrack to white affluence at West Egg. At the same time, the Ku Klux Klan was experiencing a resurgence, and Tom Buchanan’s enthusiasm for pseudo-scientific books about the decline of the white race reflects a real current of Anglo-Saxon supremacism among the established rich. The Valley of Ashes, meanwhile, registers the industrial poverty that underpinned the decade’s prosperity, as immigrant and working-class labour generated the wealth that the Buchanans carelessly enjoyed.

Fitzgerald drew heavily on his own life. His tumultuous marriage to Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who had initially rejected him because he was not rich enough, clearly informs Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy, and Fitzgerald’s sense of himself as an outsider watching the rich from the edges gives the novel its ambivalent tone. Although Gatsby received respectful reviews on publication in April 1925, it sold modestly in Fitzgerald’s lifetime; only after his death in 1940, and especially after its distribution to American servicemen in the Second World War, did it come to be regarded as the great American novel of the twentieth century.