A masterpiece of 20th century literature from F. Scott Fitzgerald, the preeminent chronicler of the Jazz Age—a term he coined. One of The Atlantic ’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years This classic work encapsulating the decadence and excess of the 1920s “Jazz Age” follows the unassuming Nick Carraway on his search for the American Dream, which leads him to the doorstep of Jay Gatsby, an enigmatic millionaire known for both his lavish parties and his undying love for Nick's cousin, the married Daisy Buchanan. With a mixture of envy and dismay, Nick observes Gatsby and his flamboyant life in the Long Island town of West Egg, while Gatsby yearns for Daisy and all that shimmers across the Sound in East Egg. The result is a chronicle of the drama and deceit that swirl around the lives of the wealthy, which cemented Fitzgerals's reputation as the voice of his generation. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) is widely considered the poet laureate of the Jazz Age and one of the great American authors of the 20th century. He became an instant literary sensation with his first novel, This Side of Paradise, published in 1920. His reputation as the voice of his generation was solidified with his succeeding novels, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender is the Night (1934). In addition, Fitzgerald was a master of the short story, publishing more than 150 in his short lifetime. In financial straits due to a lifetime of alcoholism and the declining popularity of his works, Fitzgerald secured a Hollywood contract to work on screenplays, including writing some unused dialogue for "Gone With the Wind." His best work during this time was a series of short stories collected as "The Pat Hobby Stories," in which he satirized the Hollywood hack writer. At the time of his death from a heart attack at age 44, he was working on his final novel, which was edited by his close friend, the literary critic by Edmund Wilson, and published posthumously as The Last Tycoon . CHAPTER I   In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.   "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."   He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought-frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.   And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction-Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"-it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No-Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.     * * *     My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something o