The Great Gatsby
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- This article is about the novel. For the film and TV adaptations, see The Great Gatsby (disambiguation).
| Author | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Charles Scribner's Sons |
| Released | April 10, 1925 |
The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published on April 10, 1925, the story is set in New York City and Long Island during the summer of 1922.
The novel chronicles an era that Fitzgerald himself dubbed the "Jazz Age." Following the shock and chaos of the First World War, American society enjoyed unprecedented levels of prosperity during the 1920s as the economy soared. At the same time, Prohibition, the ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment, made millionaires out of bootleggers and encouraged organized crime. Although Fitzgerald, like Nick Carraway in his novel, idolized the riches and glamour of the age, he was uncomfortable with the unrestrained materialism and lack of morality that went with it.
The Great Gatsby was not popular upon initial printing and sold fewer than 24,000 copies during the remaining 15 years of Fitzgerald's life. Today it usually sells more copies than that each month (2006).
Although it was adapted into both a Broadway play and a Hollywood film within a year of publication, it was largely forgotten during the Great Depression and World War II. After it was republished in 1945 and 1953, it quickly found a wide readership. It is now a standard text in high school and university courses on American literature in countries around the world.
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[edit] Plot summary
Nick Carraway, a New York bond dealer from the Midwest, befriends his neighbor Jay Gatsby, an extremely wealthy young man known for hosting lavish soirées in his Long Island mansion. Gatsby's great wealth is a subject of much rumor; none of the guests whom Nick meets at Gatsby's parties know much about his past. Nick also visits Tom Buchanan, a wealthy former college athlete, and his wife Daisy, who is Nick's second cousin once removed. Gatsby is later discovered to be deeply in love with Daisy Buchanan, and vice versa. Daisy and Gatsby soon begin an affair after a meeting arranged by Nick which is at first strained (unnerving Nick), but turns more communicative when Gatsby begins to relax. They see more of each other at Gatsby's house without Tom being present. The conflict comes to a head in New York City, when Tom confronts Gatsby about the affair that he suspects. It is then that Gatsby claims Daisy will leave Tom and go with him. Daisy declares that she loves Gatsby now but is unable to renounce her love for Tom. Flustered, Daisy departs for Long Island with Gatsby in his car; the rest follow later, in Tom's car. By this point, Nick (who placed himself as an outsider early on in the novel) has become both Gatsby's sole ally and best friend. During the middle of the hotel room confrontation, Nick becomes so impressed by Gatsby that he feels the desire to "get up and slap him on the back," saying he has experienced a complete renewal of faith in him.
Daisy is driving when Gatsby's car crashes into a woman in a hit and run accident, killing her. The woman was Myrtle Wilson, Tom's lover, who has run out to meet the car, thinking it was Tom coming for her. Myrtle's husband at first believes Tom has killed Myrtle (partly because Mr. Wilson correctly suspects Tom of having hit Myrtle previously), and confronts Tom, who directs him to Gatsby's car. Mr. Wilson tracks the car to Gatsby's house and shoots Gatsby to death, then kills himself. Daisy allows Tom to continue to believe it was Gatsby at the wheel when Myrtle was killed in the hit and run. None of the legions who attended his parties come to Gatsby's funeral; only Nick, Gatsby's father Henry Gatz (Gatsby changed the name in his social-climbing efforts), an unnamed man known for his "owl" eyes whom Nick met in Gatsby's library, and Gatsby's servants, pay their respects. Nick later describes Tom and Daisy as rich people who leave it to others to clean up their messes. Nick breaks off his relationship with Jordan (in whom he saw a fundamental dishonesty) and moves back to the Midwest.
[edit] Inspiration
The situation of the Great Gatsby, a wealthy man of mystery haunting the society of his lost love, may owe something to Alexandre Dumas, père's The Count of Monte Cristo.
The character of Meyer Wolfsheim in the novel is based on Arnold Rothstein, the real-life gambling kingpin suspected to have been behind the fixing of the 1919 World Series.
Gatsby leads those around him to believe that he took a degree at Trinity College, Oxford, this is another of his half truths. Gatsby did attend Oxford but only briefly after the war, when officers were offered the opportunity to attend. He also attended St. Olaf College for a few days, "disliking it because he had to support himself with janitor work." St. Olaf is a liberal arts college located in Northfield, Minnesota, an hours drive south from where Fitzgerald grew up. Not surprisingly, Gatsby hides this part of his education and instead embellishes his Oxbridge era
Early in the book, Tom Buchanan describes to Nick a book he's reading, Rise of the Colored Empire by "this man Goddard." This book is a play on T. Lothrop Stoddard's book, The Rising Tide of Color, printed about 1922.
The introduction features a poem attributed to Thomas Parke D'Invilliers, who is actually a character from Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side Of Paradise.
East Egg and West Egg are thinly disguised versions of Manhasset and Great Neck, New York. As recorded in the novel The Tender Bar, "Some people also knew Manhasset as the backdrop for The Great Gatsby. While composing portions of his masterpiece, F. Scott Fitzgerald sat on a breezy veranda in Great Neck and gazed across Manhasset Bay at our town, which he turned into the fictional East Egg" (Moehringer, p. 5-6).
[edit] Trivia
- Gatsby's copy of Hopalong Cassidy contains a note dated 1906, which is not possible since it was first published in 1910.
- The Great Gatsby was sometimes read out loud by Andy Kaufman in a faux British accent as a type of anti-humor.
- Seattle-based rock band Gatsbys American Dream derived their name from an obvious theme in the book.
- Businessman Bill Gates has inscribed in his library a sentence from the last page of the novel: "He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it." [1]
[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
The Great Gatsby has been filmed four times:
- The Great Gatsby (1926 film), in 1926 by Herbert Brenon – a silent movie of a stage adaptation, starring Warner Baxter and Lois Wilson. According to the IMDb, no known copies have survived (only a trailer with a few minutes of footage is known to exist);
- The Great Gatsby (1949 film), in 1949 by Elliott Nugent – starring Alan Ladd and Betty Field; far more faithful to the novel than the more elaborate 1974 version; but for copyright reasons, this film is not readily available;
- The Great Gatsby (1974 film), in 1974, by Jack Clayton – the most famous screen version, starring Robert Redford in the title role with Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan & Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway, with a script by Francis Ford Coppola;
- The Great Gatsby (2000 TV), in 2000 by Robert Markowitz – a made-for-TV movie starring Toby Stephens and Mira Sorvino.
Famous American author Truman Capote was originally hired as the screenwriter for the 1974 film adaptation. In his screenplay, Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker were both written to be homosexual. After Capote was removed from the project, Coppola rewrote the screenplay.
The 2002 film G (released in 2005) by Christopher Scott Cherot claims inspiration from The Great Gatsby.
[edit] Opera
An operatic treatment of the novel was commissioned by the New York Metropolitan Opera to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the debut of James Levine. The opera premiered on December 20, 1999. The music and libretto are by John Harbison with popular song lyrics by Murray Horwitz.
[edit] Play
The Great Gatsby, a stage adaptation by Owen Davis, was first performed at the Ambassador Theatre in New York City on Feb 2, 1926 in a production directed by George Cukor with James Rennie and Florence Eldridge.
The Great Gatsby, in a new adaptation by Simon Levy, was performed for the opening of the new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota in July 2006. This was billed as "the first authorized stage version of the novel since 1926."
However, two months earlier, in Brussels, Belgium, The Kunsten Festival des Arts debuted Gatz, a six-hour production by the New York theater company Elevator Repair Service. Set in a ramshackle contemporary office building, Gatz utilized the entire text of Gatsby, at first read by employees at the office building, and eventually acted out by them. "Gatz" premiered in the U.S. on September 21, 2006, at the Walker Art Center (also in Minneapolis) just eleven days after the closing of The Great Gatsby at The Guthrie.
[edit] Young adult novel
Gordon Korman's 2003 young-adult novel Jake, Reinvented is a modern-day retelling of the tale set in the social environment of a fictitious F. Scott Fitzgerald High School.
[edit] External links
- Online text of The Great Gatsby
- Index to The Great Gatsby
- Summary, analysis, and important quotes from The Great Gatsby
- The Great Gatsby (1926) at the Internet Movie Database
- The Great Gatsby (1949) at the Internet Movie Database
- The Great Gatsby (1974) at the Internet Movie Database
- G (2002) at the Internet Movie Database
- AP: Page Ivey: "Professor, private investigator team up in search of the real 'Great Gatsby'"
- Study Guides
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