The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book was first published in 1925, and it has been republished in 1945 and 1953. There are two settings for the novel. The first setting is on Long Island’s North Shore and the second major setting is in New York City. The book is set within the year 1922 from the spring to the autumn.
The Great Gatsby takes place during a prosperous time in American History. In 1922, America has fully recovered from the First World War, and is enjoying prosperity during the “roaring” 1920s. The economy soared and emotions ran high. Yet, at the same time, Prohibition, the ban on the sale and manufacture of alcohol as mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment, was gaining traction.
The ban on alcohol made millionaires out of bootleggers, who were smuggling in the illegal substance. That scenario is the backdrop for the novel, which contributed to its popularity. After the novel was republished in 1945 and 1953, The Great Gatsby quickly found a wide readership. Today the book is widely regarded as the epitome of the Great American Novel, and a literary classic. The Modern Library named it the second best English-language novel of the 20th Century.
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 any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
Chapter 1
In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year….Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.
Chapter 1
I KNOW. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything…Sophisticated – God, I’m sophisticated.
Chapter 1
All right…I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
Chapter 1
This is a valley of ashes–a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
Chapter 2
I married him because I thought he was a gentleman…I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe.
Chapter 2
I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets… I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without.
Chapter 2
I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
Chapter 3
He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.
Chapter 3
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others–young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
Chapter 3
Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
Chapter 3
It takes two to make an accident.
Chapter 3
Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can’t forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there… they shot him three times in the belly and drove away.
Chapter 4
A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: ‘There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.
Chapter 4
Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes.
Chapter 5
One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer/ The rich get richer and the poor get – children./ In the meantime,/ In between time–
Chapter 5
His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people–his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God… and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.
Chapter 6
It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.
Chapter 6
He wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.
Chapter 6
Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans.
Chapter 7
It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well. Wilson was so sick that he looked guilty.
Chapter 7
I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it – overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.
Chapter 7
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.
Chapter 7
Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table… They weren’t happy… yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.
Chapter 7
He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.
Chapter 8
He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise, and when he looked around him now for the first time and saw the height and splendor of the hall… his grief began to be mixed with an awed pride.
Chapter 9
After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.
Chapter 9
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
Chapter 9
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning– So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Chapter 9
