The Great Gatsby

Product Description

Now the subject of a major new film from director Baz Luhrmann (Romeo Juliet Moulin Rouge!) starring Leonardo Di Caprio & Carey Mulligan The Great Gatsby is F Scott Fitzgerald's brilliant fable of the hedonistic excess & tragic reality of 1920s America This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction & notes by Tony Tanner Young handsome & fabulously rich Jay Gatsby is the bright star of the Jazz Age but as writer Nick Carraway is drawn into the decadent orbit of his Long Island mansion where the party never seems to end he finds himself faced by the mystery of Gatsby's origins & desires Beneath the shimmering surface of his life Gatsby is hiding a secret a silent longing that can never be fulfilled & soon this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald brilliantly captures both the disillusionment of post-war America & the moral failure of a society obsessed with wealth & status But he does more than render the essence of a particular time & place for
- in chronicling Gatsby's tragic pursuit of his dream
- Fitzgerald re-creates the universal conflict between illusion & reality Like Jay Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) has acquired a mythical status in American literary history & his masterwork The Great Gatsby is considered by many to be the 'great American novel' In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre dubbed 'the first American Flapper' & their traumatic marriage & Zelda's gradual descent into insanity became the leading influence on his writing As well as many short stories Fitzgerald wrote five novels This Side of Paradise The Great Gatsby The Beautiful & the Damned Tender is the Night & incomplete at the time of his death The Last Tycoon After his death The New York Times said of him that 'in fact & in the literary sense he created a generation ''A classic perhaps the supreme American novel' John Carey Sunday Times Books of the Century