The Great Gatsby
In the summer of 1922 Nick Carraway rents a small cottage on Long Island's North Shore, next door to an enormous pile of a mansion belonging to a young, impossibly wealthy stranger named Jay Gatsby who throws lavish parties every weekend for hundreds of guests he has never met. Nick's cousin Daisy lives across the bay in a colder sort of mansion with her old-money philandering husband Tom Buchanan, and the real subject of Gatsby's parties, it turns out, is her. Over a single summer Nick watches an obsession that began five years earlier in Louisville drag everyone involved, Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, Tom's mistress Myrtle, and her doomed husband, toward a hot, inevitable night. F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel is the tightest great American novel, a brief, piercing meditation on wealth, reinvention, and the American longing that refuses to die.
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What you might want to know about The Great Gatsby
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In the summer of 1922, Yale graduate Nick Carraway moves to a rented cottage on Long Island's West Egg, next to the mansion of self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby. Across the bay, Nick's cousin Daisy lives with her old-money husband Tom Buchanan, and Gatsby has thrown his parties for one reason.
Yes. The Great Gatsby was published in 1925 and entered the U.S. public domain in 2021. Free editions are available legally through Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, and similar archives.
Yes. Notable adaptations include the 1974 film with Robert Redford and the 2013 Baz Luhrmann film with Leonardo DiCaprio. Earlier silent and sound versions also exist.
The Great Gatsby was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 2004 by WN.
The Great Gatsby is 186 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Great Gatsby takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
The Great Gatsby is a standalone novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, not part of a series.
The Great Gatsby is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
