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  • Published: 18 June 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241341469
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $14.99

The Great Gatsby




Twenty new titles in the much-loved and hugely successful Penguin English Library series

'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'

Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach ... Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby - young, handsome, fabulously rich - always seems alone in the crowd, watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.

The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War.

  • Published: 18 June 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241341469
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $14.99

Other books in the series

About the author

F Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 -1940) is widely considered the poet laureate of the Jazz Age. He wrote many short stories and four novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby. An unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota, and went to Princeton University, which he left in 1917 to join the army. He was said to have epitomized the Jazz Age, which he himself defined as 'a generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken'. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre. Their traumatic marriage and her subsequent breakdowns became the leading influence on his writing. Among his publications were five novels, This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon (his last and unfinished work); six volumes of short stories and The Crack Up, a selection of autobiographical pieces.

Fitzgerald died suddenly in 1940. After his death The New York Times said of him that 'He was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a 'generation'. . . he might have interpreted and even guided them, as in their midle years they saw a different and nobler freedom threatened with destruction.'

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Praise for The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby remains not just one of the greatest works of American literature, but a timeless evocation of the allure, corruption and carelessness of wealth...a gilded society intoxicated by wealth, dancing its way into the Great Depression.

The Times

Gatsby is a connoisseur's guide to the glamour and glitter of the Jazz Age, but it's also a nearly prophetic glimpse into the world to come. Writing at the height of the boom, in the midst of the Roaring Twenties, Fitzgerald detected the ephemerality, fakery and corruption always lurking at the heart of the great American success story... A haunting meditation on aspiration, disillusionment, romantic love - and a blistering exposé of the materialism, duplicity, and sexual politics driving what Fitzgerald calls America's true "business": "the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty"

Sarah Churchwell,, The Times

It is a marvellously suggestive novel...a parable of modern America, and by extension of modern life

AN Wilson,, Daily Telegraph

The first and greatest modern novel, it has beautiful women, lavish parties, romance, betrayal and murder woven together in an intricately structured plot. A prescient comment on the dying days of a gilded age that is brilliant entertainment with a very eloquent insight

Mirror

His masterpiece, an elegy for the American Dream, the greatest lost cause of them all

Los Angeles Times

His glorious prose captures ephemeral glamour magically

Independent

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings

Ernest Hemingway

Read it again, forever

Boston Globe

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