Fiction

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, the novel depicts narrator Nick Carraway’s interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby’s obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.

A youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island’s North Shore in 1922 inspired the novel. Following a move to the French Riviera, he completed a rough draft in 1924. He submitted the draft to editor Maxwell Perkins, who persuaded Fitzgerald to revise the work over the following winter. After his revisions, Fitzgerald was satisfied with the text, but remained ambivalent about the book’s title and considered several alternatives. The final title he desired was Under the Red, White, and Blue. Painter Francis Cugat’s final cover design impressed Fitzgerald who incorporated a visual element from the art into the novel.

Gatsby continues to attract popular and scholarly attention. The novel was most recently adapted to film in 2013 by director Baz Luhrmann, while contemporary scholars emphasize the novel’s treatment of social class, inherited wealth compared to those who are self-made, race, environmentalism, and its cynical attitude towards the American dream. The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary masterpiece and a contender for the title of the Great American Novel.

A masterpiece of 20th century literature from F. Scott Fitzgerald, the preeminent chronicler of the Jazz Age–a term he coined.

This classic work encapsulating the decadence and excess of the 1920s “Jazz Age” follows the unassuming Nick Carraway on his search for the American Dream, which leads him to the doorstep of Jay Gatsby, an enigmatic millionaire known for both his lavish parties and his undying love for Nick’s cousin, the married Daisy Buchanan. With a mixture of envy and dismay, Nick observes Gatsby and his flamboyant life in the Long Island town of West Egg, while Gatsby yearns for Daisy and all that shimmers across the Sound in East Egg. The result is a chronicle of the drama and deceit that swirl around the lives of the wealthy, which cemented Fitzgerals’s reputation as the voice of his generation.

Princess Guinevere has come to Camelot to wed a stranger: the charismatic King Arthur. With magic clawing at the kingdom’s borders, the great wizard Merlin conjured a solution–send in Guinevere to be Arthur’s wife . . . and his protector from those who want to see the young king’s idyllic city fail. The catch? Guinevere’s real name–and her true identity–is a secret. She is a changeling, a girl who has given up everything to protect Camelot.

To keep Arthur safe, Guinevere must navigate a court in which the old–including Arthur’s own family–demand things continue as they have been, and the new–those drawn by the dream of Camelot–fight for a better way to live. And always, in the green hearts of forests and the black depths of lakes, magic lies in wait to reclaim the land.

Deadly jousts, duplicitous knights, and forbidden romances are nothing compared to the greatest threat of all: the girl with the long black hair, riding on horseback through the dark woods toward Arthur. Because when your whole existence is a lie, how can you trust even yourself?