The Great Gatsby

Read The Great Gatsby as Nick Carraway's version of one summer in 1922, not a neutral record: its nine short chapters hand you Gatsby's past in pieces and out of order, and the narrator who claims not to judge judges everyone. This study guide covers how the novel is built, its themes and characters, a reading plan, and the questions worth bringing to class.

F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925, when he was already known for fiction about young, wealthy Americans after the First World War. It is a short novel narrated by Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner who moves to West Egg on Long Island in 1922 to sell bonds and finds himself next door to Jay Gatsby, a millionaire nobody can quite account for, who throws enormous parties. Across the bay, in older and grander East Egg, live Nick's cousin Daisy and her husband, Tom Buchanan.

The book sold modestly in Fitzgerald's lifetime, and its reputation grew after his death in 1940. Students meet it now because it packs so much into so few pages: the 1920s boom, Prohibition and bootlegging, the gap between inherited and new money, and the question of whether anyone can remake themselves completely. It also tests two skills literature classes care about: reading a narrator critically and tracing an image across a book.