Day and night Jay Gatsby's mansion on West Egg 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, although no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret longing that can never be fulfilled. In The Great Gatsby , Fitzgerald brilliantly captures both the disillusion of post-war America and the moral failure of a society obsessed with wealth and status. And in chronicling the tragic pursuit of a dream, he recreates the universal conflict between illusion and reality.

Autorentext

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and educated at Princeton. Stationed in Alabama, he met and later married Zelda Sayre. His first novel, This Side of Paradise published in 1920, was a tremendous critical and commercial success. Fitzgerald followed with The Beautiful and the Damned in 1922, The Great Gatsby in 1925 and Tender is the Night in 1934. He was working on The Last Tycoon (1941) when he died, in Hollywood, in 1940.