\'The Great Gatsby\' is a novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and first published in 1925. Set in the summer of 1922, the story takes place in the fictional town of West Egg on Long Island and explores themes of wealth, decadence, and the American Dream.The novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young man who moves to West Egg and becomes neighbors with the mysterious and wealthy Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is known for hosting extravagant parties in the hopes that his former lover, Daisy Buchanan, who lives across the bay in East Egg with her husband Tom, will attend one of them.As the narrative unfolds, the reader learns about Gatsby's past, his rise to wealth, and his unrequited love for Daisy. The novel delves into the moral and social consequences of the pursuit of wealth and the illusion of the American Dream.Fitzgerald's writing is celebrated for its exploration of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties, capturing the excesses and superficiality of the time. The characters in \'The Great Gatsby\' grapple with the emptiness beneath the veneer of wealth and privilege, and the novel is often considered a critique of the American Dream.The novel's tragic and poignant ending is a culmination of themes such as the corruption of the American Dream, the destructive power of obsession, and the inevitability of the passage of time. Despite initial mixed reviews, \'The Great Gatsby\' has become a classic of American literature and is widely taught in schools for its exploration of societal and moral themes.
James Gatzthat was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his careerwhen he saw Dan Codys yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the Tuolomee, and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour. I suppose hed had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm peoplehis imagination had never
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The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of Goda phrase which, if it means anything, means just that and he must be about His Fathers business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam-digger and a salmon-fisher or in any other capacity that brought him food and bed. His brown, hardening body lived naturally through the half-fierce, half-lazy work of the bracing days. He knew women early, and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted.
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But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairys wing.
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An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran College of St. Olafs in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitors work with which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to Lake Superior, and he was still searching for something to do on the day that Dan Codys yacht dropped anchor in the shallows alongshore. Cody was fifty years old then, a product of the Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since seventy-five. The transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and, suspecting this, an infinite number of women tried to separate him from his money. The none too savoury ramifications by which Ella Kaye, the newspaper woman,
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