The Great Gatsby

So we beat on, boats against the current…

In the spring of 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald rented a villa on the French Riviera, hoping distance would give him the clarity—and discipline—to finish his third novel. He was 27 years old, restless, and haunted by the glittering ghosts of his Jazz Age generation. Zelda was unraveling. The money was thinning. The parties no longer offered solace. And yet, he still believed in the power of the dream. Or at least, the tragedy of its pursuit.

He completed The Great Gatsby in under a year, pouring into it not just the heat of the decade, but the ache of its illusion. Though its initial reception was lukewarm, time did what time does best: it revealed the novel’s haunting brilliance. Today, it stands as the definitive elegy to American ambition—a novella-length masterpiece with prose that gleams like a champagne glass raised under moonlight.

The Story
Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate and aspiring writer, moves to West Egg, Long Island, and rents a modest house next door to a mysterious millionaire named Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is famous for his lavish parties, thrown not for pleasure, but in the desperate hope that Daisy Buchanan—Nick’s cousin and Gatsby’s lost love—might one day wander through the door.

What follows is a summer of excess, longing, illusion, and betrayal. As Gatsby clings to a dream already rotted from within, Nick watches a society built on money and manners crack under the weight of its own hypocrisy.

The Great Gatsby is a study in façades: of wealth, of identity, of hope. It asks what becomes of a man who builds himself from myth—and whether love, in the end, is ever truly enough.