a book review of the great gatsby

The Great Gatsby

By f. scott fitzgerald.

'The Great Gatsby' tells a very human story of wealth, dreams, and failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald takes the reader into the heart of the Jazz Age, in New York City, and into the world of Jay Gatsby.

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

The Great Gatsby tells a very human story of wealth, dreams, and failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald takes the reader into the heart of the Jazz Age , in New York City, and into the world of Jay Gatsby. Through Nick’s narration, readers are exposed to the dangers of caring too much about the wrong thing and devoting themselves to the wrong ideal.

Gatsby’s pursuit of the past central to my understanding of this novel. Fitzgerald created Gatsby as a representative of the American dream , someone who, despite all of his hard work, did not achieve the one thing he wanted most in life.

Wealth and the American Dream

Another part of this novel I found to be integral to my understanding of the time period was the way that wealth and the American dream did not exist alongside one another. The American dream suggests that through hard work and determination, anyone can achieve the dream life they’re looking for.

On the outside, Gatsby does just that. He raises himself out of poverty and makes his fortune (albeit not through entirely legal means). He worked hard and remained focused. For those attending his parties or who have seen his mansion, he is living the best possible life–an embodiment of the American dream. But, he’s missing the one thing he really wanted to achieve–Daisy’s love and commitment. His pursuit of wealth was not for wealth alone. It was for something that, he realized, money can’t buy.

It was impossible for me not to feel moved by the bind Gatsby got himself into. He put Daisy on a pedestal, one that required she fulfill her end of the bargain if he fulfilled his. He got rich and acquired the means to give her the kind of life she wanted. But, Daisy was unwilling to separate herself from her husband, Tom Buchanan, and return to Gatsby. She ended up being more interested in maintaining her social status and staying in the safety of her marriage than living what might’ve been a happy life.

Daisy Buchanan and the Treatment of Women

Her character is often deeply romanticized, with her actions painted as those of a woman torn between what she knows is right and her inability to guide her own life. However, I always return to the strange conversation she shares with Nick, revealing her concerns about raising a daughter. The quote from The Great Gatsby reads:

I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

This quote proved to me that Daisy is well aware of her position in the world, and she turns to the safety of being “a beautiful little fool” when she needs to be. It’s the only way she feels she can survive.

There’s something to be said for the depiction of Daisy as a victim. Still, her callous treatment of Gatsby at the end of the novel, seen through her refusal to attend his funeral and dismissal of the destruction she caused, is hard to empathize with. Daisy may be at Tom’s mercy for a great deal, her livelihood, and her social status, but when she walks away from the death of a man she supposedly loved, it feels as though her true nature is revealed. She’s a survivor more than anything else and didn’t deserve the pedestal that Gatsby put her on. This is part of what makes Gatsby’s story so tragic. He was pure in a way that no other character in the novel was. He had one thing he wanted, and he was determined to do anything to get it. That one thing, Daisy’s love, was what let him down.

I also found it interesting to consider the differences between Jordan’s character and Daisy’s and how they were both treated. Jordan, while certainly no saint, is regarded as a dangerous personality. She sleeps with different men, appears to hold no one’s opinion above her own, and has made an independent career for herself as a golfer (a surely male-dominated world). I continue to ask myself how much of Nick’s depiction of Jordan is based on her pushing the envelope of what a woman “should” do in the 1920s ?

The Great Gatsby and Greatness

One of the novel’s defining moments is when Nick realizes who was truly “great” and why. Gatsby wasn’t “Great” because of his wealth, home, parties, or any other physical item he owned. He was great because of the single-minded pursuit of his dream. His incredible personality and determination made him a one-of-a-kind man in Nick’s world. This realization about who Gatsby was and what he represented was driven home by his death and the lack of attendees at his funeral. No one, aside from Nick, realizes the kind of man he was. Those he might’ve called friends were using him for the money, possession, or social status they might have attained. But, Nick realizes that none of these things made the man “great.”

The Great Gatsby as a Historical Document

Finally, I find myself considering what the novel can tell us about the United States post-World War I and during the financial boom of the roaring twenties. Without didactically detailing historical information, the novel does provide readers with an interesting insight into what the world was like then.

The characters, particularly those who attend Gatsby’s parties, appear to have nothing to lose. They’ve made it through the war, are financially better off than they were before, and are more than willing to throw caution to the wind. Fitzgerald taps into a particular culture, fueled by a new love for jazz music, financial stability, prohibition and speakeasies, and new freedoms for women. The novel evokes this culture throughout each page, transporting readers into a very different time and place.

The novel conveys a feeling of change to me, a realization that the American dream may not be all it’s cut out to be and that the world was never going to be the same again after World War I. It appears that this is part of what was fueling Fitzgerald’s characters in The Great Gatsby and his plot choices.

What did early reviewers think of The Great Gatsby ?

Early reviews of The Great Gatsby were not positive. Reviewers generally dismissed the novel, suggesting that it was not as good as Fitzgerald’s prior novels. It was not until after this death that it was elevated to the status it holds today.

What is the message of The Great Gatsby ?

The message is that the American dream is not real and that wealth does not equal happiness. Plus, optimism might feel and seem noble but when it’s misplaced it can be destructive.

Is Jay Gatsby a good or bad character?

Gatsby is generally considered to be a good character. He did illegal things to gain his fortune but it was with the best intentions–regaining the love of Daisy, the woman he loved in his youth.

Did Daisy actually love Gatsy?

It’s unclear whether or not she loved Gatsby. But, considering her actions, it seems unlikely she loved him during the novel.

What does Nick learn from Gatsby?

Nick learns that the wealth of East and West Egg are a cover for emptiness and moral bankruptcy. The men and women he met are devoid of empathy or love for one another.

The Great Gatsby: Fitzgerald's Enduring Classic of the Jazz Age

Book Title: The Great Gatsby

Book Description: 'The Great Gatsby' is an unforgettable and beautiful novel that explores the nature of dreams and their value in contemporary society.

Book Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Book Edition: First Limited Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: Charles Scribner's Sons

Date published: April 10, 1925

ISBN: 0-14-006229-2

Number Of Pages: 224

• Writing Style
• Lasting Effect on Reader

The Great Gatsby Review

The Great Gatsby is a novel of the Jazz Age. It follows Nick Carraway as he uncovers the truth behind his mysterious neighbor’s wealth and dreams. The novel explores the consequences of wealth and suggests that the American dream is an unrealistic expectation.

• Realistic setting. 
• Interesting and provoking dialogue.
• Memorable characters.
• Limited action and emotions. 
• Several unlikeable characters. 
• Leaves readers with questions.

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About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

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• Read TIME’s Original Review of <i>The Great Gatsby</i>

Read TIME’s Original Review of The Great Gatsby

T he main book review in the May 11, 1925, issue of TIME earned several columns of text, with an in-depth analysis of the book’s significance and the author’s background.

But, nearly a century later, you’ve probably never heard of Mr. Tasker’s Gods , by T.F. Powys, much less read it.

Meanwhile, another book reviewed in the issue, earning a single paragraph relegated to the second page of the section, has gone down in history as one of the most important works in American literature — and, to many, the great American novel. It was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby , published exactly 90 years ago, on April 10, 1925.

TIME’s original review, though noting Fitzgerald’s talent, gave little hint of the fame waiting for the book:

THE GREAT GATSBY—F. Scott Fitzgerald—Scribner—($2.00). Still the brightest boy in the class, Scott Fitzgerald holds up his hand. It is noticed that his literary trousers are longer, less bell-bottomed, but still precious. His recitation concerns Daisy Fay who, drunk as a monkey the night before she married Tom Buchanan, muttered: “Tell ’em all Daisy’s chang’ her mind.” A certain penniless Navy lieutenant was believed to be swimming out of her emotional past. They gave her a cold bath, she married Buchanan, settled expensively at West Egg, L. I., where soon appeared one lonely, sinister Gatsby, with mounds of mysterious gold, ginny habits and a marked influence on Daisy. He was the lieutenant, of course, still swimming. That he never landed was due to Daisy’s baffled withdrawal to the fleshly, marital mainland. Due also to Buchanan’s disclosure that the mounds of gold were ill-got. Nonetheless, Yegg Gatsby remained Daisy’s incorruptible dream, unpleasantly removed in person toward the close of the book by an accessory in oil-smeared dungarees.

But not everyone had trouble seeing the future: in a 1933 cover story about Gertrude Stein, the intellectual icon offered her prognostications on the literature of her time. F. Scott Fitzgerald, she told TIME, “will be read when many of his well known contemporaries are forgotten.”

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Critical Overview of "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Discussing the plot, main character, and theme of an American classic

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The Great Gatsby is F. Scott Fitzgerald's greatest novel—a book that offers damning and insightful views of the American nouveau riche in the 1920s. The Great Gatsby is an American classic and a wonderfully evocative work.

Like much of Fitzgerald's prose, it is neat and well-crafted. Fitzgerald has a brilliant understanding of lives that are corrupted by greed and turn out incredibly sad and unfulfilled. He was able to translate this understanding into one of the finest pieces of literature of the 1920s . The novel is a product of its generation—with one of American literature's most powerful characters in the figure of Jay Gatsby, who is urbane and world-weary. Gatsby is really nothing more than a man desperate for love.

The Great Gatsby Overview

The novel's events are filtered through the consciousness of its narrator, Nick Carraway, a young Yale graduate, who is both a part of and separate from the world he describes. Upon moving to New York, he rents a house next door to the mansion of an eccentric millionaire (Jay Gatsby). Every Saturday, Gatsby throws a party at his mansion and all the great and the good of the young fashionable world come to marvel at his extravagance (as well as swap gossipy stories about their host who—it is suggested—has a murky past).

Despite his high-living, Gatsby is dissatisfied and Nick finds out why. Long ago, Gatsby fell in love with a young girl, Daisy. Although she has always loved Gatsby, she is currently married to Tom Buchanan. Gatsby asks Nick to help him meet Daisy once more, and Nick finally agrees—arranging tea for Daisy at his house.

The two ex-lovers meet and soon rekindle their affair. Soon, Tom begins to suspect and challenges the two of them—also revealing something that the reader had already begun to suspect: that Gatsby's fortune was made through illegal gambling and bootlegging. Gatsby and Daisy drive back to New York. In the wake of the emotional confrontation, Daisy hits and kills a woman. Gatsby feels that his life would be nothing without Daisy, so he takes the blame.

George Wilson—who discovers that the car that killed his wife belongs to Gatsby—comes to Gatsby's house and shoots him. Nick arranges a funeral for his friend and then decides to leave New York—saddened by the fatal events and disgusted by the way lived their lives.

Gatsby's Character and Societal Values

The power of Gatsby as a character is inextricably linked to his wealth. From the very beginning of The Great Gatsby , Fitzgerald sets up his eponymous hero as an enigma: the playboy millionaire with the shady past who can enjoy the frivolity and ephemera that he creates around him. However, the reality of the situation is that Gatsby is a man in love. Nothing more. He concentrated all of his life on winning Daisy back.

It is the way that he attempts to do this, however, that is central to Fitzgerald's world-view. Gatsby creates himself—both his mystique and his personality—around rotten values. They are the values of the American dream—that money, wealth, and popularity are all there is to achieve in this world. He gives everything he has—emotionally and physically—to win, and it is this unrestrained desire that contributes to his eventual downfall.

Social Commentary About Decadence

In the closing pages of The Great Gatsby , Nick considers Gatsby in a wider context. Nick links Gatsby with the class of people with whom he has become so inextricably associated. They are the society persons so prominent during the 1920s and 1930s. Like his novel The Beautiful and the Damned , Fitzgerald attacks the shallow social climbing and emotional manipulation—which only causes pain. With a decadent cynicism, the party-goers in The Great Gatsby cannot see anything beyond their own enjoyment. Gatsby's love is frustrated by the social situation and his death symbolizes the dangers of his chosen path.

F. Scott Fitzgerald paints a picture of a lifestyle and a decade that is both fascinating and horrific. In so doing, he captures a society and a set of young people; and he writes them into legend. Fitzgerald was a part of that high-living lifestyle, but he was also a victim of it. He was one of the beautiful but he was also forever damned. In all its excitement—pulsating with life and tragedy— The Great Gatsby brilliantly captures the American dream in a time when it had descended into decadence.

• 'The Great Gatsby' Overview
• The Great Gatsby and the Lost Generation
• F. Scott Fitzgerald's Inspiration for 'The Great Gatsby'
• What is the role of women in 'The Great Gatsby'?
• 'The Great Gatsby' Themes
• 'The Great Gatsby' Plot Summary
• 'The Great Gatsby' Characters: Descriptions and Significance
• 'The Great Gatsby' Study Questions
• 'The Great Gatsby' Quotes Explained
• Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Writer of the Jazz Age
• Why Was "The Great Gatsby" Banned?
• The Lost Generation and the Writers Who Described Their World
• 10 Classic Novels for Teens
• 49 Unforgettable F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
• The Life of Zelda Fitzgerald, the Other Fitzgerald Writer
• Great Books from High School Summer Reading Lists

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The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald - review

There are many novels which claim that they are the greatest love story of all time. It is only in the case of this novel that that statement can be applied and be true.

The novel is set during the roaring 20s in America, narrated by Nick Carraway, a man from a well-to-do family just out of fighting the war and looking to sell bonds. He moves to East Egg, the slightly less grand area in comparison to West Egg, right opposite Gatsby's mansion. Gatsby is rich, mega-rich, and throws magnificent parties every weekend which the whole town attend. However the host is never seen during these parties, and is never completely known by any one person. Gatsby holds a dark secret about his past and how he became so great, a deep lust that will eventually lead to his demise.

The Great Gatsby is in many ways similar to Romeo and Juliet, yet I believe that it is so much more than just a love story. It is also a reflection on the hollowness of a life of leisure. Both stories are obsessed with controlling time: Juliet wants to extend her present, as her future prospects with Romeo are bleak and Gatsby wants to create a beautiful future by restoring the past. This is what leads Gatsby to say his most famous line "Can't change the past? Why, of course you can." I could very much relate to this - there have been many moments where I've wished that I could go back to the past and just remain there, for it was a better place.

Similarly to Romeo and Juliet, Fitzgerald's writing is almost like a work of poetry, with waves of literary brilliance creating a rich and lush rhythm which you can almost tap your foot to. The descriptions are jarringly, magnificently beautiful so that it almost made my heart ache.

However, unlike in Romeo and Juliet, the characters in The Great Gatsby are in themselves very flawed and very hard to sympathise with. But that is the beauty of the book. Of course you hate Daisy Buchanan! Of course you hate Tom! You even begin to slightly dislike Gatsby, to whom it is not enough for Daisy to say that she loved him, but requires her to state that she never in her five year marriage loved her husband Tom. But Gatsby, to me, remains Great right until the end of this book.

It is ironic that only the idle rich survive this novel, and Fitzgerald through this further enrages the reader about the cruelty and the injustice of the world. The rich are allowed to continue to be careless, for that is the dream, is it not? To live a carefree life? Yet Fitzgerald highlights the horrors of being a careless person: "They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money and vast carelessness." What's amazing in this line is that Tom and Daisy aren't careless to be malicious - that is just their nature. And that in itself is a very sad thing. They do not care for their daughter, for Myrtle, for Gatsby nor even each other. Their inability to care is what makes The Great Gatsby the stark opposite to Romeo and Juliet where the lovers are sacrificed and Verona is healed. In Fitzgerald's masterpiece nothing is made whole by this tragedy. Many consider The Great Gatsby to be depressing because, in the end, those who dream do not achieve their aspirations. However, the main message that Fitzgerald sends to us isn't that dreaming will lead to despair, but that chasing an unworthy dream will lead to tragedy.

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The great gatsby, common sense media reviewers.

American classic captures romance, debauchery of Jazz Age.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

The Great Gatsby is a book very much of its time.

Many of the characters behave irresponsibly at bes

There are a lot more negative role models in The G

In one scene, a man punches his lover in the face

Adults in the book flirt and kiss. Reference is al

Curse words are not used, but other offensive lang

There are many examples of excessive material weal

The adults consume a great deal of alcohol, which

Parents need to know that THE GREAT GATSBY is at once a romantic and cynical novel about the wealth and habits of a group of New Yorkers during the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald's writing is unassailably magnificent, as he paints a grim portrait of shallow characters who maneuver themselves into complex situations. This…

Educational Value

The Great Gatsby is a book very much of its time. Readers will learn about life in New York during the Jazz Age (1920s), and about drinking behavior during Prohibition. Also, the character Tom Buchanan converses about books he likes that represent bigoted views held by many whites at that time. These beliefs are often offensive, but they do inform the reader about the time Fitzgerald portrays.

Positive Messages

Many of the characters behave irresponsibly at best, and the most romantic character in the novel, Gatsby himself, is probably involved in criminal business dealings. The most positive message in the book is probably that readers should learn from the characters' mistakes. However, there's something beautiful in Gatsby's undying devotion to Daisy. Though Fitzgerald deeply questions the wisdom of trying to recapture the past, Gatsby believes in his dream of restoring lost love in a way that's childlike and touching.

Positive Role Models

There are a lot more negative role models in The Great Gatsby than positive ones. The narrator, Nick, is largely a foil for the lovers' bad behavior, but his intention of being a real friend to Gatsby, especially in the end, is admirable.

Violence & Scariness

In one scene, a man punches his lover in the face during an argument. At another point, a woman is fatally hit by a car, and the condition of her body is described briefly but graphically.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Adults in the book flirt and kiss. Reference is also made to extramarital affairs, and Fitzgerald describes the past relationship of two characters, saying that the man "took her," though sex is never actually described.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Curse words are not used, but other offensive language is. The book includes the word "kike," and characters are prejudiced toward Jewish and African-American people.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

There are many examples of excessive material wealth in The Great Gatsby . In fact, the majority of the culture during this time was defined by consumerism and flashy lifestyles. Gatsby's way of life in particular is very much dictated by his devotion to Daisy, which explains the lavish mansion and extravagant parties to impress the object of his affection.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

The adults consume a great deal of alcohol, which fuels some bad behavior. As the novel was written and takes place in the United States before the Surgeon General's warning, cigarette smoking is also ubiquitous.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that THE GREAT GATSBY is at once a romantic and cynical novel about the wealth and habits of a group of New Yorkers during the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald's writing is unassailably magnificent, as he paints a grim portrait of shallow characters who maneuver themselves into complex situations. This classic American novel is required reading for a lot of high school students, and it can definitely be appreciated and understood on some levels by teenagers. However, Fitzgerald's use of language and symbolism is best appreciated by mature readers able to analyze literature and think critically. Parents also need to know that some characters express racial and religious prejudice.

Where to Read

Community reviews.

• Parents say (12)
• Kids say (73)

Based on 12 parent reviews

Little people living lives too larger for them

Themes of female sexuality,, what's the story.

Nick Carraway spends a summer living in a cheap rental house surrounded by lavish mansions on Long Island in the 1920s. Among his neighbors are his beautiful cousin Daisy, her loutish husband Tom, and her former lover, Jay Gatsby, whose history and epic parties are fodder for gossip. Nick becomes caught up in the machinery of more than one romantic triangle as the summer begins to fade and Gatsby's orchestra stops playing.

Is It Any Good?

THE GREAT GATSBY is a magnificent novel on every level. Fitzgerald writes about the Jazz Age in language that beautifully evokes music. He writes about a hot day in a way that almost makes you sweat. His characters are well-drawn, and the plot is engaging and fast-paced. Though this novel is possibly best appreciated by college-level readers, advanced high school students will find a lot to enjoy and discuss.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Gatsby's five-year quest to regain Daisy's heart. Is his dream realistic? What is Fitzgerald saying about trying to recapture the past?

What kind of person is Nick? Do you feel he is a well-formed character? Why was he so devoted to Gatsby at the end of the book?

What is Gatsby really like? How is he different from the widely held ideas about him in the book?

Why do you think this book is considered a classic?

Book Details

• Author : F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Genre : Literary Fiction
• Book type : Fiction
• Publisher : Scribner
• Publication date : April 10, 1925
• Number of pages : 192
• Last updated : September 30, 2015

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This week’s issue features an essay adapted from Jesmyn Ward’s introduction to a new edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “ The Great Gatsby .” In 1925, Edwin Clark reviewed the novel for the Book Review. Below is an excerpt.

Of the many new writers that sprang into notice with the advent of the post-war period, Scott Fitzgerald has remained the steadiest performer and the most entertaining. Now he has said farewell to his flappers and is writing of the older sisters that have married. To use a phrase of Burton Rascoe’s — his hurt romantics are still seeking that other side of paradise. And it might almost be said that “The Great Gatsby” is the last stage of illusion in this absurd chase.

The story of Jay Gatsby of West Egg is told by Nick Carraway, who is one of the legion from the Middle West who have moved on to New York and finds in Long Island a fascinating but dangerous playground. Gatsby’s fortune, business, even his connection with underworld figures, remain vague generalizations. Of his uncompromising love — his love for Daisy Buchanan — his effort to recapture the past romance — we are explicitly informed. This patient romantic hopefulness against existing conditions symbolizes Gatsby.

Nick Carraway had known Tom Buchanan at New Haven. Daisy, his wife, was a distant cousin. The post-war reactions were at their height — everyone was restless. Buchanan had acquired another woman. Daisy was bored, broken in spirit and neglected. Gatsby, his parties and his mysterious wealth were the gossip of the hour. At the Buchanans Nick met Jordan Baker; through them both Daisy again meets Gatsby, to whom she had been engaged before she married Buchanan. The inevitable consequence that follows is almost incidental, for in the overtones the decay of souls is more tragic. With keen psychological observation, Fitzgerald discloses in these people a meanness of spirit and absence of loyalties. He cannot hate them, for they are dumb in their selfishness, and only to be pitied. A curious book, a mystical, glamourous story of today.

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Why do we keep reading the great gatsby , arts & culture.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1937. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Why do we keep reading The Great Gatsby ? Why do some of us keep taking our time reading it? F. Scott Fitzgerald kept it short. A week is unwarranted. It should be consumed in the course of a day. Two at most. Otherwise, all the mystery seeps away, leaving Jay Gatsby lingering, ethereal but elusive, like cologne somebody else is wearing.

I have read The Great Gatsby four times. Only in this most recent time did I choose to attack it in a single sitting. I’m an authority now. In one day, you can sit with the brutal awfulness of nearly every person in this book—booooo, Jordan; just boo. And Mr. Wolfsheim, shame on you, sir; Gatsby was your friend . In a day, you no longer have to wonder whether Daisy loved Gatsby back or whether “love” aptly describes what Gatsby felt in the first place. After all, The Great Gatsby is a classic of illusions and delusions. In a day, you reach those closing words about the boats, the current, and the past, and rather than allow them to haunt, you simply return to the first page and start all over again. I know of someone—a well-heeled white woman in her midsixties—who reads this book every year. What I don’t know is how long it takes her. What is she hoping to find? Whether Gatsby strikes her as more cynical, naive, romantic, or pitiful? After decades with this book, who emerges more surprised by Nick’s friendship with Gatsby? The reader or Nick?

In this way, The Great Gatsby achieves hypnotic mystery. Who are any of these people—Wilson the mechanic or his lusty, buxom, doomed wife, Myrtle? Which feelings are real? Which lies are actually true? How does a story that begins with such grandiloquence end this luridly? Is it masterfully shallow or an express train to depth? It’s a melodrama, a romance, a kind of tragedy. But mostly it’s a premonition.

Each time, its fineness announces itself on two fronts. First, as writing. Were you to lay this thing out by the sentence, it’d be as close as an array of words could get to strands of pearls. “The cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment-houses”? That line alone is almost enough to make me quit typing for the rest of my life.

The second front entails the book’s heartlessness. It cuts deeper every time I sit down with it. No one cares about anyone else. Not really. Nick’s affection for Gatsby is entirely posthumous. Tragedy tends to need some buildup; Fitzgerald dunks you in it. The tragedy is not that usual stuff about love not being enough or arriving too late to save the day. It’s creepier and profoundly, inexorably true to the spirit of the nation. This is not a book about people, per se. Secretly, it’s a novel of ideas.

Gatsby meets Daisy when he’s a broke soldier and senses that she requires more prosperity, so five years later he returns as almost a parody of it. The tragedy here is the death of the heart, capitalism as an emotion. We might not have been ready to hear that in 1925, even though the literature of industrialization demanded us to notice. The difference between Fitzgerald and, say, Upton Sinclair, who wrote, among other tracts, The Jungle , is that Sinclair was, among many other things, tagged a muckraker and Fitzgerald was a gothic romantic, of sorts. Nonetheless, everybody’s got coins in their eyes.

This is to say that the novel may not make such an indelible first impression. It’s quite a book. But nothing rippled upon its release in 1925. The critics called it a dud! I know what they meant. This was never my novel. It’s too smooth for tragedy, under wrought. Yet I, too, returned, seduced, eager to detect. What— who? —have I missed? Fitzgerald was writing ahead of his time. Makes sense. He’s made time both a character in the novel and an ingredient in the book’s recipe for eternity. And it had other plans. The dazzle of his prose didn’t do for people in 1925 what it’s done for everybody afterward. The gleam seemed flimsy at a time when a reader was still in search of writing that seeped subcutaneously.

The twenties were a drunken, giddy glade between mountainous wars and financial collapse. By 1925, they were midroar. Americans were innovating and exploring. They messed around with personae. Nothing new there. American popular entertainment erupted from that kind of messy disruption of the self the very first time a white guy painted his face black. By the twenties, Black Americans were messing around, too. They were as aware as ever of what it meant to perform versions of oneself—there once were Black people who, in painting their faces black, performed as white people performing them. So this would’ve been an age of high self-regard. It would have been an age in which self-cultivation construes as a delusion of the American dream. You could build a fortune, then afford to build an identity evident to all as distinctly, keenly, robustly, hilariously, terrifyingly, alluringly American. Or the inverse: the identity is a conjurer of fortune.

This is the sort of classic book that you didn’t have to be there for. Certain people were living it. And Fitzgerald had captured that change in the American character: merely being oneself wouldn’t suffice. Americans, some of them, were getting accustomed to the performance of oneself. As Gatsby suffers at Nick’s place during his grand reunion with Daisy, he’s propped himself against the mantle “in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom.” (He’s actually a nervous wreck.) “His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock.” Yes, even the clock is in on the act, giving a performance as a timepiece.

So again: Why this book—for ninety-six years, over and over? Well, the premonition about performance is another part of it, and to grasp that, you probably did have to be there in 1925. Live performance had to compete with the mechanical reproduction of the moving image. You no longer had to pay for one-night-only theater when a couple times a day you could see people on giant screens, acting like people . They expressed, gestured, pantomimed, implied, felt. Because they couldn’t yet use words—nobody talked until 1927 and, really, that was in order to sing—the body spoke instead. Fingers, arms, eyes. The human gist rendered as bioluminescence. Often by people from the middle of nowhere transformed, with surgery, elocution classes, a contract, and a plainer, Waspier name, into someone new. So if you weren’t reinventing yourself, you were likely watching someone who had been reinvented.

The motion picture actually makes scant appearances in this book but it doesn’t have to. Fitzgerald was evidently aware of fame. By the time The Great Gatsby arrived, he himself was famous. And in its way, this novel (his third) knows the trap of celebrity and invents one limb after the next to flirt with its jaws. If you’ve seen enough movies from the silent era or what the scholars call the classical Hollywood of the thirties (the very place where Fitzgerald himself would do a stint), it’s possible to overlook the glamorous phoniness of it all. It didn’t seem phony at all. It was mesmerizing. Daisy mesmerized Gatsby. Gatsby mesmerized strangers. Well, the trappings of his Long Island mansion in East Egg, and the free booze, probably had more to do with that. He had an aura of affluence. And incurs some logical wonder about this fortune: How? Bootlegger would seem to make one only so rich.

A third of the way into the book, Nick admits to keeping track of the party people stuffed into and spread throughout Gatsby’s mansion. And the names themselves constitute a performance: “Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester Meyer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull,” Nick tells us. “Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys.” There’s even poor “Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.” This is a tenth of the acrobatic naming that occurs across a mere two pages, and once Fitzgerald wraps things up, you aren’t at a party so much as a movie-premiere after-party.

Daisy’s not at Gatsby’s this particular night, but she positions herself like a starlet. There’s a hazard to her approximation of brightness and lilt. We know the problem with this particular star: She’s actually a black hole. Her thick, strapping, racist husband, Tom, enjoys playing his role as a boorish cuckold-philanderer. Jordan is the savvy, possibly kooky, best friend, and Nick is the omniscient chum. There’s something about the four and sometimes five of them sitting around in sweltering rooms, bickering and languishing, that predicts hours of the manufactured lassitude we call reality TV. Everybody here is just as concocted, manifested. And Gatsby is more than real—and less. He’s symbolic. Not in quite the mode of one of reality’s most towering edifices, the one who became the country’s forty-fifth president. But another monument, nonetheless, to the peculiar tackiness of certain wealth dreams. I believe it was Fran Lebowitz who called it. Forty-five, she once said, is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person.” And Gatsby is the former James Gatz’s idea of the same.

Maybe we keep reading this book to double-check the mythos, to make sure the chintzy goose on its pages is really the golden god of our memories. It wasn’t until reading it for the third time that I finally was able to replace Robert Redford with the blinkered neurotic that Leonardo DiCaprio made of Gatsby in the Baz Luhrmann movie adaptation of the book. Nick labels Gatsby’s manner punctilious. Otherwise, he’s on edge, this fusion of suavity, shiftiness, and shadiness. Gatsby wavers between decisiveness and its opposite. On a drive with Nick where Gatsby starts tapping himself “indecisively” on the knee. A tic? A tell? Well, there he is about to lie, first about having been “educated at Oxford.” Then a confession of all the rest: nothing but whoppers, and a tease about “the sad thing that happened to me”—self-gossip. Listening to Gatsby’s life story is, for Nick, “like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.”

This is a world where “anything can happen”—like the fancy car full of Black people that Nick spies on the road (“two bucks and a girl,” in his parlance) being driven by a white chauffeur. Anything can happen, “even Gatsby.” (Especially, I’d say.) Except there’s so much nothing. Here is a book whose magnificence culminates in an exposé of waste—of time, of money, of space, of devotion, of life. There is death among the ash heaps in the book’s poor part of town. Jordan Baker is introduced flat out on a sofa “with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall.” It’s as likely to be an actual object as it is the idea of something else: the precarious purity of their monotonous little empire.

We don’t know who James Gatz from North Dakota is before he becomes Jay Gatsby from Nowhere. “Becomes”—ha. Too passive. Gatsby tosses Gatz overboard. For what, though? A girl, he thinks. Daisy. A daisy. A woman to whom most of Fitzgerald’s many uses of the word murmur are applied. But we come back to this book to conclude her intentions, to rediscover whether Gatsby’s standing watch outside her house after a terrible night portends true love and not paranoid obsession. And okay, if it is obsession, is it at least mutual? That’s a question to think about as you start to read this thing, whether for the first or fifty-first time. Daisy is this man’s objective, but she’s the wrong fantasy. It was never her he wanted. Not really. It was America. One that’s never existed. Just a movie of it. America .

Wesley Morris is a critic-at-large at the New York Times and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine , where he writes about popular culture and cohosts, with Jenna Wortham, the podcast Still Processing . For three years, he was a staff writer at Grantland , where he wrote about movies, television, and the role of style in professional sports, and cohosted the podcast Do You Like Prince Movies? , with Alex Pappademas. Before that, he spent eleven years as a film critic at the Boston Globe , where he won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Introduction by Wesley Morris to the Modern Library edition of The Great Gatsby , by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Introduction copyright © 2021 by Wesley Morris. Published by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

‘The Great Gatsby’ review (the book, that is, circa 1925)

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Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” opens wide this Friday. Eighty-eight years before -- to the day -- the Los Angeles Times ran this review of the original “The Great Gatsby,” the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Today, perception of the book’s reception in 1925 varies -- some say it was successful , others that it was a dismal failure -- but our review, by Lillian C. Ford, is purely positive. And she captures something of what has made the book a classic.

“The Seamy Side of Society,” read the headline, with this below: “In ‘The Great Gatsby,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald Creates a New Kind of Underworld Character and Throws the Spotlight on the Jaded Lives of the Idle Rich.” The full book review follows:

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who won premature fame in 1920 as the author of “This Side of Paradise,” a book that first turned into literary material the flapper of wealthy parents and of social position, whose principal lack was inhibitions, has in “The Great Gatsby” written a remarkable study of today. It is a novel not to be neglected by those who follow the trend of fiction.

Wisely, Mr. Fitzgerald tells his story through the medium of Nick Carroway [sic], who, after graduation from Yale in 1915 had “participated in the delayed Teutonic migration known as the great war.” When the story opens, Carroway had left his western home and had gone east to learn the bond business. He was living in a tiny house at West Egg, Long Island, near an emblazoned mansion owned by the great Gatsby, an almost mythical person who lived sumptuously, knew no one, but entertained everyone at his great parties given Saturday nights.

Very gradually this Gatsby is revealed as a restless, yearning, baffled nobody, whose connection with bootleggers and bond thieves is suggested, but never mapped out, an odd mixture of vanity and humility, of overgrown ego and of wistful seeker after life.

Across the bay from Gatsby’s mansion, in one of the white palaces of fashionable East Egg, lived Tom and Daisy Buchanan, transplanted from Chicago, but wealthy enough to flourish anywhere. Polo, jazz, cocktails were their earmarks. He, who had been a famous football end a few years before, was now “a sturdy straw-haired man of 30 year of age, with a hard mouth and supercilious manner.” Of his wife, Daisy, Mr. Fitzgerald tells us: “Her face was sad and lovely, with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright, passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget; a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting thing hovering in the next hour.”

Daisy soon confided to Nick that Buchanan had “a girl” and Buchanan verified this by asking Nick to a New York party, in which the blowsy wife of a village garage-keeper appeared as the mistress of a week-end flat supported by Buchanan.

That Daisy was humiliated, discomfited, wearied, was her not-too-zealously guarded secret. So when she met Gatsby and discovered in him an old lover, to whom she had been engaged when he was a lieutenant in a training camp, it was not strange that she should dally with him once more.

But it is for no such ordinary denouement that Mr. Fitzgerald tells his tale. Instead, he builds up a tense situation in which Daisy has the chance to choose Gatsby, with his doubtful antecedents and mysterious present connections, or to be as false as it has ever fallen to the lot of woman to be. She took the meaner way, the safe way, and plotted with her husband to save herself from smirch while letting Gatsby in for the worst that could befall him.

Character could not be more skillfully revealed than it is here. Buchanan and his wife, secure, but beneath contempt, standing shoulder to shoulder in the crisis, is a sad picture. “It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back to their money, or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

The story is powerful as much for what is suggested as for what is told. It leaves the reader in a mood of chastened wonder, in which fact after fact, implication after implication is pondered over, weighed and measured. And when all are linked together, the weight of the story as a revelation of life and as a work of art becomes apparent. And it is very great. Mr. Fitzgerald has certainly arrived.

‘Gatsby,’ ‘Gatz’ and the fallacy of adaptation

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Carolyn Kellogg is a prize-winning writer who served as Books editor of the Los Angeles Times for three years. She joined the L.A. Times in 2010 as staff writer in Books and left in 2018. In 2019, she was a judge of the National Book Award in Nonfiction. Prior to coming to The Times, Kellogg was editor of LAist.com and the web editor of the public radio show Marketplace. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in English from the University of Southern California.

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Review: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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1/ Now go read Trimalchio ! 2/ I believe The Great Gatsby was inspired by Great Expectations . 3/ You may find this interesting: http://dgmyers.blogspot.no/2013/08/baz-luhrmanns-final-paper.html

Great review. The last ten pages of the novel are just exquisitely wrought. The automobile at the time was for the rich only, transforming America. The African Amerucans in the expensive motor vehicle are an important symbol of a changing America.

Thanks, I'll take a look at Trimalchio when I get a chance. I can certainly see the comparison with Great Expectations . Interesting post - properly puts the boot into Luhrmann's adaptation. Good discussion in the comments too. Clearly, quality people frequent the place. ;)

Thanks, Mel - thousands of words could probably be written about the Automobile in Gatsby . There are some great passages - I imagine a re-read would only throw up more for me to enjoy.

Great review and I knew the green light meant more but I did not tie it into jeaulously until I read this. Very good point.

Thanks, the green light is a brilliant metaphor - visually moving and deeply layered. Such a simple idea but one that works so well.

I always welcome comments...

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THE GREAT GATSBY

A graphic novel adaptation.

by F. Scott Fitzgerald & K. Woodman-Maynard ; illustrated by K. Woodman-Maynard ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 2021

A disappointing stand-in for the original.

Nearly a century after its first publication, the English class mainstay is presented in graphic form, presenting the story of Nick, a young man who rents a mansion in Long Island for the summer, and an enigmatic party host named Gatsby.

Fitzgerald’s dialogue appears in speech bubbles while Nick’s signature nonjudgmental judgments are woven into the art itself, appearing in the beam of a lightbulb, the shadow of the self-important Tom Buchanan’s imposing frame, or the chaise that Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker seemingly ceaselessly lounge on. Woodman-Maynard’s adaptation of the text is understandably quite abridged, but it does the book no favors. The great revelation that Gatsby is (spoiler alert) not a trust fund kid but an imposter is afforded a single page, and the fact of his past affair with Daisy is so murkily depicted that it feels less tragic romance and more moony boy and Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The class issues that make the original novel so compelling are thus less than adequately examined. Where the book truly shines is in a few striking images, some metaphorical and some text based, rendered in cool, languid watercolor and digital art. As Woodman-Maynard indicates in the author’s note, those who are not familiar with the novel should begin there; those more familiar with the story will be able to fill in the gaps as they read this condensed version.

Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-5362-1301-0

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Candlewick

Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS

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SUPERMAN SMASHES THE KLAN

by Gene Luen Yang ; illustrated by Gurihiru ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2020

A clever and timely conversation on reclaiming identity and acknowledging one’s full worth.

Superman confronts racism and learns to accept himself with the help of new friends.

In this graphic-novel adaptation of the 1940s storyline entitled “The Clan of the Fiery Cross” from The Adventures of Superman radio show, readers are reintroduced to the hero who regularly saves the day but is unsure of himself and his origins. The story also focuses on Roberta Lee, a young Chinese girl. She and her family have just moved from Chinatown to Metropolis proper, and mixed feelings abound. Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane’s colleague from the Daily Planet , takes a larger role here, befriending his new neighbors, the Lees. An altercation following racial slurs directed at Roberta’s brother after he joins the local baseball team escalates into an act of terrorism by the Klan of the Fiery Kross. What starts off as a run-of-the-mill superhero story then becomes a nuanced and personal exploration of the immigrant experience and blatant and internalized racism. Other main characters are White, but Black police inspector William Henderson fights his own battles against prejudice. Clean lines, less-saturated coloring, and character designs reminiscent of vintage comics help set the tone of this period piece while the varied panel cuts and action scenes give it a more modern sensibility. Cantonese dialogue is indicated through red speech bubbles; alien speech is in green.

Pub Date: May 12, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-77950-421-0

Publisher: DC

Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020

SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS

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Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2017

New York Times Bestseller

by Kwame Alexander with Mary Rand Hess ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2017

A contemporary hero’s journey, brilliantly told.

The 17-year-old son of a troubled rock star is determined to find his own way in life and love.

On the verge of adulthood, Blade Morrison wants to leave his father’s bad-boy reputation for drug-and-alcohol–induced antics and his sister’s edgy lifestyle behind. The death of his mother 10 years ago left them all without an anchor. Named for the black superhero, Blade shares his family’s connection to music but resents the paparazzi that prevent him from having an open relationship with the girl that he loves. However, there is one secret even Blade is unaware of, and when his sister reveals the truth of his heritage during a bitter fight, Blade is stunned. When he finally gains some measure of equilibrium, he decides to investigate, embarking on a search that will lead him to a small, remote village in Ghana. Along the way, he meets people with a sense of purpose, especially Joy, a young Ghanaian who helps him despite her suspicions of Americans. This rich novel in verse is full of the music that forms its core. In addition to Alexander and co-author Hess’ skilled use of language, references to classic rock songs abound. Secondary characters add texture to the story: does his girlfriend have real feelings for Blade? Is there more to his father than his inability to stay clean and sober? At the center is Blade, fully realized and achingly real in his pain and confusion.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-310-76183-9

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Blink

Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT LITERARY FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES

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The Great Gatsby

F. scott fitzgerald, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

In the summer of 1922, Nick Carraway moves from Minnesota to work as a bond salesman in New York. Nick rents a house in West Egg, a suburb of New York on Long Island full of the "new rich" who have made their fortunes too recently to have built strong social connections. Nick graduated from Yale and has connections in East Egg, a town where the people with social connections and "old" money live. One night Nick drives to East Egg to have dinner with his cousin, Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan , a classmate of Nick's at Yale. There, he meets Jordan Baker , a beautiful and cynical professional golfer. Jordan tells Nick that Tom is having an affair. Upon returning home from dinner, Nick sees his mysterious neighbor Jay Gatsby holding out his arms toward the Long Island Sound. Nick looks out across the water, but sees only a green light blinking at the end of a dock on the far shore.

A few days later, Tom invites Nick to a party in New York City. On the way, Tom picks up his mistress, Myrtle Wilson , the wife of George Wilson , the owner of an auto shop an industrial area between West Egg and New York City called the Valley of Ashes . At the party, Myrtle gets drunk and makes fun of Daisy. Tom punches her and breaks her nose.

Nick also attends one of Gatsby's extravagant Saturday night parties. He runs into Jordan there, and meets Gatsby for the first time. Gatsby privately tells Jordan a story she describes as the most "amazing thing." After going to lunch with Gatsby and a shady business partner of Gatsby's named Meyer Wolfsheim , Nick meets with Jordan and learns the "amazing" story: Gatsby met and fell in love with Daisy before World War I, and bought his West Egg mansion just to be near her and impress her. At Gatsby's request, Nick arranges a meeting between Gatsby and Daisy. The two soon rediscover their love.

Daisy invites Nick and Gatsby to lunch with her, Tom, and Jordan. During the lunch, Tom realizes Daisy and Gatsby are having an affair. He insists they all go to New York City. As soon as they gather at the Plaza Hotel, though, Tom and Gatsby get into an argument about Daisy. Gatsby tells Tom that Daisy never loved Tom and has only ever loved him. But Daisy can only admit that she loved them both, and Gatsby is stunned. Tom then reveals that Gatsby made his fortune by bootlegging alcohol and other illegal means. Tom then dismissively tells Daisy to go home with Gatsby, since he knows Gatsby won't "bother" her anymore. They leave in Gatsby's car, while Tom, Nick, and Jordan follow sometime later.

As they drive home, Tom, Nick, and Jordan come upon an accident: Myrtle has been hit and killed by a car. Tom realizes that it must have been Gatsby's car that struck Myrtle, and he curses Gatsby as a coward for driving off. But Nick learns from Gatsby later that night that Daisy was actually behind the wheel.

George Wilson, distraught, is convinced that the driver of the car yellow car that hit Myrtle is also her lover. While at work that day, Nick fights on the phone with Jordan. In the afternoon, Nick has a kind of premonition and finds Gatsby shot to death in his pool. Wilson's dead body is a few yards away. Nick organizes a funeral, but none of the people who were supposedly Gatsby's friends come. Only Gatsby's father and one other man attend.

Nick and Jordan end their relationship. Nick runs into Tom soon after, and learns that Tom told Wilson that Gatsby had run over Myrtle. Nick doesn't tell Tom that Daisy was at the wheel. Disgusted with the corrupt emptiness of life on the East Coast, Nick moves back to Minnesota. But the night before he leaves he walks down to Gatsby's beach and looks out over Long Island Sound. He thinks about Gatsby, and compares him to the first settlers to America. Like Gatsby, Nick says, all people must move forward with their arms outstretched toward the future, like boats traveling upstream against the current of the past.

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The Great Gatsby: The Only Authorized Edition Paperback – EveryBook, September 30, 2004

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Reading age 9 - 12 years
• Print length 180 pages
• Language English
• Lexile measure 1010L
• Dimensions 5.25 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Publisher Scribner
• Publication date September 30, 2004
• ISBN-10 9780743273565
• ISBN-13 978-0743273565
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About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave

me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me,

“just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had

the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually

communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he

meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m

inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up

many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of

not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect

and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal

person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly

accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret

griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were

unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or

a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that

an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the

intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in

which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred

by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of

infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if

I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly

repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled

out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to

the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded

on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point

I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from

the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in

uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted

no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the

human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to

this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented

everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If

personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then

there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened

sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one

of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten

thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do

with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under

the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary

gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have

never found in any other person and which it is not likely I

shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the

end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in

the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my

interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this

Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are

something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re

descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual

founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came

here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and

started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries

I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like

him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting

that hangs in father’s office. I graduated from New

Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and

a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration

known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly

that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm

center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the

ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn

the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business,

so I supposed it could support one more single man. All

my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a

prep school for me, and finally said, “Why—ye-es,” with very

grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year,

and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought,

in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was

a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns

and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested

that we take a house together in a commuting town,

it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weatherbeaten

cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last

minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out

to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a

few days until he ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish

woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered

Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man,

more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I

was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually

conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves

growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had

that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again

with the summer.

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much

fine health to be pulled down out of the young breathgiving

air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit

and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red

and gold like new money from the mint, promising to

unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and

Mæcenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading

many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—

one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials

for the Yale News —and now I was going to bring back

all such things into my life and become again that most limited

of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t

just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at

from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house

in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was

on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of

New York—and where there are, among other natural

curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles

from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour

and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most

domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere,

the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not

perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are

both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical

resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the

gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting

phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except

shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the

two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the

bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My

house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the

Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for

twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was

a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation

of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one

side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble

swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and

garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know

Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion, inhabited by a gentleman of

that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small

eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the

water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling

proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable

East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer

really begins on the evening I drove over there to have

dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second

cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college. And just

after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments,

had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football

at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those

men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one

that everything afterward savors of anticlimax. His family were

enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with

money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago

and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away;

for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies

from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own

generation was wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year

in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and

there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich

together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the

telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s

heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a

little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable

football game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I

drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely

knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I

expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion,

overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and

ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping

over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally

when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines

as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken

by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected

gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom

Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart

on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he

was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard

mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant

eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him

the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not

even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the

enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening

boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could

see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved

under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous

leverage—a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the

impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch

of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—

and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,”

he seemed to say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a

man than you are.” We were in the same senior society, and

while we were never intimate I always had the impression that

he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some

harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

“I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing

about restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat

hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken

Italian garden, a half acre of deep, pungent roses, and a

snub-nosed motor-boat that bumped the tide offshore.

“It belonged to Demaine, the oil man.” He turned me

around again, politely and abruptly. “ We’ll go inside.”

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosycolored

space, fragilely bound into the house by French

windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming

white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little

way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew

curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags,

twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling,

and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a

shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an

enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed

up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in

white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they

had just been blown back in after a short flight around the

house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the

whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on

the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the

rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room,

and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned

slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was

extended full length at her end of the divan, completely

motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing

something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she

saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—

indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for

having disturbed her by coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she

leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then

she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed

too and came forward into the room.

“I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.”

She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and

held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face,

promising that there was no one in the world she so much

wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur

that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve

heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people

lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less

At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me

almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head

back again—the object she was balancing had obviously

tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a

sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of

complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions

in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear

follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of

notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and

lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate

mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that

men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a

singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she

had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there

were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on

my way East, and how a dozen people had sent their love

through me.

“Do they miss me?” she cried ecstatically.

“The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear

wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent

wail all night along the north shore.”

“How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. To-morrow!” Then

she added irrelevantly: “You ought to see the baby.”

“I’d like to.”

“She’s asleep. She’s three years old. Haven’t you ever seen

“Well, you ought to see her. She’s——”

Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about

the room, stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.

“What you doing, Nick?”

“I’m a bond man.”

“Who with?”

I told him.

“Never heard of them,” he remarked decisively.

This annoyed me.

“You will,” I answered shortly. “You will if you stay in the

“Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he said, glancing

at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something

more. “I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.”

At this point Miss Baker said: “Absolutely!” with such suddenness

that I started—it was the first word she had uttered

since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much

as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft

movements stood up into the room.

“I’m stiff,” she complained, “I’ve been lying on that sofa

for as long as I can remember.”

“ Don’t look at me,” Daisy retorted, “I’ve been trying to

get you to New York all afternoon.”

“No, thanks,” said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in

from the pantry, “I’m absolutely in training.”

Her host looked at her incredulously.

“You are!” He took down his drink as if it were a drop in

the bottom of a glass. “How you ever get anything done is

beyond me.”

I looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she “got

done.” I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, smallbreasted

girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by

throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young

cadet. Her gray sun-strained eyes looked back at me with

polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented

face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a

picture of her, somewhere before.

“You live in West Egg,” she remarked contemptuously. “I

know somebody there.”

“I don’t know a single——”

“You must know Gatsby.”

“Gatsby?” demanded Daisy. “What Gatsby?”

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0743273567
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner; First Edition (September 30, 2004)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 180 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780743273565
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0743273565
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 9 - 12 years
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1010L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• #178 in Friendship Fiction (Books)
• #717 in Classic Literature & Fiction
• #2,156 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Great Gatsby Book Review

✅ Martins Family ✅

The Great Gatsby

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About the author

F. scott fitzgerald.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, short story writer and screenwriter. He was best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he popularized. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.

His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).

Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works amid the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson completed and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death.

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10 Movies That Are Better If You Read the Book First

C inema is an integral part of storytelling, simultaneously allowing experimentation with narratives and visuals. Although it stands at a significant position on its own, film as a medium evolves in great proximity to film as a medium evolves in great proximity to literature . The stories expressed through prose eventually find a way to make it on the big screen, whether they be direct adaptations or sources of sole inspiration.

Consuming films may be a relatively more straightforward activity than reading a book. Due to a lack of time or attention span, it does not matter—it is a commonly known fact that books require more effort and time to be both acknowledged and appreciated. This is why film adaptations often capture the audience's intrigue and steal the spotlight, but some stories still require their original prose to be subjected to genuine recognition. Their cinematic siblings are praiseworthy, of course, but here are 10 films that insistently want you to read the book first—if you want the authentic experience.

Related: The Greatest Book-To-Movie Adaptations of the 2000s

The Lovely Bones

Alice Sebold’s drama thriller novel The Lovely Bones , about the brutal murder of a 14-year-old girl (played by Saoirse Ronan), was adapted to film by Peter Jackson in 2009. Saoirse’s character Susie falls victim to the cruel intentions of her neighbor George Harvey in the 1970s. However, stuck in a limbo-esque state, Susie continues to observe and even lead her family throughout the investigation of her disappearance and death. Combining a coming-of-age structure with crime, the afterlife, and the pursuit of justice, The Lovely Bones proposes a complex portrayal of death and heartbreak.

Expectantly, the story's emotional depth is presented much more clearly in the book, emphasizing grief, loss , forgiveness, and resilience. The character developments are relatively more prosperous, and the prose also gives its readers a chance to truly form a bond with Susie and be morally and emotionally invested in her murder. By engaging with the book first, the audience can witness additional character arcs, backstories, and subplots while also understanding its true emotional complexity.

The Girl on the Train

A psychological thriller by Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train tells the story about Rachel Watson, an alcoholic woman with psychological troubles that only further her entanglement with an ongoing missing person investigation. The book was adapted into film in 2016 by Tate Taylor and features Emily Blunt as Watson. Tackling deception, perception, memory, and secrets too dark to express overtly, The Girl on the Train studies the underlying mysteries of seemingly ordinary lives.

The psychological depth of Rachel’s addiction, guilt, and unreliable memories are traced in the book with utmost characterization. The bleak suburban landscape is described with great detail, and the tension is built through extreme immersion in the story and its setting. Also, the structure of its non-linear storytelling becomes firmly established with the novel, and the film’s similar experiments of time become the cherry on top.

Love, Rosie

A romantic comedy novel by Cecelia Ahern, Love, Rosie was adapted to film with the same name in 2014 by Christian Ditter. Following the lives of Rosie Dunne (Lily Collins) and Alex Stewart (Sam Claflin), the story is about two childhood best friends that try to navigate through life and love with various obstacles and missed opportunities. The story looks at the emotional counterparts of long-distance relationships, separation, and the harsh discipline of timing. Since it is essentially a contemporary love story that features the love of both friendships and romantic relationships, the epistolary formatting of Love, Rosie ’s book is quite significant.

Adding depth and increasing levels of empathy, the letters written between the characters help trace the expanded span of time the story takes place in and gives a deeper characterization of the two protagonists than the film is able to. However, one massive perk of the book is the alternate endings and resolutions it proposes for the story’s ending. Allowing the audience to engage with different possible outcomes, the novel actually strengthens the emotional impact of the story and situates its reader in a more active and immersed position.

The Remains of the Day

Written by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day was adapted to film in 1993 by James Ivory. Revolving around a butler, Steven, residing in the English countryside, in a house called the Darlington Hall, the story is set in the years leading up to World War ll . Steven’s thoughts on his career, the relationship he shares with Miss Kenton, the housekeeper, and his dedicated loyalty to his Employer, Lord Darlington comprise the general sense of the plot.

Though the film captures the book's essence and atmosphere, there are still several reasons why the book remains relevant and significant. First and foremost, Ishiguro’s prose style is quite distinctive and evocative, and contributes characterization to the delicate subtlety of the story. His nuanced storytelling and its effect on Steven's narrative perspective as a character and his path of self-realization and transformation are pivotal to comprehending the subtext and intricate symbolism.

The GodFather

The highly acclaimed film of Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather , was a crime novel of the same name written by Mario Puzo. Following the Corleone family, headed by Vito Corleone, the narrative represents the Italian-American mafia scene . Throughout the trilogy, the story explores themes of power, loyalty, family, and organized crime by diving into the inner family dynamics and rivalries of the Corleones.

The filmic trilogy is a renowned masterpiece at this point, but the impression created by the books is crucial for one to grasp the reality of its story. Puzo’s writing style directly reflects the gritty and compelling nature of the mafia world. Aided by characteristic narrative style, the story in the book thus offers broader perspectives on the relationships and criminal network operations of the Corleone family. Themes of morality, honor, loyalty, and blurring of the difference between good and evil are collectively embedded into the narration structure and tone of the book. While the films’ success and quality are immeasurable, the book’s code of loyalty and display of power dynamics are expressed in greater detail.

Related: Recently Banned Books That Deserve a Film Adaptation

Trainspotting

Irvine Welsh’s 1993 black comedy-drama novel Trainspotting was adapted into a film by Danny Boyle in 1996. A group of heroin addicts in 1980s Edinburgh struggle with the challenges of drug addiction and try to break free from its viciously destructive cycle. The friend group is not only entrenched in the Edinburgh drug scene but also engages in various other illegal activities that support their habits. Explicating each character’s physical, emotional, and psychological process of heroin addiction and its devastating effects is an intricate task in the films.

The book, however, delves into the recovery attempts, relapses, themes of identity, and escape in a manner that immerses its reader through the Scottish dialect and linguistic style, the inner monologue of the characters expanded subplots, and the raw and gritty realism of desperation. It is additionally a study of the relevant sociocultural status of the characters. It discusses the socioeconomic factors, the Thatcher-era policies and their impacts, and, evidently, the drug culture prevalent in Edinburgh.

The Great Gatsby

Yet another story adapted to multiple screen iterations is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Greatest Gatsby with the 1974 version by Jack Clayton and the 2013 release directed by Baz Luhrmann. Narrated by Nick Carraway, a young man who settles into the fictitious town of West Egg, New York, the story follows the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is infatuated with the married Daisy Buchanan because of their romantic relationship years ago and is insistent on impressing Daisy and making her leave her husband, Tom.

The lavish scenery present in the films satisfies the audience’s visions, but the prose is what really studies the historical and societal value of the narrative. Set in the 1920s , The Great Gatsby requires cultural context to understand the characters and its setting accurately, and the narrative perspective of Nick Carraway is a primary source of that. Capturing the nuances and Nick’s moral dilemmas, the book functions as the core text to grasp what the story traces as the ‘American Dream.’

The highly controversial Lolita novel of Vladimir Nabokov has two notable film adaptations: one directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and Adrian Lyne’s version released in 1997. Narrated by the character Humbert Humbert, Lolita is a story about a brilliant and articulate scholar’s infatuation and sexual obsession with Dolores Haze, a 17-year-old young girl he nicknames Lolita. It intensely portrays desire, morality, forbidden relationships, and age-centric manipulation.

Because of its radical nature and controversial topic, the story is one that requires utmost concentration and immersion to be able to construe and interpret it in the way it is intended. Nabokov’s linguistic intricacies, wordplays, and complex descriptions play crucial roles in depicting the plot's moral ambiguity and psychological layers. To engage in broader discussions and relevant debates about the book’s subject matter, one must first be introduced to it through its original prose.

2001: A Space Odyssey

The Stanley Kubrick-directed classic 2001: A Space Odyssey is an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 novel of the same title. A science fiction story about humanity’s evolution, nature of consciousness, and the existence of advanced extraterrestrial life, it unfolds in four parts: The Dawn of Man , Discovery of the Moon , Journey to Jupiter , and The Infinite and Beyond .

Initially written based on Clarke’s short story called “The Sentinel,” the screenplay and the novel’s plot were developed simultaneously by both Clarke and Kubrick. Because of the exchange of ideas and concepts between the two creators, the book possesses immense value in truly understanding the impact and grandeur of the film. Delving deeper into the expanded universe, fleshing out the themes and symbolisms in greater detail, and offering a more extensive character development than its screen counterpart, the book comprises practically the core of 2001: A Space Odyssey , and even though the film is considered a masterpiece and admirable adaptation on its own accord, the value of the book is still impossible to gloss over.

Pride and Prejudice

Subjected to several film adaptations over the years, Jane Austen’s timeless classic Pride and Prejudice takes place in early 19th-century England. Following the lives of the Bennet family, the story focuses mainly on Elizabeth Bennet, the second-eldest daughter of the house. As Elizabeth navigates her town's social interactions and courtships, she becomes acquainted with Mr. Darcy , the close friend of the wealthy and amiable Mr. Bingley. The story titularly explores the themes of pride, prejudice, self-reflection, and personal growth that transcends surface-level judgments. It also depicts societal norms and expectations of marriage in 19th-century England, featuring class differences, pressure on women, and the pursuit of advantageous matches.

The screen adaptations capture the visionary and atmospheric feel of the old English countryside, but Austen’s wit and language are incomparable. Not only does the novel give a more well-rounded and complex character portrayal, but it is also filled with social commentary, observations, and critique that can easily get overshadowed in the films.