American · b. 1896
Considered one of the greatest American novelists of the 20th century
F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American novelist whose masterpiece The Great Gatsby made him the defining chronicler of the Jazz Age and one of the 20th century's essential writers.
F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925 to modest commercial success and mixed reviews. It is now considered the quintessential American novel — a short, perfectly constructed study of wealth, illusion, obsession, and the failure of the American Dream that manages to be both of its moment and entirely timeless. Fitzgerald’s prose is among the most beautiful in the American canon, lyrical without sacrificing precision, and his portrait of the Long Island rich of the 1920s is devastatingly observed.
The novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, offers just enough detachment to see the emptiness beneath the glittering surface of Gatsby’s world, but Fitzgerald is careful never to make the critique simple. Gatsby’s romantic delusion is rendered with genuine sympathy — his belief that the past can be recovered, that enough money and longing can reverse time, is both foolish and heartbreaking. The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock has become one of literature’s most resonant images precisely because what it represents is both universally recognisable and forever out of reach.
Fitzgerald’s life and his art were deeply entangled — the excess and tragedy he wrote about were also lived by him — and some readers struggle to separate the romantic mythology around his biography from a clear reading of his actual achievement. But The Great Gatsby earns its reputation on the page: it is a novel that improves on re-reading, revealing more of its architecture with each pass.
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Jay Gatsby's lavish parties, his green light across the bay, and his impossible dream of recapturing the past define Fitzgerald's short, perfect novel about the American Dream's fatal beauty — the defining American novel of the twentieth century.
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by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dick Diver, a brilliant American psychiatrist on the French Riviera in the 1920s, has married his former patient Nicole and constructed a life of exquisite social grace — which we watch unravel across the novel.
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by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Anthony Patch, heir to a great fortune, and his beautiful wife Gloria dazzle New York society while waiting for Anthony's grandfather to die. The wait — and the drinking and the parties — destroy them both before the inheritance arrives.
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by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Amory Blaine moves through Princeton and the First World War and a series of love affairs toward a nebulous self-awareness. Fitzgerald's debut novel made him famous at twenty-three and introduced the Jazz Age to American literature.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald's complete bibliography in order — from This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby to Tender Is the Night and The Last Tycoon. Best starting points and what makes him essential.
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Where to start with F. Scott Fitzgerald — whether to begin with The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, or This Side of Paradise. A complete reading guide.
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Two books on every high school syllabus, two very different Americas. The green light versus the red hunting hat — which should you read first, and why both still matter.
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Fitzgerald's portrait of Jay Gatsby reaching for the green light is the defining American novel of illusion and disillusion. These books share its obsession with reinvention, its gorgeous prose, and its brutal honesty about who America lets succeed.
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