The Great Gatsby

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Now the subject of a major new film from director Baz Luhrmann (Romeo+Juliet, Moulin Rouge!), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, The Great Gatsby is F. Scott Fitzgerald's brilliant fable of the hedonistic excess and tragic reality of 1920s America. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Tony Tanner.
Young, handsome and fabulously rich, Jay Gatsby is the bright star of the Jazz Age, but as writer Nick Carraway is drawn into the decadent orbit of his Long Island mansion, where the party never seems to end, he finds himself faced by the mystery of Gatsby's origins and desires. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life, Gatsby is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon, this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.
In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald brilliantly captures both the disillusionment of post-war America and the moral failure of a society obsessed with wealth and status. But he does more than render the essence of a particular time and place, for - in chronicling Gatsby's tragic pursuit of his dream - Fitzgerald re-creates the universal conflict between illusion and reality.
Like Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) has acquired a mythical status in American literary history, and his masterwork The Great Gatsby is considered by many to be the 'great American novel'. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre, dubbed 'the first American Flapper', and their traumatic marriage and Zelda's gradual descent into insanity became the leading influence on his writing. As well as many short stories, Fitzgerald wrote five novels This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night and, incomplete at the time of his death, The Last Tycoon. After his death The New York Times said of him that 'in fact and in the literary sense he created a "generation" '.
'A classic, perhaps the supreme American novel'
   John Carey, Sunday Times Books of the Century

Adapted with skill and economy of story-telling, this would be the ideal stage version for companies wishing to bring the famous story of Jay Gatsby to life on-stage.

“[Fitzgerald] had one of the rarest qualities in all literature—charm. It’s not a matter of pretty writing or clear style. It’s a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite, the sort of thing you get from good string quartets.” 
— Raymond Chandler
“[Gatsby’s] exuberant ambitions and his abrupt tragedy have merged with the story of America, in its self-creation and its failure.”  — The New Yorker
“Fitzgerald’s novel is a portal to the savage heart of the human spirit, affords a glimpse at our humanity and wonders at our enormous capacity to dream, to imagine, to hope and to persevere.”  — Irish Times
“[Gatsby] is a celebration of intemperance, and a condemnation of its destructiveness. It is about trying to recapture our fleeting joys, about the fugitive nature of delight. It is a tribute to possibility, and a dirge about disappointment. It is a book in which the glory of imagination smacks into the grimness of real life.”  — The Guardian
“A stunning illumination of the world, not only a miracle of talent but a triumph of technique.”  — Richard Yates

Acknowledgments; Illustrations; Introduction; The holograph of The Great Gatsby; A note on the text; Text of the manuscript; Explanatory notes; Illustrations.