Riassunto:
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write
"something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and
simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful,
intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The
Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly
the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age
in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit
of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place
in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay
Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most
abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of
new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the
orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded
us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster,
stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--"
Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a
kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream. It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's
quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years
before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young
Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall
in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the
brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the
war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by
whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to
the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says
admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His
millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound
from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties,
and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with
all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached,
cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout.
Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The
Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of
poem. * * * "Now we have an American masterpiece in its final form: the
original crystal has shaped itself into the true diamond. This
is the novel as Fitzgerald wished it to be, and so it is what
we have dreamed of, sleeping and waking." -- James Dickey * * * The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott
Fitzgerald. First published on April 10, 1925, it is set on
Long Island's North Shore and in New York City during the
summer of 1922. The novel takes place following the First World War.
American society enjoyed prosperity during the "roaring" 1920s
as the economy soared. At the same time, Prohibition, the ban
on the sale and manufacture of alcohol as mandated by the
Eighteenth Amendment, made millionaires out of bootleggers.
After its republishing in 1945 and 1953, it quickly found a
wide readership and is today widely regarded as a paragon of
the Great American Novel, and a literary classic. The Great
Gatsby has become a standard text in high school and university
courses on American literature in countries around the world,
and is ranked second in the Modern Library's lists of the 100
Best Novels of the 20th Century. --Wikipedia