The Great Gatsby

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Michela Carpentino, Jan 19, 2022 - Fiction
At the height of his wealth, powerful and envied, isolated in the splendor of his mansion on the Hudson, lives a man condemned to unhappiness. This man is Gatsby, an ex-gangster locked in his own mysterious profession, in a false past from which emerges at times the memory of a single pure youthful love.The young Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, moves to New York in the summer of 1922 and rents a house in the prestigious and dreamy Long Island, inhabited by many newly rich people frantically engaged in celebrating each other. One neighbor strikes Nick in particular: the mysterious Jay Gatsby, who lives in a huge, gaudy house, filling it every Saturday night with guests at his extravagant parties. Yet he lives in desperate loneliness and in senseless love for Nick's cousin Daisy....In the setting of a brilliant and unsatisfied society, where the world of alcohol smugglers mixes with that of bankers and stars, Gatsby desperately pursues his dream of love for Daisy. To no avail now is its power, except to arouse in both lovers a sweet madness, which will end in tragedy.

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About the author (2022)

F(rancis) Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. He was educated at Princeton University and served in the U.S. Army from 1917 to 1919, attaining the rank of second lieutenant. In 1920 Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre, a young woman of the upper class, and they had a daughter, Frances. Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the finest American writers of the 20th Century. His most notable work was the novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). The novel focused on the themes of the Roaring Twenties and of the loss of innocence and ethics among the nouveau riche. He also made many contributions to American literature in the form of short stories, plays, poetry, music, and letters. Ernest Hemingway, who was greatly influenced by Fitzgerald's short stories, wrote that Fitzgerald's talent was "as fine as the dust on a butterfly's wing." Yet during his lifetime Fitzgerald never had a bestselling novel and, toward the end of his life, he worked sporadically as a screenwriter at motion picture studios in Los Angeles. There he contributed to scripts for such popular films as Winter Carnival and Gone with the Wind. Fitzgerald's work is inseparable from the Roaring 20s. Berenice Bobs Her Hair and A Diamond As Big As The Ritz, are two short stories included in his collections, Tales of the Jazz Age and Flappers and Philosophers. His first novel The Beautiful and Damned was flawed but set up Fitzgerald's major themes of the fleeting nature of youthfulness and innocence, unattainable love, and middle-class aspiration for wealth and respectability, derived from his own courtship of Zelda. This Side of Paradise (1920) was Fitzgerald's first unqualified success. Tender Is the Night, a mature look at the excesses of the exuberant 20s, was published in 1934. Much of Fitzgerald's work has been adapted for film, including Tender is the Night, The Great Gatsby, and Babylon Revisited which was adapted as The Last Time I Saw Paris by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1954. The Last Tycoon, adapted by Paramount in 1976, was a work in progress when Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, in Hollywood, California. Fitzgerald is buried in the historic St. Mary's Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland.

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