Description:

Librarian note: Older covers for this edition can be found here: 1992, 1993, 1993, 1993, 2001, 2001. Generally considered to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's finest novel, The Great Gatsby is a consummate summary of the "roaring twenties", and a devastating expose of the ‘Jazz Age’. Through the narration of Nick Carraway, the reader is taken into the superficially glittering world of the mansions which lined the Long Island shore in the 1920s, to encounter Nick's cousin Daisy, her brash but wealthy husband Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby and the mystery that surrounds him. The Great Gatsby is an undisputed classic of American literature from the period following the First World War and is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. (back cover) Only this CLASSICS MADE EASY™ edition includes A comprehensive 340-WORD GLOSSARYLOCATION GUIDE covering the 75+ locations mentionedCHARACTER GUIDEAdditional Historical Context and About the AuthorUnabridged original textThis is the most comprehensible edition of The Great Gatsby ever compiled. Here is a novel, glamorous, ironical, compassionate–a marvellous fusion into unity of the curious incongruities of the life of the period–which reveals a hero like no other–one who could live at no other time and in no other place. But he will live as a character, we surmise, as long as the memory of any reader lasts.“There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life… 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.”It is the story of this Jay Gatsby who came so mysteriously to West Egg, of his sumptuous entertainments, and of his love for Daisy Buchanan–a story that ranges from pure lyrical beauty to sheer brutal realism, and is infused with a sense of the strangeness of human circumstance in a heedless universe.It is a magical, living book, blended of irony, romance, and mysticism.