The Great Gatsby - (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by F Scott Fitzgerald (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with flaps and deckle-edged paper

Young, handsome, and fabulously rich, Jay Gatsby seems to have everything. But at his mansion east of New York City, in West Egg, Long Island, where the party never seems to end, he's often alone in the glittering Jazz Age crowd, watching and waiting, as speculation swirls around him--that he's a bootlegger, that he was a German spy during the war, that he even killed a man. As writer Nick Carraway is drawn into this decadent orbit, he begins to see beneath the shimmering surface of the enigmatic Gatsby, for whom one thing will always be out of reach: Nick's cousin, the married Daisy Buchanan, whose house is visible from Gatsby's just across the bay.

A brilliant evocation of the Roaring Twenties and a satire of a postwar America obsessed with wealth and status, The Great Gatsby is a novel whose power remains undiminished after a century. This edition, based on scholarship dating back to the novel's first publication in 1925, restores Fitzgerald's masterpiece to the original American classic he envisioned, and features an introduction addressing how gender, race, class, and sexuality complicate the pursuit of the American Dream.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Review Quotes

"One of the most quintessentially American novels ever written." ―Time

"The American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country's writers." ―The Washington Post

"No novel has more thrillingly portrayed the corrupting obsessions of love and money. . . . The romantic myth of self-creation speaks deeply to readers. . . . The prose, sentence by gorgeous sentence, goes down like spun sugar." --George Packer, The Atlantic, "The Great American Novels"

About the Author

Min Jin Lee (introduction) is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Pachinko, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2017, and of the nationally bestselling novel Free Food for Millionaires. A writer in residence at Amherst College and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, she lives in New York.

Philip McGowan (editor, notes) is an executive board member of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, the president of the European Association for American Studies, a senior lecturer at Queen's University Belfast, and the editor of the Oxford University Press centenary edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise.