The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald's 1925 novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, who moves to Long Island and becomes involved with his neighbour Jay Gatsby, a wealthy man of unexplained origin who holds enormous parties. Gatsby's purpose is to recover Daisy Buchanan, whom he loved five years earlier before he had money, and whose husband Tom is wealthy by inheritance.

The class structure is the novel's subject. Fitzgerald separates inherited wealth, represented by the Buchanans and by East Egg, from acquired wealth, represented by Gatsby and West Egg, and shows that the second cannot buy entry into the first regardless of quantity. Gatsby's money comes from bootlegging and from securities fraud, and the novel is precise that the source matters less than the fact of acquisition rather than inheritance.

The central argument is stated at the end, that Gatsby's error was believing the past could be repeated and that money could restore a position that time had removed. Nick's judgment that Tom and Daisy were careless people who smashed things and retreated into their money is the book's moral conclusion. The novel sold poorly during Fitzgerald's life and became canonical afterwards, largely through wartime distribution to American troops.

It is short and the prose is the reason to read it. Its business readership treats it as a study of new money against old, of the limits of what wealth purchases, and of a person whose entire construction of self is directed at a single objective that cannot be achieved. Readings that treat Gatsby as an aspirational figure invert what the novel says about him.