The Great Gatsby
A bond salesman rents a small house next to a mansion on Long Island and watches his neighbour throw parties for a woman who lives across the bay. Fitzgerald's novel is short, carefully patterned and narrated by a man who is both inside and outside the world he describes.
The book is usually taught as a critique of the American dream, which it is, but it is also a love story about a man who has invented himself. The prose is lyrical and the structure is almost architectural. Read it twice: once for the plot, once for the sentences.
Public-domain status
First published in 1925. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, so this work has been free to republish there since 2011.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 64317 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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Keep reading
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- Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman, 1855
- Bleak House — Charles Dickens, 1853
- Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens, 1838
- New York — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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