What Is The Great Gatsby About? Fitzgerald's Jazz Age Novel Explained

The Great Gatsby is a short novel by the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925, about Jay Gatsby, a mysterious and very rich man who throws enormous parties on Long Island in the hope of winning back Daisy Buchanan, the woman he loved years before. Set in the summer of 1922, it paints a glittering and finally tragic picture of wealth, desire and the American Dream in the Jazz Age. It sold modestly at first but is now one of the most widely read American novels.

The writer of the Jazz Age

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) became famous young with his first novel and, with his wife Zelda, came to symbolise the glamorous, hard-drinking 1920s. He even helped popularise the phrase "the Jazz Age" for the decade. Behind the glamour there were money worries, alcohol problems and Zelda's illness. Fitzgerald died at 44 believing himself a failure, without knowing that Gatsby would become a classic.

The story in brief

The narrator, Nick Carraway, a young man from the Midwest, moves to West Egg on Long Island to work in the bond business in New York. His neighbour is Gatsby, who lives in a huge mansion and holds wild parties that hundreds of strangers attend, though almost nobody knows who he really is. Across the bay, in the more old-money East Egg, live Nick's cousin Daisy and her rich, arrogant husband Tom Buchanan.

Nick learns that Gatsby and Daisy fell in love five years earlier, before Gatsby went to war. Gatsby was poor then, and Daisy married Tom. Since then, Gatsby has built a fortune, partly through shady business, and bought his house so he could look across the water at the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. With Nick's help, the two meet again and begin an affair.

But the past cannot simply be repeated. In a tense scene in a hot New York hotel room, Tom exposes Gatsby's background, and Daisy cannot leave her husband. Driving back with Gatsby's car, Daisy hits and kills Myrtle, Tom's lover. Gatsby takes the blame to protect her. Myrtle's husband, misled into thinking Gatsby was the driver and Myrtle's lover, shoots Gatsby and then himself. Almost no one comes to Gatsby's funeral, and Nick, disgusted with the careless rich, returns to the Midwest.

The green light and other symbols

The novel is famous for its images. The green light across the bay stands for Gatsby's hope and his dream of Daisy, always just out of reach. The huge eyes of an old optician's advertisement watch over the grey "valley of ashes" between Long Island and the city, often read as a kind of empty, godless judgement. The contrast between the shiny parties and the ash-covered valley shows the cost of the era's wealth.

The American Dream

Gatsby rose from nothing by his own efforts, which seems like the American Dream. Yet his dream is about recapturing a moment in the past and winning a woman who represents status and money. The old-money Buchanans never accept him, and they escape without consequences while he dies. The book asks whether the dream was ever what it promised. Its last line, about boats beating "against the current", is one of the most quoted endings in American writing.

A lasting influence

The Great Gatsby has been adapted for film several times and is widely studied in schools. Its title character has become a type: a self-made person whose glamour hides loneliness. Its short length and beautiful sentences also make it a popular choice for advanced English learners.

Learn with Gatsby: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
old money	families rich for generations	They're old money; they never talk about prices.
new money	people who became rich recently	The new money crowd loved big parties.
the green light	permission to begin (everyday use)	We got the green light for the project.
to keep up appearances	to pretend things are fine	They kept up appearances despite their debts.
to live in the past	to focus too much on old times	Stop living in the past.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a goal you are chasing, using "the green light" and "to live in the past".