The Great Gatsby is a portrait of America at the height of its roaring prosperity, when money flowed like champagne and everyone believed they'd never run dry. Nick Carraway arrives in West Egg, Long Island, next door to the enigmatic Jay Gatsby, a man who throws parties nobody is invited to, who appears to have risen from nothing, and who lives for only one purpose: to reclaim Daisy Buchanan, the woman he loved and lost five years ago. What follows is a devastating examination of desire, class, and the dark underbelly of the American Dream. Fitzgerald's prose is liquid gold, capable of making the careless wealth of the 1920s feel both seductive and poisonous. The green light at the end of Daisy's dock burns through the entire novel like a question about what we're all really chasing. This is a novel about the danger of loving an ideal more than any real person, and the price exacted when the dream finally collides with reality. It is perhaps the most precise American novel ever written about what it means to want something you cannot have.
