The Great Gatsby

Set amid the glittering wealth, restless ambition, and moral uncertainty of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby remains one of the defining novels of twentieth-century American literature. Through the unforgettable story of Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, Nick Carraway, and the world of East Egg and West Egg, Fitzgerald captures the seduction of reinvention, the ache of lost love, and the fragile promise of the American Dream. This annotated edition is designed for readers who want more than the novel alone. Alongside Fitzgerald's original text, this edition includes a foreword, original illustration, explanatory annotations, and an annotated bibliography that helps place the novel in its literary, historical, and cultural context. The added material offers guidance without overwhelming the reading experience, making the book accessible for students, book clubs, collectors, teachers, and anyone returning to Gatsby with fresh eyes. Elegant, tragic, and endlessly discussable, The Great Gatsby continues to speak to questions of class, identity, illusion, longing, and the cost of chasing a dream that may already be gone. This edition presents the classic novel with added context and care for a new generation of readers.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was the brilliant, self- mythologizing chronicler of the Jazz Age whose four completed novels and 150+ short stories mapped the promise and disillusion of modern American life. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, he was named for his famous distant cousin Francis Scott Key, author of The Star-Spangled Banner. His parents were Edward Fitzgerald and Mary "Mollie" McQuillan; he grew up between the Midwestern respectability of his mother's prosperous Irish-American family and his father's faltering fortunes-an early split that fed the class consciousness in his fiction.Fitzgerald attended St. Paul Academy, then the Newman School in New Jersey, where Father Sigourney Fay encouraged his literary ambitions. He entered Princeton in 1913, threw himself into campus literary life- writing lyrics for the Triangle Club and contributing to the Princeton Tiger and Nassau Literary Magazine-but neglected classes and eventually left to join the Army in 1917. During these years he fell for Chicago heiress Ginevra King, a relationship many scholars see echoing through characters like Daisy Buchanan. Zelda, sudden fame, and the Jazz Age personaWhile stationed near Montgomery, Alabama, in 1918, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre. After a brief breakup over money, he rewrote his campus novel; Scribner's published This Side of Paradise in spring 1920, and he married Zelda in New York on April 3, 1920. Instant celebrity followed, and high-paying magazine short stories-especially for The Saturday Evening Post-financed a headline-grabbing lifestyle. Their only child, Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald, was born in St. Paul on October 26, 1921. Fitzgerald's name became inseparable from the 1920s-he helped popularize the very phrase "Jazz Age," including by titling a 1922 collection Tales of the Jazz Age. After The Beautiful and Damned (1922), the Fitzgeralds decamped to France in 1924, mingling with the American expatriate set around Gerald and Sara Murphy. There he completed The Great Gatsby, published in New York on April 10, 1925-a work he considered his finest. The novel's initial sales disappointed, though its reputation would later make its mark in history.

Foreword Annotated Bibliography The Great Gatsby Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Chapter IX