The first-person narrator of the story is Nick Carraway, a young man who tries his hand at securities trading in New York in 1922 and moves into an old and modest house in West Egg on Long Island on the east coast of the United States. In the palatial house next door lives Jay Gatsby, the key character in the novel. Gatsby is a young millionaire and obscure businessman whose shrouded-in-mystery origins, obscure education, and seemingly immeasurable fortune provide material for many rumors. Although he hosts lavish dance parties for New York society at his home, he is lonely, as the plot reveals. At the bottom of his heart, he wants to bring back the past and be with the love of his life, Daisy, again. But during the time Gatsby was fighting in France as a soldier in World War I, Daisy married the rough-hewn ex-football and now polo player Tom Buchanan, a reactionary millionaire from a wealthy Midwestern family, with whom she now has a three-year-old daughter. The Buchanans live across the bay in East Egg. Tom has been cheating on his wife for some time with Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a simple gas station owner.
Nick Carraway is a second cousin of Daisy and visits the couple at their estate at the beginning of the narrative set during one summer. There he meets the young, attractive Jordan Baker, who is also an acquaintance of Daisy's. Jordan is a confident woman who takes care of herself, thoroughly likeable but with calculating traits. Nick and Jordan become closer in the course of the story, but ultimately do not enter into a relationship.
With Jordan's and eventually Nick's help, Gatsby reunites with his childhood sweetheart Daisy. Daisy is subsequently torn between her husband Tom Buchanan and Gatsby. During a meeting between the protagonists that eventually results in a trip to New York in Tom and Gatsby's cars, Tom realizes that he is in danger of losing Daisy to Gatsby. As a result, a verbal exchange develops between the two men, with both claiming Daisy's love. At the end of the argument, Tom sends Gatsby and Daisy home in anger.
On their way back, Myrtle Wilson, Tom's lover, runs into their car and is fatally injured. Daisy, who is at the wheel of the crashed car, drives on in a panic. Gatsby will explain hours later to Nick that he wants to take responsibility for the accident out of love for Daisy. Meanwhile, Tom tips off Myrtle's distraught husband, George Wilson, that Gatsby is the owner of the crashed car. From this, Wilson concludes that Gatsby caused the accident, and the next morning shoots Gatsby and then himself.
No one appears at Gatsby's funeral except the narrator, Nick, and Gatsby's father, Henry C. Gatz (Gatsby's real name was James Gatz), finally, a mysterious stranger whom Nick and Jordan had accidentally met months ago at one of Gatsby's debauched parties in the library, where, in a drunken state, he had admired the "authenticity" of the books in Gatsby's library.
