The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby (original title: The Great Gatsby) is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, first published in 1925. It depicts the experiences of a number of different characters who spend the summer of 1922 in the fictional town of West Egg on Long Island, northeast of New York City. The main character is the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, who has been in love for years with the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, who married another man during his military service.

The Great Gatsby is considered Fitzgerald's masterpiece, in which he explores themes of decadence, debauchery, idealism, resistance to change, and social upheaval. In the process, he created an apt portrait of the so-called "Roaring Twenties," the 1920s in the United States marked by economic growth, Prohibition, crime, jazz, and flappery.

Fitzgerald began working on this novel in 1923. He was inspired by the parties on Long Island, where he was occasionally a guest. However, his progress on the novel was slow. Fitzgerald finished the first draft after moving to the Riviera with his wife Zelda in 1924. Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner's, however, felt this first draft was too vague and persuaded Fitzgerald to revise the manuscript. In April 1925, the novel was published. Reviews were lukewarm, and only 20,000 copies were sold in the first few months after publication. When Fitzgerald died in 1940, he was convinced that all his work would be forgotten.

His novels, and among them especially The Great Gatsby, were rediscovered by a wider audience in the 1940s. The Great Gatsby is now considered one of the most important works of American modernism. T. S. Eliot called it the first step in the development of the American novel since Henry James. Time magazine ranked this novel of Fitzgerald's among the best 100 English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005, and the Modern Library listed it second among the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century in 1998. This made Fitzgerald the highest-ranked US American on the list.

Storyline

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.

The now-demolished Beacon Towers mansion on the North Shore of Long Island is considered the estate that inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald's description of Gatsby's estate.

Translations into German

• Maria Lazar, Th. Knaur Nachf., Berlin 1928.
• Walter Schürenberg, Blanvalet, Berlin 1953; Diogenes, Zurich 1974.
• Bettina Abarbanell, Zurich 2007.
• Reinhard Kaiser, Insel, Berlin 2011
• Lutz-W. Wolff, dtv, Munich 2001.
• Kai Kilian, Anaconda, Cologne 2011.
• Johanna Ellsworth, Nikol, Hamburg 2011.
• Hans-Christian Oeser, Reclam, Stuttgart 2012