Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's portrait of the Jazz Age in all its decadence and excess, is, as editor Maxwell Perkins praised it in 1924, "a wonder." It remains one of the most widely read, translated, admired, imitated and studied twentieth-century works of American fiction.

This deceptively simple work, Fitzgerald's best known, was hailed by critics as capturing the spirit of the generation. In Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald embodies some of America's strongest obsessions: wealth, power, greed, and the promise of new beginnings.

The recording includes a selection of letters written by Fitzgerald to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, his agent, Harold Ober, and friends and associates, including Willa Cather, H.L. Mencken, John Peale Bishop and Gertrude Stein.

Edwin C. Clark

. . . It expresses one phase of the great grotesque spectacle of our American scene. It is humor, irony, ribaldry, pathos and loveliness. . . . A curious book, a mystical, glamorous story of today. It takes a deeper cut at life than hitherto has been essayed by Mr. Fitzgerald. He writes well -- he always has -- for he writes naturally, and his sense of form is becoming perfected. -- Books of the Century; New York Times review, April 1925

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. Upon graduating from Princeton, he served in the Army and worked briefly in advertising. He married his wife, Zelda, in 1920, a week after his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published. His works, considered by many to be classics, include The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and the uncompleted The Last Tycoon. He died of a heart attack at the age of 44.