About The Great Gatsby

By F. Scott Fitzgerald · first published in 1925 · Literary Fiction

In the summer of 1922 Nick Carraway, a young man from the Midwest, rents a small house on Long Island beside the enormous mansion of Jay Gatsby, whose parties fill the summer nights and whose past nobody can quite explain. Across the bay live Nick’s cousin Daisy and her husband, Tom Buchanan, and at the end of their dock a green light burns all night.

F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in April 1925. It sold modestly, and by the time he died in 1940 its sales had dwindled to almost nothing. During the Second World War well over a hundred thousand copies were printed for American servicemen, and in the decades that followed it became a fixture of school reading lists and is often named among the great American novels.

The novel entered the public domain in the United States on 1 January 2021, ninety-five years after it was published, and it has long been free to read in India, where copyright lasts sixty years after an author’s death. The preview opens with Chapter One and Nick’s much-quoted first lines about his father’s advice.