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Summary
Summary
Featured title on PBS's The Great American Read in 2018
F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic American novel of the Roaring Twenties is beloved by generations of readers and stands as his crowning work. This audio edition, authorized by the Fitzgerald estate, is narrated by Oscar-nominated actor Jake Gyllenhaal ( Brokeback Mountain ). Gyllenhaal's performance is a faithful delivery in the voice of Nick Carraway, the Midwesterner-turned-New-York-bond salesman, who rents a small house next door to the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby. There, he has a firsthand view of Gatsby's lavish West Egg parties--and of his undying love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan.
After meeting and losing Daisy during the war, Gatsby has made himself fabulously wealthy. Now, he believes that his only way to true happiness is to find his way back into Daisy's life, and he uses Nick to try to reach her. What happens when the characters' fantasies are confronted with reality makes for a startling conclusion to this iconic masterpiece.
This special audio edition joins the recent film--as well as many other movie, radio, theater, and even video-game adaptations--as a fitting tribute to the cultural significance of Fitzgerald's Jazz Age classic, widely regarded as one of the greatest stories ever told.
Author Notes
F(rancis) Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. He was educated at Princeton University and served in the U.S. Army from 1917 to 1919, attaining the rank of second lieutenant. In 1920 Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre, a young woman of the upper class, and they had a daughter, Frances.
Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the finest American writers of the 20th Century. His most notable work was the novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). The novel focused on the themes of the Roaring Twenties and of the loss of innocence and ethics among the nouveau riche. He also made many contributions to American literature in the form of short stories, plays, poetry, music, and letters. Ernest Hemingway, who was greatly influenced by Fitzgerald's short stories, wrote that Fitzgerald's talent was "as fine as the dust on a butterfly's wing." Yet during his lifetime Fitzgerald never had a bestselling novel and, toward the end of his life, he worked sporadically as a screenwriter at motion picture studios in Los Angeles. There he contributed to scripts for such popular films as Winter Carnival and Gone with the Wind.
Fitzgerald's work is inseparable from the Roaring 20s. Berenice Bobs Her Hair and A Diamond As Big As The Ritz, are two short stories included in his collections, Tales of the Jazz Age and Flappers and Philosophers. His first novel The Beautiful and Damned was flawed but set up Fitzgerald's major themes of the fleeting nature of youthfulness and innocence, unattainable love, and middle-class aspiration for wealth and respectability, derived from his own courtship of Zelda. This Side of Paradise (1920) was Fitzgerald's first unqualified success. Tender Is the Night, a mature look at the excesses of the exuberant 20s, was published in 1934.
Much of Fitzgerald's work has been adapted for film, including Tender is the Night , The Great Gatsby, and Babylon Revisited which was adapted as The Last Time I Saw Paris by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1954. The Last Tycoon, adapted by Paramount in 1976, was a work in progress when Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, in Hollywood, California. Fitzgerald is buried in the historic St. Mary's Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Readers in that sizeable group of people who think The Great Gatsby is the Great American Novel will be delighted with Robbins's subtle, brainy and immensely touching new reading. There have been audio versions of Gatsby before this-by Alexander Scourby and Christopher Reeve, to name two-but actor/director Robbins brings a fresh and bracing vision that makes the story gleam. From the jaunty irony of the title page quote ("Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!") to the poetry of Fitzgerald's ending about "the dark fields of the republic" and "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past," Robbins conjures up a sublime portrait of a lost world. And as a bonus, the excellent audio actor Robert Sean Leonard reads a selection of Fitzgerald's letters to editors, agents and friends which focus on the writing and selling of the novel. Listeners will revel in learning random factoids, e.g., in 1924, Scott and Zelda were living in a Rome hotel that cost just over $500 a month, and he was respectfully suggesting that his agent Harold Ober ask $15,000 from Liberty magazine for the serial rights to Gatsby. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
This thoughtful, well-developed, highly academic volume includes some background information about Fitzgerald, then presents a chapter-by-chapter summary of his novel. Eleven brief essays and snippets from longer critical works follow, exposing readers to a variety of scholarly perspectives and approaches. An annotated bibliography will be useful to young Fitzgerald scholars. Bib., ind. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Choice Review
This fine critical edition of The Great Gatsby is a desirable acquisition for all university libraries and will prove quite useful to both scholars and college students. Editor Bruccoli, a preeminent Fitzgerald scholar, has made numerous appropriate changes in the original text, many of them desired by Fitzgerald but overlooked in the haste with which the 1925 edition was rushed into print. The scholarly apparatus is accessible and often fascinating. Stages of composition and revision from manuscript through galleys are explained chronologically. Substantive emendations and typographical "accidentals" are catalogued. Explanatory notes are succinctly provided throughout the text. Various appendixes dealing with the novel's early titles, dust-jacket illustrations, chronology, and the geography of East and West Egg (with illustrative maps) are provided, as are facsimiles of sample manuscript and galley pages. Throughout, the editor explains and justifies the difficult decisions he has made as to what to change and what to let stand. In sum, this is a meticulous and necessary work of scholarship, a valuable addition to Fitzgerald studies and to any library.-B. H. Leeds, Central Connecticut State University
School Library Journal Review
Gr 8 UpAn initial biographical essay and closing chronology introduce Fitzgerald, his era, and his place in American literature. "For Further Research" includes Web site sources and provides helpful primary and secondary references. Spanning more than 50 years of criticism, the 19 pithy essays, one by Fitzgerald himself, are divided into three chapters that successively focus on Gatsby's character, American culture, and literary structure. Additional quotes, boxed and placed throughout the text, provide additional support for the authors' positions. There is little overlap of other Fitzgerald or Gatsby volumes in similar series, and although comparable titles written by one author exist, this volume's multi-authored critiques afford a highly varied, even conflicting, dialogue that's necessary for stimulating classroom discussion.Kate Foldy, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, yet when I came back from the east last autumn I wanted no more privileged excursions. My family are prominent Middle Westerners, yet after the great war I decided to go east and learn the bond business. It was a warm season so my father rented me a small bungalow at 80 a month on Long Island Sound, and one evening in that summer of 1922 I drove over to dinner with my second cousin Daisy and her enormously wealthy husband, Tom, whom I had known at college. "Black people are taking over the world," said Tom, making himself unsubtly unsympathetic. "You haven't met our baby yet, have you Nick?" Daisy asked. "Neither have you, apparently," her companion, Miss Baker, said evenly. "She's now three years old." "Well let's not worry about her," Daisy laughed, drinking another cocktail. "She's only a symbol of neglect." The telephone rang in the hall and Tom left the table without a word. Daisy chattered a while and then excused herself. "Everyone knows Tom has another woman in New York," Miss Baker whispered to me. "I'm Jordan, by the way. I sense we're going to have an inconsequential affair." Tom mannishly invited me to meet his girl the following week. I tried to demur but he was insistent, and that Sunday we stopped by Wilson's car repair workshop near the ash heaps on Main Street. A roundish woman appeared. "I've got to see you," he said intently. "Take the next train into the city." "My husband doesn't suspect a thing," Myrtle Wilson laughed as we all got drunk. "Just don't mention Daisy," said Tom. "Daisy, Daisy, Daisy." Tom punched her hard and broke her nose. I've wondered since whether I should have intervened, but that might have compromised my role as a semi-detached observer. So I left quietly with my moral authority still unblemished. Every Friday a corps of caterers came down to provide for my neighbour's legendary parties at his exquisite shore-side mansion. Some said that Gatsby had once killed a man, but no one seemed to know or care who he was, as they came uninvited from miles around to enjoy his seemingly limitless hospitality. I was the exception, as his manservant had delivered an invitation to me earlier in the week, and soon after I arrived I went looking for my host. "You look very familiar, old sport," said a man with piercing, friendly eyes. "And you are?" I enquired. "Jay Gatsby, old sport." I apologised for not recognising him, believing him to be much older. It emerged that we had served in France at the same time and I confess that I instantly warmed to him. "I'm inclined to believe that you really are who you say and that you did go to Oxford," I said patronisingly. I see that from what I've written so far, you might think that I was not quite as detached from the fast set as I would like you to believe. So allow me to mention that I also worked extremely hard. And now that's over, I can return to the story. To my surprise, Gatsby courted me assiduously, once even introducing me to his shady Jewish associate. "He wants you to invite Daisy and him to tea," Jordan told me later. "They were lovers before the war and he bought the house just to be close to her. He's been heartbroken since he learned Daisy had married Tom." Gatsby told me much later he had been born James Gatz, the son of an impecunious westerner, and had decided to reinvent himself when he was 17. He had never told Daisy he was penniless when they first met, and by the time he had money she was already wed. Yet even before he had trusted me with the truth, I had been happy to effect the introduction, and he and Daisy rekindled their passion with a sincerity in marked contrast to the superficiality of my relationship with Jordan. The weeks slid by in easeful contentment, but eventually Tom grew suspicious. "She doesn't love you," he said cruelly one day. "She does," Gatsby cried. "It's you she never loved, old sport." "I've loved you both." "Gatsby is a bootlegger," Tom shouted. "He's not one of us." Gatsby and Daisy sped off in Tom's car, while Tom and I followed in the coupe. We came across the body of Myrtle Wilson lying dead in the road. "She ran out towards the car and it didn't stop," said a bystander. I advised Gatsby to make a dash for Montreal, but he refused. I had guessed that it had been Daisy driving, but his nobility went unrewarded. Tom and Daisy refused to see him and society closed ranks. Greater tragedy soon followed. Tom did nothing to correct Mr Wilson's belief that it was Gatsby who had killed his wife, and one morning Wilson shot him by the pool before turning the gun on himself. Gatsby's death passed almost unmourned except by me and his father. I couldn't hate Tom and Daisy. They were just a bit careless. And with that profound observation, I casually dumped Jordan. It was time to retreat from the green orgastic light of the east back into the safety of my provincial squeamishness. John Crace's Digested Reads appear in G2 on Tuesdays. Caption: article-DigClass28.1 "Well let's not worry about her," [Daisy] laughed, drinking another cocktail. "She's only a symbol of neglect." [Tom] mannishly invited me to meet his girl the following week. I tried to demur but he was insistent, and that Sunday we stopped by Wilson's car repair workshop near the ash heaps on Main Street. A roundish woman appeared. "I've got to see you," he said intently. "Take the next train into the city." "He wants you to invite Daisy and him to tea," Jordan told me later. "They were lovers before the war and he bought the house just to be close to her. He's been heartbroken since he learned Daisy had married Tom." - John Crace.
Library Journal Review
Fitzgerald's classic novel depicts the times, sounds, attitudes, and lives of many Americans in the 1920s. Upon moving to the West Egg area of Long Island to sell bonds in New York, unassuming narrator Nick Carraway becomes involved with, though never quite a part of, several segments of the alternating languid and furiously paced lives of individuals with money and time to spend. When he meets his neighbor the mysterious Jay Gatsby at a wild party in the neighborhood, Nick becomes entwined in Gatsby's hopeful plan to rekindle his continuing love for Nick's cousin Daisy Buchanan. Themes of reality vs. fantasy, hope vs. obsession, the idle rich, and the American dream are beautifully threaded to offer readers a tapestry that has come to embody the time period. Narrator Jake Gyllanhaal gives an understated performance filled with nuance and a thoughtful appreciation of the written word. Never overpowering, Gyllanhaal allows time for readers to draw their own conclusions and investigate their own interpretations of the novel's many facets. This fresh audio production will inspire readers to experience the classic anew. VERDICT This is an essential purchase for libraries not owning this novel in audiobook format and for those wanting to use the popular movie poster found on the audiobook cover as a conduit for enticing new listeners.-Lisa Youngblood, Harker Heights P.L., TX (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
'He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward -- and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.' Excerpted from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
