The Great Gatsby

A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Self-made,
self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his
country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise
of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future
that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no
matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And
one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace
becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.
It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion
for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when
Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished
officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries
the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby
devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to
the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of
money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous