F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota,
and went to Princeton University, which he left in 1917 to join the
army. He is said to have epitomized the Jazz Age, which he himself
defined as "grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all
faiths in man shaken." In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre; their
traumatic marriage and her subsequent breakdowns became the leading
influence on his writing. Among his publications were five novels,
This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby,
Tender Is the Night, and The Last Tycoon; six volumes of short
stories; and The Crack-Up, a selection of autobiographical
pieces.
Min Jin Lee (introduction)is the author of the New York Times
bestselling novel Pachinko-a finalist for the National Book Award
and one of The New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st
Century-andof the nationally bestselling novel Free Food for
Millionaires.She has received the Fitzgerald Prize for Literary
Excellence, the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature from South Korea,
and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and has been inducted into
the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame and the New York
State Writers Hall of Fame. She lives in New York City.
Philip McGowan (editor, notes) is an executive board member of the
F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, the president of the European
Association for American Studies, a professor of American
literature at Queen's University Belfast, and a co-editor of The
Routledge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Jennifer Buehler (suggestions for further exploration) is an
associate professor of educational studies at Saint Louis
University and a past president of the Assembly on Literature for
Adolescents of the National Council of Teachers of English.
“Virtuosic . . . Both imperfect and sublime . . . I’ve read and
loved Gatsby for a very long time. . . . I’ve always loved it
because it shows that Fitzgerald understood unfairness. . . . I
cannot imagine a more persuasive and readable book about lost
illusions, class, White Americans in the 1920s, and the perils and
vanity of assimilation. . . . I turn to Gatsby because it gives me
the sober wisdom to imagine and revise my own American dream, and
for that, it has a lasting hold.” ―Min Jin Lee, from the
Introduction
“One of the most quintessentially American novels ever
written.” ―Time
“The American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this
country’s writers.” ―The Washington Post
“No novel has more thrillingly portrayed the corrupting obsessions
of love and money. . . . The romantic myth of self-creation speaks
deeply to readers. . . . The prose, sentence by gorgeous sentence,
goes down like spun sugar.” —George Packer, The Atlantic, “The
Great American Novels”
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