F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American novelist whose masterpiece The Great Gatsby made him the defining chronicler of the Jazz Age and one of the 20th century's essential writers.

F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925 to modest commercial success and mixed reviews. It is now considered the quintessential American novel — a short, perfectly constructed study of wealth, illusion, obsession, and the failure of the American Dream that manages to be both of its moment and entirely timeless. Fitzgerald’s prose is among the most beautiful in the American canon, lyrical without sacrificing precision, and his portrait of the Long Island rich of the 1920s is devastatingly observed.

The novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, offers just enough detachment to see the emptiness beneath the glittering surface of Gatsby’s world, but Fitzgerald is careful never to make the critique simple. Gatsby’s romantic delusion is rendered with genuine sympathy — his belief that the past can be recovered, that enough money and longing can reverse time, is both foolish and heartbreaking. The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock has become one of literature’s most resonant images precisely because what it represents is both universally recognisable and forever out of reach.

Fitzgerald’s life and his art were deeply entangled — the excess and tragedy he wrote about were also lived by him — and some readers struggle to separate the romantic mythology around his biography from a clear reading of his actual achievement. But The Great Gatsby earns its reputation on the page: it is a novel that improves on re-reading, revealing more of its architecture with each pass.