In the minds of his contemporaries, Francis Scott Fitzgerald was and remains not just a writer, but a living legend, the embodiment of the spirit of the time. In the 1920s, he became an idol of American youth, who saw him as a brilliant exponent of his own worldview. This reputation has stuck to him forever, and even today American critics continue to call him a singer of the “jazz age”. True, now there is no doubt that the work of Fitzgerald, along with the works of Sh. Anderson, E. Hemingway, T. Wolfe, W. Faulkner, – a phenomenon in the highest degree significant that it reflects a whole era in the development of American consciousness and has an absolute aesthetic value.

In the novel “The Great Gatsby” included in this edition, Fitzgerald explores the phenomenon of the “American dream”. In the character of the protagonist Jay Gatsby, the writer managed to achieve an amazing harmony in depicting the appeal of the dream and its inevitable collapse.

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Published:  1925
Original language:  English
Literary Genre: psychological novel