The Canon Library
Cover of The Great Gatsby

Modern · Novel

The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby filters wealth, longing, reinvention, and moral failure through a narrator who is both participant and judge, fascinated by the dream he learns to distrust.

Save or track in My CanonFind available editions on Bookshop.orgCompare recommended editions

Find a print edition

Browse Bookshop.org's current catalog to choose an available edition.

Some purchase links are affiliate links. We may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.

Date
1925
Origin
United States
Era
Modern
Genre
Novel
Canon tier
Essential core
Difficulty
Accessible
Length
Short
Reading time
4–6 hours
Collection
The Western Canon

Subjects and themes

Self-InventionClassDesireMemoryThe American DreamDreamWealth

Why it matters

Its brevity and symbolic clarity made it one of the most durable examinations of American self-making and of the social barriers that money can conceal without dissolving.

This work is included on the basis of modern broader canon. Its cataloged influence level is 5 out of 5.

Before you read

Watch Nick’s changing claims about his own impartiality. The novel’s parties and surfaces matter, but its structure depends on delayed information, retrospective narration, and repeated acts of looking across distance.

Historical context

The story’s prosperity is bound to speculation, illicit money, inherited status, racial anxiety, and the uneven social order beneath the glamour of the 1920s.

What to read before

What to read next

Related works

Book

Beloved

Toni Morrison · Contemporary · Novel

Reading paths featuring The Great Gatsby

Continue through a deliberately ordered journey that places this work in conversation with others.

Reading path

Essential 100

A century of works that gives the broadest useful first view of the Western canon. 100 books · Advanced.

Reading path

Modernism

A route through fractured time, unstable narrators, urban consciousness, and formal experiment. 9 books · Advanced.

Reading path

The Great American Novel

Eight major contenders for the elusive Great American Novel: books that test the country's myths of freedom, race, money, mobility, violence, and memory. 8 books · Intermediate.

Access and editions

2 edition recommendations are available.

Compare editions of The Great Gatsby