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Informationen zum Autor F. Scott Fitzgerald was considered the quintessential author of the Jazz Age. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896, Fitzgerald attended Princeton University, where he began to write seriously. After joining the U.S. Army in 1917, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre, whom he later married. In 1920, Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, transformed Fitzgerald overnight into a literary sensation. The Great Gatsby followed in 1925, although it was not as popular at the time as his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned . Fitzgerald died in 1940 of a heart attack. He was forty-four years old. Klappentext Fitzgerald's masterpiece--the quintessential Jazz Age novel--now in a hardcover Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics edition For generations of enthralled readers, F. Scott Fitzgerald's mysterious millionaire, Jay Gatsby, has come to embody all the glamour and decadence of the Roaring Twenties. Gatsby emerges as if from nowhere, evading questions about his past and throwing dazzling parties sparkling with champagne and jazz at his luxurious Long Island mansion. Nick Carraway, a young man who has moved in next door, is fascinated by his oddly detached neighbor, and by his discovery that Gatsby is motivated by a single-minded quest to regain his long-lost love, Daisy Buchanan. Nick finds something both appalling and appealing about the intensity of Gatsby's ambition to reinvent himself. But Daisy and her wealthy husband are cynical and careless people, and as Gatsby's dream collides with reality, Nick is witness to the violence and tragedy that result. The Great Gatsby 's remarkable staying power, nearly a century after its publication, is owed both to the lyrical freshness of its storytelling and to the way that it illuminates the hollow core of the glittering American dream. Leseprobe from the INTRODUCTION by Malcolm Bradbury “The uncertainties of 1919 were over – there seemed little doubt about what was going to happen – America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it. The whole golden boom was in the air – its splendid generosities, its outrageous corruptions and the tortuous death struggle of the old America in prohibition. All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them.” --F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Early Success” (1937) No writer ever set out more determinedly to capture and condense in fiction the tone, the style, the spirit, the noise, the excitement, the hope and the despair of his own decade than Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. The decade was, of course, the American 1920s—the era when, in the wake of the Great War, the United States became modern and a leading world power, and in an era of economic boom and unprecedented change the nation entered on what Fitzgerald himself tagged the “greatest, gaudiest spree in history.” The great, gaudy spree was not merely something that Fitzgerald observed and then wrote about. Beside his flamboyant wife Zelda, herself a Fitzgerald flapper heroine and the obvious source for the headstrong new women who populate his five novels and his many short stories, Fitzgerald went on to live out the times as a great and glorious spectacle. He gave himself so thoroughly to the task, that it all became personal; on behalf of Ameicans at large, Fitzgerald publicly performed the Twenties. From the moment when his first novel, This Side of Paradise, came out in 1920, just as the new decade started, to win immediate success because it seemed so exactly to voice the spirit, hopes and anxieties of the new post-war generation, he became a cultural icon, an embodiment of what was happening. “I who knew less of New York than any reporter of six months standing and less of its society than any hall-room boy in a Ritz stag line, was pushed into the position not only of spokesman for ...
