April 10 - The Great Gatsby

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” … F. Scott Fitzgerald’s landmark novel, The Great Gatsby, was published on April 10, 1925. Set in Long Island and Manhattan at the start of the Roaring Twenties amid unprecedented economic prosperity, the book follows Jay Gatsby, a man whose singular desire – to re-win the heart of his lost love, Daisy Buchanan – drives him from poverty to immense (bootlegged) wealth, disillusionment and death. Told through the lens of Nick Carraway, in resonant prose that blends Jazz-era vernacular with the poetic and the profound, it is often viewed as the Great American Novel, a masterpiece that captures not only the essence of a reckless, doomed era but the nature of the American dream. Fitzgerald planned the novel as a "consciously artistic” effort, and finished it in 1923 while on the French Riviera with his wife, Zelda. The famous cover art (pictured), showing disembodied eyes and mouth, influenced Fitzgerald while he wrote Gatsby.