"The Great Gatsby" (Eng. Of The Great Gatsby)-a novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was released on April 10, 1925 and is a typical representative of the so-called "Age of Jazz" in American literature. The novel was started by Fitzgerald in New York, and completed and published in Paris, where he then resided during his trip to Europe.
The action of the novel, the main plot of which is a love story with a detective and tragic denouement, develops near New York, on the "golden coast" of Long Island, among the rich villas. In the 1920s, following the chaos of World War I, American society entered an unprecedented period of prosperity: in the “roaring twenties”, the US economy developed rapidly. At the same time, Prohibition made many bootleggers millionaires and gave a significant impetus to the development of organized crime. While admiring the rich and their charm, Fitzgerald at the same time questions the unlimited materialism and moral crisis. America of that era.
Although The Great Gatsby was staged on Broadway and filmed in Hollywood shortly after release, the novel did not become particularly famous during the author's lifetime - about 24,000 copies of the book were sold. However, shortly after the death of Fitzgerald, the novel was reprinted, and this caused an unusual wave of interest. Popularity of the book on a national scale contributed to the fact that 150,000 copies of the novel were sent to American soldiers to the front. Since then, more than 25 million copies have been sold worldwide.
In the following decades, the novel became compulsory for reading in high schools and university courses in literature in many English-speaking countries of the world.
In 1998, the novel was ranked No. 2 on the list of 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century according to the Modern Library publishing house, second only to Ulysses by James Joyce.
He was included in the 2013 Publishers Weekly bestseller list.