, first published on 10 April 1925, is Scott Fitzgerald’s third and most famous novel and an established classic of modern American and Anglophone literature. It has also been widely translated. Its title character, Jay Gatsby, is one of those fictional figures, like Cervantes’ Don Quixote or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who have floated free of their texts of origin and acquired a quasi-independent existence of their own. Gatsby has become a symbol of doomed Romantic aspiration and of the “American Dream”, in all its grandeur and vulgarity, and the novel of which he is the titular protagonist has become a major example of accessible Modernist writing; it combines the readability of nineteenth-century fiction with something of the intricacy of language and structure…
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Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "The Great Gatsby". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 February 2006; last revised 17 January 2022. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=668, accessed 27 November 2024.]
