The Great Gatsby

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Painted against the backdrop of the expansive wealth and unleashed passions of New York during the roar of the twenties, The Great Gatsby epitomizes an era in love with itself, in gin-mad parties, and yellow jazz. Hailed by T.S. Eliot as "the first step forward American fiction had taken since Henry James," F. Scott Fitzgerald's third novel, published in 1925 when he was twenty-nine, was an immediate critical success. While writing The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald said, "So in my new novel I'm thrown directly on purely creative work... the sustained imagination of a sincere and radiant world. The book will be a consciously artistic achievement." So it was and so it remains.