The Great Gatsby.

FITZGERALD, F. Scott.

Item Number: 1642

New York: Charles Scribners, 1925.

First edition, first state with “chatter” p.60, “northern” p.119, “sick in tired” p.205, and “Union Street station” p. 211. Octavo, original dark green cloth. In near fine condition, with the gilt lettering to the spine, nice and bright. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box.

In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.