Ah, The Great Gatsby...how I love it. Hopefully you love it, too.F. Scott Fitzgerald finished this, his third novel, in 1925. Although the book is short, it's sort of an epic and dreamy novel about the goings-on of high society in Long Island. Narrator Nick Carraway rents a house in West Egg and finds that his mysterious neighbor Jay Gatsby throws lavish parties almost nightly. As it turns out, Gatsby has long harbored a love for Nick's cousin, Daisy, whom he'd romanced five years before in her hometown of Louisville just after returning from his service in World War I. But complicating the reconciliation is Daisy's husband, Tom Buchanan, who's having his own affair with Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a mechanic. It all seems so glamorous and carefree until the illusion is painfully ripped away one night by an auto accident. Caught in the middle of it all is Nick, the innocent who has been thrust into this world that he doesn't totally belong to - and in the end, flees it.
For the accompanying image, I used the book cover that's actually on my Scribner classic edition, as it's the original cover. According to the introduction by Charles Scribner III, artist Francis Cugat had painted the cover before The Great Gatsby was even finished and Fitzgerald liked the image so much that he wrote it into the book. The melancholy eyes apparently belong to Daisy but for Fitzgerald, it triggered the addition of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, an eye doctor long since out of business whose billboard eyes stare out from the road between Long Island and New York City. The bottom part of the image is supposed to represent Manhattan's carnival-like atmosphere but the yellow burst always makes me think of the car accident, as it happens right under Dr. Eckleburg's watchful stare.
Anyway...wonderful book, no surprise it's a classic.
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