The Great Gatsby is a 1925 tragedy novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire obsessed with reuniting with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.

The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922. Following a move to the French Riviera, Fitzgerald completed a rough draft of the novel in 1924. He submitted it to editor Maxwell Perkins, who persuaded Fitzgerald to revise the work over the following winter. After making revisions, Fitzgerald was satisfied with the text but remained ambivalent about the book's title and considered several alternatives. Painter Francis Cugat's dust jacket art, named Celestial Eyes, greatly impressed Fitzgerald, and he incorporated its imagery into the novel.

After its publication by Scribner's in April 1925, The Great Gatsby received generally favorable reviews, though some literary critics believed it did not equal Fitzgerald's previous efforts. Compared to his earlier novels, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922), the novel was a commercial disappointment. It sold fewer than 20,000 copies by October, and Fitzgerald's hopes of a monetary windfall from the novel were unrealized. When Fitzgerald died in 1940, he believed himself to be a failure and his work forgotten.

During World War II, the novel experienced an abrupt surge in popularity when the Council on Books in Wartime distributed free copies to American soldiers serving overseas. This new-found popularity launched a critical and scholarly re-examination, and the work soon became a core part of most American high school curricula and a part of American popular culture. Numerous stage and film adaptations followed in the subsequent decades.

Gatsby continues to attract popular and scholarly attention. Scholars emphasize the novel's treatment of social class, inherited versus self-made wealth, gender, race, and environmentalism, as well as its cynical attitude towards the American Dream. The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary masterpiece and a contender for the title of the Great American Novel.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940), widely known as F. Scott Fitzgerald or simply Scott Fitzgerald,[1] was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term that he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. He published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. He achieved transient success and fortune in the 1920s, but did not receive critical acclaim until after his death. He is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

Fitzgerald was born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, but he was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. He had a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King and dropped out of Princeton in 1917 to join the Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. She initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, but she agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.

His second novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922) propelled Fitzgerald further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. He frequented Europe during this period, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel The Great Gatsby (1925) received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Fitzgerald finished his last completed novel Tender Is the Night (1934) following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institution for schizophrenia.

Fitzgerald struggled financially because of the declining popularity of his works during the Great Depression. He then moved to Hollywood where he embarked on an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. He had long struggled with alcoholism, and he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940 at age 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published the unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941). Wilson described Fitzgerald's style: "romantic, but also cynical; he is bitter as well as ecstatic; astringent as well as lyrical. He casts himself in the role of playboy, yet at the playboy he incessantly mocks. He is vain, a little malicious, of quick intelligence and wit, and has the Irish gift for turning language into something iridescent and surprising."