The Great Gatsby

LORELAI: He’s liked you for ten years? … Wow. That is some serious Great Gatsby pining … You’re his Daisy.

The Great Gatsby, 1925 novel by 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 mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, and Gatsby’s obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan. The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with a socialite named Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island’s North Shore in 1922.

The novel received generally favourable, if restrained, reviews, but was a commercial disappointment, selling less than 20 000 copies in the first six months. When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, be believed himself 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. Contemporary scholars emphasise the novel’s treatment of social class, and its cynical attitude towards the American Dream. The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary masterwork and a contender for the title of the Great American Novel.

The 1974 film version of The Great Gatsby, starring Robert Redford as Gatsby, featured Richard Hermann, who plays Richard Gilmore, in the minor role of Ewing Klipspringer, the mooching party guest who decides to simply never leave.