The Great Gatsby (Centaur Classics) [The 100 greatest novels of all time - #10]

"In fact, it seems to me the first step American fiction has taken since Henry James." —T. S. Eliot
"What gives the story distinction is the charm and beauty of the writing." —Henry Louis Mencken
"Gatsby’s magic emanates not only from its powerhouse poetic style — in which ordinary American language becomes unearthly — but from the authority with which it nails who we want to be as Americans. Not who we are; who we want to be. It’s that wanting that runs through every page of ‘The Great Gatsby’, making it our Greatest American Novel." —Maureen Corrigan
"One of the few truly mythological creations in our culture." —William Troy
"A masterpiece." —John Berryman
"[Fitzgerald’s] talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings." —Ernest Hemingway

'I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited — they went there.'
After the war, the mysterious Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire pursues wealth, riches and the lady he lost to another man with stoic determination. When Gatsby finally does reunite with Daisy Buchanan, tragic events are set in motion. Told through the eyes of his detached and omnipresent neighbour and friend, Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald's succinct and powerful prose hints at the destruction and tragedy that awaits.
In "The Great Gatsby", Fitzgerald brilliantly captures both the disillusionment of post-war America and the moral failure of a society obsessed with wealth and status. But he does more than render the essence of a particular time and place, for in chronicling Gatsby's tragic pursuit of his dream, Fitzgerald re-creates the universal conflict between illusion and reality.