About the Book
A collectible hardcover edition of one of the great American novels—and one of America's most popular—featuring an introduction by Min Jin Lee, the New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko
A Penguin Vitae Edition
Young, handsome, and fabulously rich, Jay Gatsby seems to have everything. But at his mansion east of New York City, in West Egg, Long Island, where the party seems never to end, he's often alone in the glittering Jazz Age crowd, watching and waiting, as speculation swirls around him—that he's a bootlegger, that he was a German spy during the war, that he even killed a man. As writer Nick Carraway is drawn into this decadent orbit, he begins to see beneath the shimmering surface of the enigmatic Gatsby, for whom one thing will always be out of Nick's cousin, the married Daisy Buchanan, whose house is visible from Gatsby's just across the bay.
A brilliant evocation of the Roaring Twenties and a satire of a postwar America obsessed with wealth and status, The Great Gatsby is a novel whose power remains undiminished after a century. This edition, based on scholarship dating back to the novel's first publication in 1925, restores Fitzgerald's masterpiece to the original American classic he envisioned, and features an introduction addressing how gender, race, class, and sexuality complicate the pursuit of the American Dream.
Penguin Vitae—loosely translated as "Penguin of one's life"—is a deluxe hardcover series from Penguin Classics celebrating a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.
From the backcover
It's the Roaring Twenties. New York City is the place to be. Everything can be purchased, everyone can be bought. As far as the eyes can see, there are ostentatious displays of wealth and lavish displays of decadency.
As more and more people lose themselves to the lure of money, the only person who remains unaffected is Jay Gatsby, the enigmatic host of the most extravagant parties...
In this tale on American culture, Fitzgerald pits a chaste dream against the corrupting influence of wealth and comes up with an epic story.