In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald\n announced his decision to write ""something new--something\n extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned.""\n That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple\n novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and\n certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in\n all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's\n generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology.\n Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of\n Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition,\n greed, and the promise of new beginnings. ""Gatsby believed in the\n green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It\n eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch\n out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--"" Gatsby's rise to\n glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about\n the American Dream. It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of\n Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before\n the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and\n Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves\n overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom\n Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of\n wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the\n same thing. ""Her voice is full of money,"" Gatsby says\n admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions\n made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician\n East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When\n she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama,\n with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout.\n Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby\n is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.