Recommendations
Books Like The Great Gatsby
What to read after The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) is one of the most widely read American novels — Jay Gatsby's green light across the water, Nick Carraway's mordant narration, and the Long Island summer that ends in violence. If you were drawn to its meditation on the American Dream, its portrait of excess as a form of emptiness, and Fitzgerald's crystalline prose, these novels offer the same intensity.
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Tender Is the Night
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald's last completed novel — Dick Diver, an American psychiatrist on the French Riviera, and his marriage to one of his patients; the same gilded world rotting from within as Gatsby, the same tragic descent, written with even more control
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The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
American expatriates in 1920s Paris and Spain — Hemingway's companion piece to Gatsby, the same Lost Generation, the same sense of pleasure as a cover for something broken, written in the style antithetical to Fitzgerald's lyricism but about the same world
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Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
A couple in 1950s suburban Connecticut who believe they are better than their circumstances — described by its publisher as the Gatsby of the 1950s; the same savage critique of American aspiration, the same sense of lives lived in bad faith
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American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis
A wealthy Manhattan investment banker in the late 1980s who may be a serial killer — a satirical extension of Gatsby's meditation on wealth as emptiness into the Reagan era; extremely disturbing but the most direct literary heir to Gatsby's critique of American materialism
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The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
New York society in the 1870s — Newland Archer trapped between duty and desire; Wharton's Pulitzer Prize winner is the predecessor to Gatsby: the same New York society, the same trap of social performance, the same woman who represents everything the protagonist cannot have
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Breakfast at Tiffany's
by Truman Capote
Holly Golightly in 1940s New York — a woman who reinvents herself with such conviction that the fiction becomes real; the same narrator observing a dazzling, doomed figure from close enough to be implicated, the same sense of beauty as its own form of tragedy
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Donna Tartt's The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
A scholarship student at a Vermont college who falls in with a group of beautiful, wealthy classics students and is drawn into their murder — the same outsider-observer narrating a world of privilege and its consequences, the same retrospective narration from after the catastrophe
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Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
A middle-class Englishman's entanglement with the aristocratic Flyte family and their decaying estate — the British counterpart to Gatsby: the same narrator in love with a world he can enter but not belong to, the same sense of beauty and privilege as a kind of curse
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