Reading Order
The Great Gatsby Reading Order
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) is a complete standalone novel set in the summer of 1922 in Long Island and New York City. It follows Nick Carraway, a Yale-educated bond salesman newly arrived in New York, who lives next to the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, whose extravagant parties are all aimed at recapturing his lost love Daisy Buchanan. The novel is considered the quintessential American novel and one of the most widely taught texts in American schools.
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The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald·1925·Standalone — Nick Carraway in Long Island in the summer of 1922, next door to Jay Gatsby and his green light; the quintessential American novel about wealth, desire, and the impossibility of recapturing the past - Buy
Tender Is the Night
OptionalF. Scott Fitzgerald·1934·Fitzgerald's last completed novel — an American psychiatrist on the French Riviera in the 1920s and his marriage to one of his patients; longer and more tragic than Gatsby, with the same evocation of a gilded world rotting from within
The Great Gatsby — Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Great Gatsby a standalone?
Yes — The Great Gatsby is entirely self-contained. Fitzgerald's other major novels — This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), and Tender Is the Night (1934) — are independent works.
What is the green light in The Great Gatsby?
The green light at the end of Daisy's dock across the water from Gatsby's mansion is the novel's central symbol — Gatsby stares at it in the novel's most famous image. It represents everything Gatsby is reaching toward: Daisy, his past, the version of himself he has invented. The final lines of the novel extend the symbol: 'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.' The green light is the American Dream — always visible, always just out of reach, always a projection of desire rather than reality.
Who killed Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby?
Daisy Buchanan is driving Gatsby's car when it strikes and kills Myrtle Wilson on the road from New York. Gatsby tells Nick he was driving, intending to protect Daisy. Tom Buchanan tells Myrtle's husband George that Gatsby's yellow car struck Myrtle — deliberately sending George after Gatsby. George Wilson shoots Gatsby in his pool and then shoots himself. Daisy and Tom leave town without attending Gatsby's funeral.
What is the Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby?
The Valley of Ashes is the industrial wasteland between Long Island and Manhattan — the ash heaps, the billboard of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg with his enormous spectacled eyes, the workers covered in ash dust. It represents the underside of the Roaring Twenties prosperity: the people left behind by the wealth Nick and Gatsby inhabit. George and Myrtle Wilson live there. The Eckleburg eyes watch everything but interpret nothing — they are sometimes read as a comment on the death of God, or on the surveillance of society.
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