Landmark Books in All Fields
ItemID: #116621
Cost: $6,800.00

Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"SO WE BEAT ON, BOATS AGAINST THE CURRENT, BORNE BACK CEASELESSLY INTO THE PAST"

FITZGERALD, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925. Octavo, original green cloth. Housed in a custom clamshell box. $6800.

First edition of this landmark of 20th-century fiction, Fitzgerald's haunting tale of "empty elegance and impossible love" in the Jazz Age (Julie Bosman) and one of America's greatest novels.

In 1922, having already written This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald told his publisher Max Perkins, "I want to write something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned" (Bruccoli, 198). The triumphant result three years later was The Great Gatsby, published just before what Fitzgerald called the summer of "1000 parties and no work" (Fitch, 183). Noted critic Cyril Connolly called Gatsby one of the half dozen best American novels: "[Gatsby] remains a prose poem of delight and sadness which has by now introduced two generations to the romance of America, as Huckleberry Finn and Leaves of Grass introduced those before it" (The Modern Movement, 48). NPR book critic Maureen Corrigan declared, "The Great Gatsby is one of the first modern novels to look squarely at the void, yet it stops short of taking a flying leap… It's Fitzgerald's thin-but-durable urge to affirm that finally makes Gatsby worthy of being our Great American Novel" (Corrigan, 23). First printing, with "sick in tired" on page 205 and all other first-issue points. Without extremely rare original dust jacket. Bruccoli A11.1.a.

Slightest discoloring to top inner margin from pages 70-95. A nearly fine copy.

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