"SO WE BEAT ON, BOATS AGAINST THE CURRENT, BORNE BACK CEASELESSLY INTO THE PAST": FIRST EDITION OF THE GREAT GATSBY—A LOVELY COPY

FITZGERALD, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925. Octavo, original green cloth. Housed in a custom clamshell box. $11,500.

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. A lovely copy.

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 dust jacket. Bruccoli A11.1.a.

Light foxing to text block edges only, with a touch of spotting to title page and faint marginal stain to pages 8-9; text generally clean. Cloth fresh and clean, gilt bright. A lovely, near-fine copy, scarce in this condition.