The Great Gatsby

"It expresses one phase of the great grotesque spectacle of our American scene. It is humor, irony, ribaldry, pathos, and loveliness...A curious book, a mystical, glamorous story of today. It takes a deeper cut at life than hitherto has been essayed by Mr. Fitzgerald."

"The monumental achievement of Fitzgerald's career. Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that it is Fitzgerald's masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country's writers."

"In astonishingly beautiful, layered prose, what Scott Fitzgerald manages to do is to replicate some of the mystery of what it is to be human...One of those rare books that you can read at different times in your life, and each time it'll do something different to you. When you're young, Gatsby's desperate pursuit of Daisy might break your heart. When you're older, the fragility of Gatsby's reinvented self might crack your soul. Whenever you do read it, though, you'll never be in any doubt that you're reading something extraordinary. If the book is tugging at your heart, you'll find the language lush and iridescent and the imagery sensuous, with its calibrated system of blues and yellows, of eyes and water, of honey and straw. If it's chipping at your soul, you'll find the language weighted and resonant and the imagery quite simply unforgettable, with its poetic elevation of the quotidian to the level of the profoundly philosophical."

"Extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned...arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology...Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem."