The Great Gatsby The Original 1925 Edition (Booklover's Library Classics)

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that there are no second acts in American lives.

The great writer that he was, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was not a Detroiter because we fall but this city always gets up and I want to tell you Detroit that you done set me up for a comeback.

Terrible cover. Equally terrible book, right?

The book sucked ass, right? Can we agree?

I hated The Great Gatsby. It's a terrible book.

I loved the movie. I thought the movie was fantastic.

Yeah right, it's like well I mean I could stay here and obviously learn this is a very these are very smart people but like what if I could just send Malcolm Gladwell an email and what if I could just like meet him wouldn't that be really cool.

And so like, it's a book you have to read not when you're older, but like when you reread it when you're older, you, you go, oh, I didn't even understand all these things that I was missing.

the best advice I ever got from my father is when you feel like criticizing someone remind yourself that there are people in this world who have not had the advantages that you have

He pinned so much personal hope and ambition and desire and sense of his self-worth as an artist on Gatsby. And its comparative failure devastated him. And, in my view, it really precipitated his spiral...

With Gatsby he made this choice that he was going to write a masterpiece and then it was met with bafflement. And that I think he lost a lot of his self-confidence and a lot of his momentum at that point.

analyze how and why the Great Gatsby is an exploration of the American dream as it exists in a corrupt period

I love the Great Gatsby. I'm looking at my copy right here.

The 1920s open display of illegal activity in acceptance of sin is the epitome of corruption. It is in this atmosphere as portrayed in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby that eventually became incompatible with the American dream. The loss of morality signaled the death of hope and idealism in the heart of man.

Gatsby was really a conscious effort to live up to his potential and he was like they keep telling me so he you know he was 28 when he wrote Gatsby which is also his worth bearing in mind 28 years old to write that masterpiece and he'd been working publishing at that point for eight years and you know at a huge you know at a fast tilt he was just you know prolific and pouring stuff out and all of that time they kept saying no but will he fulfill his potential but will it you know it's a point is like my god what do I have to do to make you think I fulfilled my potential

I think that he pinned so much personal hope and ambition and desire and sense of his self worth as an artist on Gatsby and its comparative failure devastated him and in my view it really precipitated his spiral

no one no one bothered to point us to a great writer who was writing about where we lived and I wonder how much more engaged I and other people would have been were the reading we were given was actually tailored to some semblance of reality or lived experience or how we saw the world as opposed to just being like high school kids should read the great Gatsby

So two of my favorites are like the great Gatsby you know we think of that as a war novel but it absolutely you know it's a war novel. The war figures really prominently in that book you know the reason J Gatsby becomes J Gatsby is because of the first world war to story about you know social mobility after the war so that's one that I think doesn't usually categorize as a war novel.

One of my favorite passages in the great Gatsby he goes and he meets Mayor Wolfshine, the organized criminal, the gangster and Gatsby sort of whispers to Nick Caraway that this was the man that had fixed the 1919 World Series. And Nick Caraway says something like, I knew that had happened but he said it just struck me that it had happened as some sort of inextrable series of events that it was the idea that a singular person had been responsible for a thing that had affected the lives of so many people. It was inconceivable and I think that kind of summarizes our attitude towards a lot of things including the civil rights movement.

When I read the great Gatsby in high school, Gatsby struck me as heroic. When I read him in my twenties, it struck me slightly different. And when I read it again, some more recently, there was a tragic element that I experienced a bit more and I also thought a lot more about Nick Carroway.

It's not just because I've changed and I've gotten older but I've read other books about Fitzgerald, about the 20s, about bootlegging.

You've spent 25 to 35 percent of your term in this regime like golfing and doing great Gatsby parties with half naked women in martini glasses with the theme.

Is that why you're having these great Gatsby-themed parties at Mar-a-Lago to just rub the wealth disparity that you're making even worse in everybody's face?

great Gatsby-themed party of basically half-naked girls or women in champagne glasses, like dancing around and gyrating.

Filled with West Palm Beach Rich folks Dressed up Like it's Remember the Great Gatsby Of course The novel About the Idle rich People on Long Island Who throw Hollow Gilded parties To show off Their lavish Wealth Just before The country Collapsed Into the Worst depression It's ever Seen

Great Gatsby themed Party At his palatial Golf home In Florida

Terrible. And then it's even worse to see the Great Gatsby-themed party at Mar-a-Lago from over the weekend, which even had, you know, a girl in a martini glass.

This is all going down as Donald hosted a Great Gatsby-themed party on Halloween night at Mar-a-Lago. Really? A party theme about a mafia-adjacent conman with a tacky house that's set after a pandemic but before the Great Depression? I thought Halloween was the holiday for pretending to be something you're not.

And he had just released a book called greater.

And this book impacted me so much.

He wrote three words when he signed this book to Jonathan and Anna, three simple words that would profoundly shape my life.

He wrote greater things ahead.

And those three words have meant the world to us.