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  The Great Gatsby and Related Stories

  Copyright © 2023 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.,

  New York, N.Y. All rights reserved.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter of January 15, 1925, to Maxwell Perkins, and Perkins’s letters of January 20, 1925, and February 24, 1925, to Fitzgerald from Dear Scott/Dear Max. Edited by John Kuehl and Jackson Bryer. Copyright © 1971 Charles Scribner’s Sons. All other letters from A Life in Letters by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Edited by Matthew Bruccoli. Copyright © 1994 by The Trustees under agreement dated July 3, 1975, created by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Library of America.

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  Distributed to the trade in the United States by Penguin Random House Inc.

  and in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Ltd.

  ISBN 978–1–59853–756–7

  eISBN 978–1–59853–757–4

  Contents

  Preface by James L. W. West III

  THE GREAT GATSBY

  STORIES

  The Rich Boy

  Winter Dreams

  Absolution

  Rags Martin-Jones and the Pr-nce of W-les

  LETTERS

  Chronology

  Note on the Texts

  Notes

  Preface

  This volume brings together F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby (1925) and four related stories that share the novel’s themes and preoccupations, all in newly edited, corrected texts prepared for Library of America. This edition also includes a selection of correspondence between Fitzgerald and his editor, Maxwell Perkins, concerning the composition and revision of the novel.

  In preparing this new text of The Great Gatsby, I have consulted Fitzgerald’s manuscript, his working galleys, and his personal reading copy of the novel. This volume presents the first printing of the 1925 Scribner’s edition, lightly emended in various ways, with the majority of the alterations made on Fitzgerald’s authority. Control of the text has been given to Fitzgerald. The treatment of the text for this edition is similar to the cleaning and restoration of a work of art that has deteriorated, ever so slightly, over time. The goal of these labors is to capture accurately the author’s intentions for the novel, as nearly as those intentions can be recovered from the evidence that survives. Readers interested in a more detailed understanding of the textual work undertaken for The Great Gatsby and the other selections in this volume should consult the Note on the Texts.

  The Great Gatsby is probably the most widely read American novel of the twentieth century. It is a fast-moving story told by a narrator, Nick Carraway, whom we like and trust. Its characters are indelibly drawn: Jay Gatsby, with his mysterious origins and air of danger; Daisy Buchanan, with her voice full of money; Tom Buchanan, rich, overbearing, and belligerent; Jordan Baker, wan and faintly arrogant. The minor characters are memorable. Fitzgerald has given us George and Myrtle Wilson, desperate to escape their marginal lives; Myrtle’s sister Catherine, with her “sticky bob of red hair”; Chester McKee, showing Nick his murky “photographic studies”; Chester’s wife, Lucille, “languid, handsome, and horrible”; Meyer Wolfshiem, exhibiting his peculiar cufflinks to Nick; Ewing Klipspringer, performing his “liver exercises” on the floor; Owl Eyes, peering at the unopened books in Gatsby’s library. And there is Gatsby’s aquaplane, his medal from “Little Montenegro,” his piles of beautiful shirts, his pink suit, the parties on his blue lawn, the stylish dancing and hot jazz, the glamorous and dissipated guests—all of this stays in the mind.

  The four stories included in this volume are closely related to The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald often used short stories as trial grounds for characters, settings, themes, and narrative approaches that he would later employ in his novels. This is particularly true for The Great Gatsby. “Winter Dreams”—which Fitzgerald, in an undated letter of June 1925 to Perkins, called a “1st draft of the Gatsby idea”—is a poignant rich girl/poor boy narrative that the author wrote almost three years before publication of the novel. Judy Jones, the golden girl of “Winter Dreams,” becomes a much desired ideal for Dexter Green. He achieves conventional success but cannot win her heart. By the end of the story he is disillusioned, unable to accept the passage of time and the inevitability of change. “Absolution,” a tense story about an adolescent boy and a priest, was salvaged from the original ur-text of The Great Gatsby, a first attempt at the novel set by Fitzgerald in the upper Midwest. Rudolph Miller, the youthful hero, yearns to escape from the limitations of his upbringing and the suffocating influence of the Catholic church, much as Jay Gatsby desires to move beyond his own humble origins in North Dakota. “Rags Martin-Jones and the Pr-nce of W-les” is a work of light fiction, a romantic fantasy in which the stalwart hero, John M. Chestnut, eventually captures the impossible Rags Martin-Jones. He creates a glittering, illusory world in order to attract her, much as Jay Gatsby stages his glamorous parties in hopes of luring Daisy Buchanan, the object of his dreams, to his ersatz mansion. “The Rich Boy,” the longest of the stories in this volume, was written just after publication of The Great Gatsby. The action of the story is seen through the eyes of a character who resembles Nick Carraway. This nameless narrator has observed the “very rich” and found them to be “different from you and me.” He is a keen observer who recognizes the differences between old and new money. He comes to understand that his friend, a rich boy named Anson Hunter, nourishes a sense of superiority and privilege that takes precedence over all else, even emotional commitment and love.

  Fitzgerald had a close relationship with Maxwell Perkins. The correspondence between the two men reveals a great deal about the inception, composition, revision, and publication of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald relied on Perkins for professional advice; he also valued the editor’s critiques of his manuscripts, especially in matters of structure and characterization. In the letters written during the composition and revision of The Great Gatsby, we can see Perkins’s influence on the novel, especially on the manner in which Jay Gatsby’s past is revealed. Particularly important here is the November 20, 1924, letter from Perkins to Fitzgerald. In this letter Perkins confesses to Fitzgerald that, for him, “Gatsby is somewhat vague.” Perkins continues: “The reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim.” Part of the problem for Perkins was that, in the early version of the novel he was reading, the details of Gatsby’s past were not revealed until very nearly the end of the book. Perkins urged Fitzgerald to drop hints about Gatsby’s past life earlier in the narrative, with “phrases, and possibly incidents, little touches of various kinds, that would suggest that he was in some active way mysteriously engaged.” Fitzgerald took this advice, along with other suggestions in the letter, and put his novel through a major revision in galley proofs, giving us the text that we know today. In this revised version we learn much earlier about Jay Gatsby’s past, with further details revealed as the narrative unfolds.

  The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. The period of its composition was his finest hour: inspiration, talent, self-discipline, and luck came together magically to create a novel that has an enduring hold on the popular imagination and continues to win new readers. Fitzgerald had a pitch-perfect ear for language and a gift for dialogue. Many of the passages in the novel are unforgettable: Daisy and Jordan dressed in white, floating on the sofa in Daisy’s sunroom; Nick woozy with drink in Tom and Myrtle’s love nest; Gatsby smiling down on his departing guests from the steps of his mansion; Nick riding with Gatsby in his gorgeous yellow car, whirling through the Valley of Ashes on the way to the glamorous streets of Manhattan. At the end of the novel Fitzgerald leaves us gazing at the green light on Daisy’s dock. It shines through the night from across the bay. Readers know what the green light signifies, even if they cannot put it into words. The Great Gatsby captures something uniquely American: our hopes and fantasies, our sense of infinite possibility, our disappointment when our dreams are not fulfilled. That’s quite a lot for one short novel.

  J. L. W. W. III

  Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

  If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

  Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,

  I must have you!”

  —Thomas Parke D’Invilliers.

  once again

  TO

  ZELDA

  Chapter I

  In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

  “Whenever you f
eel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

  He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

  And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

  ◆

  My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

  I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why—ye-es,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

  The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a few days until he ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

  It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

  “How do you get to West Egg Village?” he asked helplessly.

  I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

  And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

  There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mæcenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

  It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

  I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.

  Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

  Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.