Who is the great gatsby

Read an in-depth analysis of Tom Buchanan. Jordan is beautiful, but also dishonest: she cheated in order to win her first golf tournament and continually bends the truth. Read an in-depth analysis of Jordan Baker. Myrtle herself possesses a fierce vitality and desperately looks for a way to improve her situation.

Unfortunately for her, she chooses Tom, who treats her as a mere object of his desire. Read an in-depth analysis of Myrtle Wilson. George loves and idealizes Myrtle, and is devastated by her affair with Tom. George is consumed with grief when Myrtle is killed. George is comparable to Gatsby in that both are dreamers and both are ruined by their unrequited love for women who love Tom.

Before the events of the novel take place, Wolfsheim helped Gatsby to make his fortune bootlegging illegal liquor. His continued acquaintance with Gatsby suggests that Gatsby is still involved in illegal business. Ace your assignments with our guide to The Great Gatsby! SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. How does Nick Carraway first meet Jay Gatsby? Why did Daisy marry Tom?

He rents a house in the West Egg district of Long Island, a wealthy but unfashionable area populated by the new rich, a group who have made their fortunes too recently to have established social connections and who are prone to garish displays of wealth. Nick is unlike the other inhabitants of West Egg—he was educated at Yale and has social connections in East Egg, a fashionable area of Long Island home to the established upper class.

Daisy and Tom introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, a beautiful, cynical young woman with whom Nick begins a romantic relationship. At a vulgar, gaudy party in the apartment that Tom keeps for the affair, Myrtle begins to taunt Tom about Daisy, and Tom responds by breaking her nose.

Gatsby tells Jordan that he knew Daisy in Louisville in and is deeply in love with her. He spends many nights staring at the green light at the end of her dock, across the bay from his mansion. Gatsby now wants Nick to arrange a reunion between himself and Daisy, but he is afraid that Daisy will refuse to see him if she knows that he still loves her. Nick invites Daisy to have tea at his house, without telling her that Gatsby will also be there. After an initially awkward reunion, Gatsby and Daisy reestablish their connection.

Their love rekindled, they begin an affair. Though Tom is himself involved in an extramarital affair, he is deeply outraged by the thought that his wife could be unfaithful to him. After all, flamboyant host is just one part of his complicated identity. He's also a bootlegger, up to his neck in criminal enterprise, not to mention a delusional stalker whose showmanship comes to seem downright tacky.

If he embodies the potential of the American Dream, then he also illustrates its limitations: here is a man, let's not forget, whose end is destined to be as pointless as it is violent. Misunderstanding has been a part of The Great Gatsby's story from the very start.

Grumbling to his friend Edmund Wilson shortly after publication in , Fitzgerald declared that "of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about.

The novel achieved only so-so sales, and by the time of the author's death in , copies of a very modest second print run had long since been remaindered. The novel has become a force in pop culture, helped by Hollywood; the term 'Gatsbyesque' emerged a few years after the film starring Robert Redford Credit: Getty Images.

Gatsby's luck began to change when it was selected as a giveaway by the US military. With World War Two drawing to a close, almost , copies were distributed in a special Armed Services Edition, creating a new readership overnight. As the s dawned, the flourishing of the American Dream quickened the novel's topicality, and by the s, it was enshrined as a set text. It's since become such a potent force in pop culture that even those who've never read it feel as if they have, helped along, of course, by Hollywood.

It was in , just a few short years after Robert Redford starred in the title role of an adaptation scripted by Francis Ford Coppola, that the word Gatsbyesque was first recorded. Along with Baz Luhrmann's divisive movie extravaganza, the book has in the past decade alone spawned graphic novels, a musical, and an immersive theatrical experience. From now on, we're likely to be seeing even more such adaptations and homages because at the start of this year, the novel's copyright expired , enabling anyone to adapt it without permission from its estate.

Early calls for a Muppets adaptation may have come to nothing never say never , but a big-budget TV miniseries is already in the works, and author Min Jin Lee and cultural critic Wesley Morris are both writing fresh introductions to new editions. The Great Gatsby has in the last decade spawned a film adaptation, a musical, a ballet and an immersive theatre experience Credit: Alamy.

If this all leaves Fitzgerald purists twiddling their pearls like worry beads, it's quite possible that while some such projects may further perpetuate the myth that throwing a Gatsby-themed party could be anything other than sublimely clueless, others may yield fresh insights into a text whose very familiarity often leads us to skate over its complexities.

Take, for instance, Michael Farris Smith's new novel, Nick. The title refers, of course, to Nick Carraway, the narrator of Gatsby, who here gets his own fully formed backstory. It's the tale of a Midwesterner who goes off to Europe to fight in World War One and comes back changed, as much by a whirlwind love affair in Paris as by trench warfare.

Like many, Smith first encountered the novel in high school. It seemed like something on almost every page was speaking to me in a way I had not expected," he recalls.