Widely ignored in literary circles, it is
increasingly regarded as an influential fin de siècle text. The
book is occasionally subtitled "Or the Strange Experience of one
Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire".
Les
Misérables
Les Misérables (1862) is a novel by French author Victor Hugo,
and among the best-known novels of the 19th century. It follows the
lives and interactions of several French characters over a twenty
year period in the early 19th century that starts in the year of
Napoleon's final defeat. Principally focusing on the struggles of
the protagonist—ex-convict Jean Valjean—who seeks to redeem
himself, the novel also examines the impact of Valjean's actions
for the sake of social commentary. It examines the nature of good,
evil, and the law, in a sweeping story that expounds upon the
history of France, architecture of Paris, politics, moral
philosophy, law, justice, religion, and the types and nature of
romantic and familial love. Les Misérables is known to many through
its numerous stage and screen adaptations, of which the most famous
is the stage musical of the same name, sometimes abbreviated "Les
Mis" or "Les Miz" .
The
Great Gatsby
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write
"something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple +
intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately
patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby,
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. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies
some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions:
money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby
believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year
recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no
matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms
farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and
eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about
the American Dream.
It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's
quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years
before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville
beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but
while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying,
but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes
himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to
the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice
is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's
more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion
across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address,
throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does,
events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama,
with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus
throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline
prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind
of poem.
* * *
"Now we have an American masterpiece in its final form: the
original crystal has shaped itself into the true diamond. This is
the novel as Fitzgerald wished it to be, and so it is what we have
dreamed of, sleeping and waking." -- James Dickey
* * *
The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott
Fitzgerald. First published on April 10, 1925, it is set on Long
Island's North Shore and in New York City during the summer of
1922.
The novel takes place following the First World War. American
society enjoyed prosperity during the "roaring" 1920s as the
economy soared. At the same time, Prohibition, the ban on the sale
and manufacture of alcohol as mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment,
made millionaires out of bootleggers. After its republishing in
1945 and 1953, it quickly found a wide readership and is today
widely regarded as a paragon of the Great American Novel, and a
literary classic. The Great Gatsby has become a standard text in
high school and university courses on American literature in
countries around the world, and is ranked second in the Modern
Library's lists of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century.
--Wikipedia
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