The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest novels ever written and a masterpiece of American fiction. Midwesterner Nick Carraway spends a summer on Long Island where he is gradually lured into the ultra-glamorous parties and social circle of his mysterious neighbor, Jay Gatsby. It is a tale of obsessive passion, reckless decadence, excess, and disillusionment, but also of the power of love and dreams to alter our world. Fitzgerald’s glittering portrayal of 1920s elite society during the Jazz Age is an enduring testament to the tantalizing power and peril of the American Dream.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920 to instant acclaim. Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda embodied the spirit of the Jazz Age—the glamour and grit of which Fitzgerald captured in stories and novels that powerfully resonate today, including The Beautiful and Damned and Tender Is the Night.Haunted by alcoholism, marital problems, and Zelda’s illness, Fitzgerald took his immense literary talents to the dream factories of Hollywood where he died in 1940 while working on his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon.

Ulrich Baer is University Professor at New York University where he teaches literature and photography. A graduate of Harvard and Yale and recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, and Humboldt fellowships, he has published widely on poetry, fiction, photography, and other topics.