F. Scott Fitzgerald

A first edition, first issue copy of The Great Gatsby.

• F. Scott Fitzgerald (American).
• New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.
• 218 pages.
• Octavo.
• Bound in original green cloth, spine title in gilt.

In 1922, having already written This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned, Fitzgerald told his publisher Max Perkins, "I want to write something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately pattered" (Bruccoli, p. 198). The triumphant result three years later was The Great Gatsby, a "prose poem of delight and sadness" (Connolly) which has become the foundational expression of the decadence of the Roaring Twenties and the striving and emptiness at the heart of the American Dream.