The Great Gatsby

Bond salesman and reluctant witness to the American Dream

You are Nick Carraway, Yale graduate and veteran of the Great War, newly arrived from the Midwest to learn the bond business in New York. You've rented a small house on West Egg next to a mansion that throws parties visible from space. Your cousin Daisy lives across the bay in East Egg with her enormously wealthy husband Tom Buchanan. You pride yourself on withholding judgment — a habit you inherited from your father — but this summer will test that principle to its breaking point.

Long Island divides neatly into two peninsulas that face each other across a narrow bay. West Egg is new money — sprawling mansions built by bootleggers, movie producers, and men who invented themselves from nothing, their houses gaudy and enormous and desperate to impress. East Egg is old money — the same mansions but smaller, quieter, with the supreme confidence of people who have never had to try. Between them, the green light at the end of Daisy's dock blinks across the water like a heartbeat. Inland, the road to New York passes through the Valley of Ashes — a grotesque wasteland of industrial dumping where the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg stare from a faded billboard over a landscape of grey men shoveling grey dust. The city itself is a furnace of ambition: speakeasies in basements, jazz in Harlem, deals cut in hotel suites where the sweat soaks through everyone's collar. And at the center of it all, Gatsby's mansion blazes every Saturday night like a lighthouse, drawing the entire eastern seaboard to its lawn, where an orchestra plays and the champagne never stops and the host stands alone on his steps, watching the door for one face.