Considered one of the finest American writers of the twentieth century, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was the author of various novels and short stories chronicling life in the US during the Roaring Twenties.

Invited to an extravagantly lavish party in a Long Island mansion, Nick Carraway, a young bachelor who has just settled in the neighbouring cottage, is intrigued by the mysterious host, Jay Gatsby, a flamboyant but reserved self-made man with murky business interests and a shadowy past. As the two men strike up an unlikely friendship, details of Gatsby's impossible love for amarried woman emerge, until events spiral into tragedy. Regarded as Fitzgerald's masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of American literature, The Great Gatsby is a vivid chronicle of the excesses and decadence of the Jazz Age, as well as a timeless cautionary critique of the American dream.

It seems to me the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.

He was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a generation.