The Great Gatsby

Jay Gatsby is the titular character of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character has become an archetype of self-made American... men seeking to join high society, and the name has become synonymous with successful businessmen with shady pasts in the US. James Gatz, a bright young man from a poor family in North Dakota, despised the imprecations of poverty so much he dropped out of St. Olaf College in Minnesota after only a few weeks because of his shame at the janitorial job he had to take to pay his way. Renaming himself Jay Gatsby, he learns the ways of the wealthy while working for a copper tycoon named Dan Cody, but upon Cody's death is cheated out of a $25,000 bequest by Cody's mistress. While training in 1917 to join the infantry and fight in World War I he meets and promptly falls in love with the beautiful Daisy, who represents everything he is not: she is rich, and she is from a patrician East Coast family. During the war he reaches the rank of Major, commands the heavy machine guns of his regiment, and is decorated "for valour" for his participation in the bloody battles of Marne and Argonne.
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A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and... in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century. Further definition of the genre is historically difficult. The construction of the narrative, the plot, the way reality is created in the works of fiction, the fascination of the character study, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history. The individualism of the presentation makes the personal memoir and the autobiography the two closest relatives among the genres of modern histories. The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements , a characteristic subject matter that creates both intimacy and a typical epic depth can be seen as features that developed with the Western market of fiction.
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