Welcome to The Great Gatsby HQ

The Great Gatsby: Read the Novel, Then Explore Its World

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is one of the most celebrated novels in American literature: a short, glittering and heartbreaking story of love, money and reinvention set on Long Island in the summer of 1922. On this site you can read the complete novel free, chapter by chapter, and then dig into its themes, characters, films, fashion and history.

Free to Read: The Great Gatsby Is in the Public Domain

The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, and its United States copyright expired at the end of its 95-year term. On January 1, 2021 the novel entered the public domain in the US. That means anyone in the United States can read, copy, share, quote, teach, perform and adapt the original 1925 text without asking permission or paying a fee.

A few things are still protected: new introductions, notes and translations in modern editions, and later adaptations such as the films and musicals. Copyright terms also differ from country to country, so readers outside the US should check their local rules before reusing the text.

Start reading Chapter 1 now →

Read The Great Gatsby Chapter by Chapter

The novel has nine chapters and runs to fewer than 50,000 words, short enough to read in a weekend. Each chapter page below gives you the complete, unabridged text of the 1925 first edition, opened by a brief guide of our own that sets the scene and suggests what to look out for. The guide is clearly separated from Fitzgerald’s words, so you can skip it if you prefer to meet the story fresh.

  1. Chapter 1Nick Comes East
  2. Chapter 2The Valley of Ashes
  3. Chapter 3Gatsby’s Party
  4. Chapter 4Gatsby’s Story
  5. Chapter 5The Reunion
  6. Chapter 6James Gatz
  7. Chapter 7The Plaza and the Accident
  8. Chapter 8Gatsby’s Last Day
  9. Chapter 9Boats Against the Current

About the Novel

The Great Gatsby was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in April 1925. Its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was already famous as the voice of the Jazz Age after his first novel, This Side of Paradise, and his stories of flappers and young rebels. With Gatsby he set out to write something more ambitious, and the result is a compact, carefully crafted novel that rewards rereading.

The story is told by Nick Carraway, a young man from the Middle West who comes to New York to sell bonds and rents a cottage in the fictional village of West Egg. His neighbour is Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire whose enormous parties draw half of New York. Across the bay live Nick’s cousin Daisy and her husband, Tom Buchanan. As Nick is drawn into their lives, he discovers that Gatsby’s whole glittering existence has been built around one dream: winning back Daisy, the girl he loved five years before.

The novel sold modestly during Fitzgerald’s lifetime, and when he died in 1940 it was far from the classic it is now. Its reputation grew in the following decades, and today it is a fixture of school reading lists and appears near the top of many lists of the greatest American novels. Read more in our biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald and our survey of criticism and interpretations.

Why The Great Gatsby Still Matters

  • The American Dream. Gatsby remakes himself from a poor farm boy into a millionaire, yet the novel asks what that success is worth. See our guide to the themes and symbols.
  • Old money and new money. The divide between East Egg and West Egg still speaks to anyone who has felt like an outsider.
  • The Jazz Age. Prohibition, bootleggers, flappers, jazz and wild parties: the novel is a portrait of the 1920s written in the middle of them.
  • The writing. Fitzgerald’s sentences are some of the most quoted in English, right up to the famous final line.

Study Help for Students and Teachers

Reading for a class? Start with the summary and study guide, test yourself with the practice quiz and look up unfamiliar words in the glossary. Teachers will find a complete unit outline, discussion questions and essay prompts in our lesson plans.

Gatsby on Screen and Stage

Few novels have been adapted as often. Paramount filmed it as a silent picture in 1926, only a year after publication, and that film is now lost. Later versions starred Alan Ladd in 1949, Robert Redford in 1974, Toby Stephens in a 2000 television film and Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 spectacle. On stage, the story has become a 1926 Broadway play, an opera at the Metropolitan Opera, a word-for-word theatre marathon and a Broadway musical. Compare them all in our guide to Great Gatsby movies and adaptations.

The Style of the Jazz Age

Gatsby’s world has inspired generations of party themes, costumes and fashion collections. Explore the dropped waists, beaded dresses, cloche hats and sharp suits of the era in our guide to Art Deco fashion, then mix a gin rickey or a mint julep, the very drinks served in the novel, with our Jazz Age cocktail recipes.

Choosing Your Own Copy

Reading online is free, but many readers like a printed copy to underline or a beautiful hardcover for the shelf. Our guide to Great Gatsby editions explains the differences between authorized, scholarly, collector and budget editions, audiobooks and graded readers for English learners.