The Great Gatsby

When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1941 he left unfinished what promised to be his finest work, The Last Tycoon. Until the existence of this novel was discovered, it had been generally considered by the critics that The Great Gatsby was his masterpiece, although This Side of Paradise came near to challenging it, but it had also been long assumed that as a creative writer he had ceased to exist. Connected preeminently with the 'Jazz Age', that fabulous period in American history, the effects of which spread around the world, he came to be regarded almost as their official chronicler and thus share in the end of tha chapter which came with the overwhelming slump of '29.

Through those years of the twenties, the years of the 'speakeasy', the gangster, the 'flapper' and wood alcohol, he recorded the hectic life of the participants and his books remain as a superbly exact and imaginative testimony of those magificently care-free years of a nation trying to recover from the hang-over of a war which had claimed a generation. (back cover)