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The Great Gatsby
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By F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
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If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
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Till she cry ‘Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
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I must have you!’
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—THOMAS PARKE D’INVILLIERS
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The Great Gatsby
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Chapter 1
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I n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave
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me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind
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ever since.
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‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me,
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‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had
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the advantages that you’ve had.’
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He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually
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communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he
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meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I’m in-
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clined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up
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many curious natures to me and also made me the victim
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of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to
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detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a
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normal person, and so it came about that in college I was
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unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy
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to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the con-
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fidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep,
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preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some
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unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quiver-
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ing on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young
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men or at least the terms in which they express them are
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usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
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Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still
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a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my fa-
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Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
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ther snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense
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of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at
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birth.
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And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to
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the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded
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on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point
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I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from
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the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in
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uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I want-
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ed no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses
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into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his
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name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby
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who represented everything for which I have an unaffect-
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ed scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful
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gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him,
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some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he
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were related to one of those intricate machines that register
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earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness
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had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which
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is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’—
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it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness
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such as I have never found in any other person and which
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it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned
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out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what
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foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily
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closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-
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winded elations of men.
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My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in
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this middle-western city for three generations. The Car-
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The Great Gatsby
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raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that
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we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the ac-
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tual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who
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came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and
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started the wholesale hardware business that my father car-
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ries on today.
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I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look
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like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled
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painting that hangs in Father’s office. I graduated from New
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Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father,
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and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic mi-
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gration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid
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so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the
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warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like
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the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go east and
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learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond
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business so I supposed it could support one more single
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man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were
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choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why—ye-
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es’ with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance
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me for a year and after various delays I came east, perma-
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nently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.
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The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was
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a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns
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and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office sug-
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gested that we take a house together in a commuting town
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it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather
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beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the
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last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went
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