Editor’s Note

This is the complete text of The Great Gatsby as first published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, in April 1925. It is set from a public-domain digital transcription of that edition. Fitzgerald’s nine chapters, numbered with Roman numerals only, are kept as he left them, together with the dedication (“Once again to Zelda”) and the epigraph credited to Thomas Parke d’Invilliers, a poet Fitzgerald invented.

The spelling, punctuation, and paragraphing of the 1925 text are kept, including forms that later editions regularized (judgements, for example). We have made no corrections. Two readings in Chapter VII that modern editions often emend are left as the first edition printed them: Wilson’s “grasping cries” after the accident (some editions read “gasping”), and the placing of Daisy’s room on the “ground floor” although Tom has just looked up at two lighted windows on the floor above.

Removed from the source: the transcription’s header and license, its table of contents, and all distributor notices. Nothing has been added to the text.