The Great Gatsby
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in Minnesota. He had a love of writing from an early age and his first story was published in his school newspaper when he was 13. He graduated from the Newman School in 1913 and went on to study at Princeton University. Here, he wrote articles and stories for magazines and eventually dropped out to join the army. His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920) received critical acclaim and he went on to write The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), as well as a number of short stories. Fitzgerald died in 1940.
Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning literary journalist, a weekly books columnist for The Washington Post, and the author of five collections of essays: Readings (2000), Bound to Please (2005), Book by Book (2006), Classics for Pleasure (2007) and Browsings (2015). He has also written the memoir An Open Book (2003) and On Conan Doyle (2012), which received an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. His introductions for The Folio Society include The Great Gatsby (2013), Dune (2016), East of Eden (2017), Atlas Shrugged (2018), Cat’s Cradle (2022), Weird Tales (2024) and A Canticle for Leibowitz (2024).