Holl

The Great Gatsby
By F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry ‘Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!’
—THOMAS PARKE D’INVILLIERS



The GreatGatsby

Chapter 1

I

n my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave
me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind
ever since.
‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me,
‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had
the advantages that you’ve had.’
He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually
communicative in a reserved way, and Iunderstood that he
meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up
many curious natures to me and also made me the victim
of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to
detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a
normal person, and so it came about that in college I was
unjustly accused of beinga politician, because I was privy
to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep,
preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some
unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young
men or at least the terms in which they express them are
usuallyplagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still
a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my faFree eBooks at Planet eBook.com



ther snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense
of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at
birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to
theadmission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded
on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point
I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from
the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in
uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses
into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who giveshis
name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby
who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful
gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him,
some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he
were related to one of those intricate machines that register
earthquakes ten thousand miles away. Thisresponsiveness
had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which
is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’—
it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness
such as I have never found in any other person and which
it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned
out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what
foul dust floated in thewake of his dreams that temporarily
closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and shortwinded elations of men.
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in
this middle-western city for three generations. The Car

The Great Gatsby

raways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that
we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was mygrandfather’s brother who
came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and
started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.
I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look
like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled
painting that hangs in Father’s office. I graduated from New
Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my...