The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Illustrated by Sam Wolfe Connelly
Introduced by Michael Dirda
Preface by Francis Ford Coppola

With a personal note by Francis Ford Coppola

Arguably the greatest American novel of the 20th century, Fitzgerald's simple story of lost love has captivated readers, film-makers and fellow writers for generations.

On its first publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby was largely dismissed as a light satire on Jazz Age follies. Today, it is acknowledged as a masterpiece: a love story, an exploration of the American dream and arguably the greatest American novel of the 20th century. Narrator Nick Carraway tells the story of his neighbour Jay Gatsby, whose parties at his Long Island mansion are as lavish as his past is mysterious. Yet Gatsby cares only for one of his guests: his lost love Daisy Buchanan, now married and living across the bay. In Fitzgerald’s hands, this deceptively simple story becomes a near-perfect work of art, told in hauntingly beautiful prose.

PRODUCTION DETAILS
Bound in buckram blocked with a design by the artist
Set in Goudy
184 pages
Frontispiece and 6 colour illustrations
Printed endpapers
Printed slipcase
9" × 5¾"

‘ONE OF THE GREATEST WORKS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE’
‘One of the greatest works of American literature ... a timeless evocation of the allure, corruption and carelessness of wealth’
The Times

Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post, has contributed a new introduction for this edition. He writes, ‘While a great novel should possess many qualities, the most essential is certainly the ability to enchant, to cast a spell over the reader’ – an ability possessed in full by ‘this ever-fresh, this ceaselessly magical novel’. Our edition also features a two-page note by the director and screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola recalling his work on the 1974 film adaptation, in particular his ingenious solution to the lack of dialogue between Daisy and Gatsby in the original novel. Sam Wolfe Connelly, a young artist based in New York, has created a series of colour illustrations and the striking binding design. The metallic endpapers and slipcase are printed with a 1920s-inspired design by the artist.

ABOUT F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
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 a number of short stories. Fitzgerald died in 1940.

ABOUT MICHAEL DIRDA
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 current project is a reconsideration of popular fiction during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has written introductions to The Great Gatsby (2013), Dune (2016), East of Eden (2017) and Atlas Shrugged (2018) for The Folio Society.

ABOUT SAM WOLFE CONNELLY
Sam Wolfe Connelly lives in New York City. He studied Illustration at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, graduating in 2011. His clients include Penguin Books, Playboy magazine, the New York Times, the Sundance Film Festival and Entertainment Weekly. He works primarily in graphite, colouring his finished drawings digitally. In addition to working as an illustrator, he frequently shows his artwork in galleries around the world. In 2013 he illustrated The Great Gatsby for The Folio Society.