FITZGERALD, F. Scott.

The Great Gatsby.

New York: The Modern Library , 1934.

$40,000.00

Out of Stock Item Number: RRB-37020

Custom Clamshell Box

Hand made by the Harcourt Bindery. ~90 days

+$450

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“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy": First Modern Library of The Great Gatsby; Inscribed by F. Scott Fitzgerald

First Modern Library edition of the author's masterpiece, with the first appearance of Fitzgerald's new introduction. Octavo, original green cloth. Inscribed by the author on the half title page, "For Lillian Abercrombie at the beginning of a tour of work F. Scott Fitzgerald." Near fine in a very good dust jacket with some rubbing to the extremities and some small chips. Housed in a full custom morocco box. The first Modern Library edition of The Great Gatsby was a resounding commercial failure, and many copies were remaindered with the caption "discontinued title" printed on the jacket's front panel. The present copy represents one of the earlier, non-remaindered copies, and like all of the first Modern Library editions of The Great Gatsby, features Fitzgerald's new introduction, with his own, now-famous take on his masterwork: "I think it is an honest book, that is to say, that one used none of one's virtuosity to get an effect, and, to boast again, one soft-pedalled the emotional side to avoid the tears leaking from the socket of the left eye, or the large false face peering around the corner of a character's head. If there is a clear conscience, a book can survive -- at least in one's feelings about it. On the contrary, if one has a guilty conscience, one reads what one wants to hear out of reviews. In addition, if one is young and willing to learn, almost all reviews have a value, even the ones that seem unfair."

In 1922, Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Cyril Connolly called The Great Gatsby one of the half dozen best American novels: "Gatsby remains a prose poem of delight and sadness which has by now introduced two generations to the romance of America, as Huckleberry Finn and Leaves of Grass introduced those before it" (Modern Movement 48). Consistently gaining popularity after World War II, the novel became an important part of American high school curricula. It was the basis for numerous stage and film adaptations. Gatsby had four film adaptations, with two exceptionally big-budget versions: the 1974 version starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, as well as Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 version starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carrie Mulligan. Fitzgerald’s granddaughter praised Lurhmann’s adaptation, stating “Scott would be proud.”