And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly back into a book that its author considered calling “Trimalchio in West Egg.” Would we still be talking about it if he had?

But he called it “The Great Gatsby” and we are.

A century after its publication, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slender novel about a mysterious, lovelorn millionaire living and dying in a Long Island mansion is among the most widely read American fictions.

Published when Fitzgerald was just 28, following two exceedingly popular novels and two collections of stories, “Gatsby” chronicles its title character through the eyes of his neighbor, Nick Carraway, a Yale grad with a philosophical streak. Jay Gatsby, whose real name is James Gatz, is in love with Daisy Buchanan. Daisy’s husband, Tom, is a blowhard, a bigot and a philanderer — a paragon of old money gone bad. These rich, careless people wreck everything around them. Gatsby winds up dead, shot by the wrong jealous husband, and Nick is left to ruminate on the meaning of his friend’s sad, perplexing and somehow quintessentially American life.

-NY Times Review of Books