No one gives better parties than Jazz Age zillionaire Jay Gatsby. No one has a bigger house or a bigger pool, or drives a longer, sleeker, more opulent automobile. His silk shirts alone—"shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue"—can and do reduce women to tears. But who is he? Where does he come from, where did he make his megabucks, and why—his sober, straight-arrow neighbor (and narrator) Nick wonders—does he stand on his dock at night and stretch out his arms to a green light shining across the bay from his magnificent mansion? The Great Gatsby lays bare the empty, tragic heart of the self-made man. It's not only a page-turner and a heartbreaker, it's one of the most quintessentially American novels ever written.—L.G.