Drama · Romance
The Great Gatsby
A mysterious millionaire throws the biggest parties on Long Island, all for one woman across the bay.
Five levels, about 80 languages
- A2ElementaryShort sentences and everyday words.
- B1IntermediateYou follow clear stories about familiar things.
- B2Upper intermediateLonger sentences, richer vocabulary.
- C1AdvancedClose to the original, lightly condensed.
- C2ProficientThe complete novel.
One purchase is one book, in one language, at one level: $4.99. Another level of a book you own is $1.99. Editions nobody has asked for yet are written on request: chapter 1 in a few minutes, the rest while you read. How the levels work.
About the book
West Egg, 1922
Nick Carraway, a young man from the Midwest, comes east in the summer of 1922 to learn the bond business and rents a small house on Long Island. Next door is a huge mansion where, every weekend, hundreds of people come to drink, dance and gossip about their host, whom most of them have never met: Jay Gatsby. Across the bay lives Nick’s cousin Daisy, with her rich, brutal husband, Tom Buchanan. One night Nick sees Gatsby standing alone on his lawn, stretching out his arms toward a green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. F. Scott Fitzgerald published the novel in 1925.
Why it works for learners
It’s short, under fifty thousand words in the original, and every chapter is a vivid scene: a party, a lunch, a drive into the city, a hot afternoon in a hotel room. The cast is small and memorable. The vocabulary of money, parties, cars, clothes and ambition is still current.
The difficulty is Fitzgerald’s prose, dense with images and full of sentences that are beautiful precisely because they don’t say things plainly. A retelling keeps the plot and the characters; the poetry needs a higher level.
Which level to start at
B2 is the best start: you’ll follow both the story and much of the style. B1 gives you the plot clearly, which is worth having before you come back. At C1 and C2, read the final pages slowly, perhaps in sentence-by-sentence mode, with each line’s audio and translation.
Read next
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, beauty and corruption in an earlier society
- Great Expectations, Pip’s story of money, class and a girl he can’t forget
- Wuthering Heights, obsession on a grander, wilder scale