This document is Chapter 1 of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, in which narrator Nick Carraway introduces himself as a nonjudgmental Midwesterner who has moved to New York’s Long Island in the summer of 1922 to work in the bond business, settling in a modest house in West Egg — the less fashionable side of the bay — next door to a mysterious, extravagantly wealthy neighbor named Gatsby. Nick visits his cousin Daisy Buchanan and her imposing, old-money husband Tom across the water in East Egg, where he also meets the sardonic, dishonest golfer Jordan Baker, and learns through hints and an interrupted phone call that Tom is having an affair. The chapter establishes the novel’s central tensions between old wealth and new, appearance and reality, and ends with Nick catching his first glimpse of Gatsby standing alone on his lawn at night, stretching his arms toward a distant green light across the bay.
I
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over
in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this
world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I
understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all
judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of
not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it
appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a
politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences
were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by
some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate
revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and
marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little
afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly
repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct
may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s
founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in
uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged
glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt
from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If
personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about
him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate
machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do
with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—
it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other
person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it
is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out
my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations.
The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes
of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-
one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father
carries on today.
I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather
hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter
4/12/26, 3:58 PM
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Great Gatsby
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/64317/pg64317-images.html
1/9
of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known
as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being
the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I
decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I
supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were
choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why—ye-es,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father
agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the
spring of twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a
country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a
house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-
beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to
Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a few days until
he ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and
muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me
on the road.
“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.
He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighbourhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in
fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the
young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities,
and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the
shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of
reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very
solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now I was going to bring back all such things
into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t
just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in
North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and
where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from
the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into
the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long
Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed
flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the
gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every
particular except shape and size.
I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag
to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of
the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve
or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a
factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a
thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It
was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a
gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been
overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbour’s lawn, and the consoling
proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.
4/12/26, 3:58 PM
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Great Gatsby
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/64317/pg64317-images.html
2/9
Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the
history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom
Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college. And just after
the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends
that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such
an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anticlimax. His family
were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but
now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d
brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own
generation was wealthy enough to do that.
Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and
then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a
permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s
heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence
of some irrecoverable football game.
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends
whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-
white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran towards
the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens—
finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of
its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide
open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs
apart on the front porch.
He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty, with a
rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance
over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the
effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill
those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle
shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a
cruel body.
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed.
There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at
New Haven who had hated his guts.
“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to say, “just because I’m
stronger and more of a man than you are.” We were in the same senior society, and while we were
never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with
some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.
We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.
“I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.
Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its
sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motorboat that
bumped the tide offshore.
“It belonged to Demaine, the oil man.” He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. “We’ll go
inside.”
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured space, fragilely bound into the house
by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass
outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains
4/12/26, 3:58 PM
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Great Gatsby
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/64317/pg64317-images.html
3/9
End of Document
160
