The Jazz Age: lights, parties, beautiful cars and cocktail dresses, but behind the tenderness of the night lies its darkness, its harshness, the sense of loneliness. Young Nick Carraway moves to New York City in the summer of 1922. He rents a house in prestigious, dreamy Long Island, teeming with the newly rich desperately busy partying with each other. One neighbor strikes Nick in a particular way: he is the mysterious Jay Gatsby, who lives in an outsized, gaudy house, filling it every Saturday night with guests at his extravagant parties. Yet he lives in desperate loneliness and falls senselessly in love with Nick's married cousin Daisy. The American myth decays page after page, retaining all the glitter of its facade but also showing its fragility. Just as was happening to Fitzgerald himself, a former playboy grappling with the mystery of an existence now doomed to final dissolution.
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