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Tag: American classic

  • The Great Gatsby

    In the summer of 1922, Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner working in the bond business, rents a small house in West Egg on Long Island. Next door stands a vast mansion where Jay Gatsby, a wealthy man no one seems to know much about, throws extravagant parties every weekend. Across the bay in fashionable East Egg live Nick's cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan, a brutish former college football star.

    Nick gradually learns that Gatsby and Daisy knew each other years before, and that the green light at the end of the Buchanans' dock holds special meaning for his neighbour. Through Nick's eyes we meet the golfer Jordan Baker, Tom's mistress Myrtle Wilson and her husband George, who runs a garage in the grim valley of ashes between the suburbs and Manhattan.

    Short and lyrical, the novel is a portrait of the excess of the Roaring Twenties and a critique of the American Dream, class and reinvention. Little noticed on publication in 1925, it is now one of the most widely taught American novels.

    Book details

    AuthorF. Scott Fitzgerald
    First published1925
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)180
    SettingLong Island and New York City, summer 1922

    Themes

    • The American Dream
    • Wealth and class
    • Longing
    • Reinvention
    • Moral decay

    Who should read it

    Readers looking for a short, beautifully written American classic about ambition, money and longing.

  • Moby-Dick

    The narrator, who asks to be called Ishmael, goes to sea to cure his restlessness and signs on to the whaler Pequod out of Nantucket together with Queequeg, a tattooed Polynesian harpooner he befriends in a New Bedford inn. Once at sea, the reclusive Captain Ahab finally appears on deck, his missing leg replaced by one made of whalebone, and reveals the true purpose of the voyage.

    Ahab is consumed by the desire to kill Moby Dick, the great white sperm whale that maimed him, and he binds the crew to his quest. The first mate Starbuck, a cautious Quaker, questions it; the second and third mates and harpooners from around the world follow. As the ship crosses oceans, encounters with other vessels bring news and omens of the whale.

    Melville interrupts the story with chapters on whale anatomy, the history of whaling, the meaning of whiteness and the workings of the ship, alongside soliloquies written like stage drama. A commercial failure in 1851, the book was rediscovered in the twentieth century and is now considered a cornerstone of American literature.

    Book details

    AuthorHerman Melville
    First published1851
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)635
    SettingNantucket and the oceans of the world, 1840s

    Themes

    • Obsession
    • Fate
    • Man versus nature
    • Good and evil
    • Friendship

    Who should read it

    Patient readers who want an ambitious, digressive American epic about obsession and the sea.