The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
“A devastating critique of the American Dream, written by a man who lived it and lost everything.”
Similar Books
Thematic connections across eras and genres — books that talk to each other.
Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller
Another American Dream autopsy — Willy Loman is Gatsby without the glamour, the dream stripped to its bones
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald's own sequel to Gatsby's themes — wealth, madness, and the destruction of beauty, this time more autobiographical
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
Same Lost Generation, opposite style — Hemingway strips language bare where Fitzgerald makes it sing
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Another novel about identity performance in America — but from the perspective Gatsby's world renders invisible
American Pastoral
Philip Roth
Picks up where Gatsby left off — the Dream fails a generation later, and this time the explosion comes from inside the family
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Old money's power to crush outsiders, set a generation earlier — Wharton is the blueprint for what Fitzgerald inherited