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The Great Gatsby

The Graphic Novel

Illustrated by Aya Morton

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About The Book

A gorgeously illustrated, first-ever graphic novel adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s beloved American classic.

First published in 1925, The Great Gatsby has been acclaimed by generations of readers and is now reimagined in stunning graphic novel form. Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway, Daisy Buchanan, and the rest of the cast are captured in vivid and evocative illustrations by artist Aya Morton. The iconic text has been artfully distilled by Fred Fordham, who also adapted the graphic novel edition of To Kill a Mockingbird. Blake Hazard, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great-granddaughter, contributes a personal introduction.

This quintessential Jazz Age tale stands as the supreme achievement of Fitzgerald’s career and is a true classic of 20th-century literature. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy is exquisitely captured in this enchanting and unique edition.

Excerpt

CHAPTER 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 judgments, 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 judgments 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.

About The Authors

Photograph © Hulton Archive

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. He attended Princeton University, joined the United States Army during World War I, and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. That same year he married Zelda Sayre and for the next decade the couple lived in New York, Paris, and on the Riviera. Fitzgerald’s masterpieces include The Beautiful and DamnedThe Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He died at the age of forty-four while working on The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald’s fiction has secured his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century.

Photograph © Fred Fordham

Fred Fordham has written and illustrated for various publications, most recently adapting and illustrating the graphic novel version of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. He also illustrated Philip Pullman’s debut graphic novel The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship. He lives in London.

About The Illustrator

Jane Anne Morton

Aya Morton’s work has been featured in Comics Art by Paul Gravett, exhibited in the London House of Illustration, and has received Awards of Excellence from Communication Arts and an honorable mention from 3x3 Illustration Annual. She is the illustrator of His Dream of the Skyland, the first book in a trilogy written by Anne Opotowsky, and has worked as a freelance artist in London and Portland, Oregon, where she now lives with her husband and two sons. 

Product Details

  • Publisher: Scribner (June 30, 2020)
  • Length: 208 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781982144548

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Raves and Reviews

“Brings the entire story to life in such vivid, quick-turning pages. The parties, the dresses, the mansions, the green light—all illustrated here beautifully. And it still packs the wallop that the original does!” —Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of Daisy Jones & The Six

“Morton's eye for fashion and interior decor aids the reader in becoming fully immersed in the era, while Fordham's economical reworking of the original text reflects a deep intimacy with Fitzgerald's work.” Shelf Awareness

“Fordham retains much of Fitzgerald’s singular prose, which Morton illustrates with an eye toward period detail and restraint that blossoms into expressive tableaus of vivid color at key moments. Here, Fitzgerald’s incisive exposé of the shallow excesses of the elite feels startlingly fresh nearly 100 years after its original publication.” Library Journal

“[Fordham] does a fine job distilling the haunted romanticism of Fitzgerald’s narrative. . . . The clean, Art Deco–like backgrounds by Morton evoke the beguiling but ultimately empty nouveau-riche milieu of Gatsby and the Buchanans in suburban Long Island, as well as the dreary gray world of Myrtle and George Wilson in working-class Queens. . . . the fidelity of this graphic adaptation should satisfy Fitzgerald devotees.” Publishers Weekly

Resources and Downloads

Common Core Text Exemplar

Freshman Reading:

Concordia University (2012/2013)

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More books from this author: F. Scott Fitzgerald