The Journal
What to read after The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is a very short novel -- about 47,000 words -- that operates at a very high symbolic intensity. If you finished it wanting more of that combination: the lush prose, the American Dream in its most critical and melancholic form, the sharp social observation delivered through a narrator who is both inside and outside the world he describes, here are the best directions to go.
F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925. It is one of the most reread novels in American literature -- and one of the most recommended next reads for any number of starting points, which makes it useful to think carefully about what specifically draws you to it.
If you want more Fitzgerald#
Tender is the Night (1934) is Fitzgerald's more ambitious and more autobiographical novel -- a story of Dick Diver, a psychiatrist, and his disintegrating marriage and career on the French Riviera. It is slower than Gatsby and more personally raw. Many readers find it the more emotionally devastating of the two. It is not in the public domain yet but widely available.
The Beautiful and Damned (1922) is Fitzgerald's novel of New York excess before Gatsby, following Anthony Patch and his wife through the destruction of their inherited wealth and their marriage. It is longer and less controlled than Gatsby but shares its world.
The Short Stories. Fitzgerald's short fiction is often underread. "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," "Babylon Revisited," and "Winter Dreams" (the latter is frequently called the proto-Gatsby) are the best starting points.
If you want the same era and milieu#
Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920, Pulitzer Prize) is the closest companion to Gatsby in terms of social observation, prose quality, and the tragedy of people trapped by the rules of their class. Newland Archer's situation is different from Gatsby's, but the novel asks the same question: what does someone sacrifice to belong to a world that ultimately does not deserve them? For the life of Edith Wharton, look for Hermione Lee's biography, the most thorough available.
Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922) cover the same American moment from a midwestern, satirical angle. Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1930) and he received it partly for the portrait of American social conformity that Babbitt represents.
If you want the American Dream as your subject#
Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) is the earlier version of the same story: a young woman from the provinces arrives in the city and discovers that the American Dream of social mobility has terms and conditions that are not written in the brochure. Dreiser's prose is not Fitzgerald's, but his social analysis is grimmer and more thorough.
John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1937) takes the same American Dream at Depression-era ground level -- two itinerant farm workers and the land of their own they will never have. It is very short (30,000 words) and very direct.
If you want the modernist prose that surrounds Gatsby#
Fitzgerald was writing at the same moment as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Woolf. A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway (1929) shares Gatsby's interest in illusion and disillusionment -- a love story set against World War One that ends without consolation. Free on Foxing if the 1929 text is in the catalog.
Further reading#
For the symbolic meaning of the novel you just finished, what the green light in Gatsby means and the meaning of Gatsby's parties cover the two most important symbols.
For the life of Fitzgerald and whether he actually lived like his characters, F. Scott Fitzgerald's biography and his relationship to the Gatsby world is the companion piece.