beardaintweird/The-Great-Gatsby · Datasets at Hugging Face

text stringlengths 0 69

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a
few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish
woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut-
tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man,
more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
‘How do you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless-
ly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I
was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casu-
ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves
growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I
had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over
again with the summer.
There was so much to read for one thing and so much
fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv-
ing air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and
investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and
gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold
the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae-
cenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many
other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one
year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials
for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all
such things into my life and become again that most limited
of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an
epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a
single window, after all.

The Great Gatsby
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a
house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri-
ca. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself
due east of New York and where there are, among other
natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty
miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in
contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into
the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western
Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.
They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus
story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but
their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual
confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a
more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every
particular except shape and size.
I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the
two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi-
zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My
house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the
Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented
for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right
was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi-
tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on
one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a
marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn
and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or rather, as I didn’t
know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle-
man of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it
was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com
view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and
the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol-
lars a month.
Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable
East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the
summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to
have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second
cousin once removed and I’d known Tom in college. And
just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments,
had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played
football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of
those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at
twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli-
max. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college
his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but
now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather
took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a
string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to real-
ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough
to do that.
Why they came east I don’t know. They had spent a year
in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here
and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were
rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over
the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into
Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek-
ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some
irrecoverable football game.

The Great Gatsby
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I
drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce-
ly knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I
expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial man-
sion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a

few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish

woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and mut-

tered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man,

more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

‘How do you get to West Egg village?’ he asked helpless-

ly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I

was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casu-

ally conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves

growing on the trees—just as things grow in fast movies—I

had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over

again with the summer.

There was so much to read for one thing and so much

fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giv-

ing air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and

investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and

gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold

the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mae-

cenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many

other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one

year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials

for the ‘Yale News’—and now I was going to bring back all

such things into my life and become again that most limited

of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’ This isn’t just an

epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a

single window, after all.

The Great Gatsby

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a

house in one of the strangest communities in North Ameri-

ca. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself

due east of New York and where there are, among other

natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty

miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in

contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into

the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western

Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound.

They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus

story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but

their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual

confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a

more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every

particular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the

two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bi-

zarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My

house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the

Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented

for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right

was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imi-

tation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on

one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a

marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn

and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or rather, as I didn’t

know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentle-

man of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it

was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and

the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol-

lars a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable

East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the

summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to

have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second

cousin once removed and I’d known Tom in college. And

just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments,

had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played

football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of

those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at

twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-cli-

max. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college

his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but

now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather

took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a

string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to real-

ize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough

to do that.

Why they came east I don’t know. They had spent a year

in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here

and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were

rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over

the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into

Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seek-

ing a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some

irrecoverable football game.

The Great Gatsby

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I

drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarce-

ly knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I

expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial man-

sion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and