Nick Carraway narrates the summer when his neighbor Jay Gatsby reached across the water toward a green light on Daisy Buchanan's dock. Fitzgerald published this in 1925, it sold modestly, and he died in 1940 believing himself forgotten. The novel's resurrection came later, and now it defines the American Twenties, the American Dream, the American inability to repeat the past even as we beat on against the current. The prose is perfect. The tragedy is that Gatsby believes in it, and so do we.