Wikipedia:Today's featured article/November 22, 2021

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan. The book was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922. The Great Gatsby received favorable reviews but was a commercial disappointment, selling fewer than 20,000 copies in the first six months. At the time of the author's death in 1940, he believed himself to be a failure and his work forgotten. During World War II, the novel surged in popularity when the Council on Books in Wartime distributed free copies to American soldiers serving overseas. This newfound popularity launched a critical re-examination, and now the book is widely considered to be a literary masterwork.