In my younger years my father gave me some advice. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one[1],” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
A habit to reserve all judgments has opened up many curious natures to me. In college I was privy to the secret griefs[2] of wild, unknown men.
When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform. I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart[3]. 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[4].
There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life[5], as if he were related to[6] one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. It was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person.
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people for three generations. The Carraways[7] are something of a clan. I graduated from New Haven[8] in 1915, then I decided to go east and learn the bond business[9]. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two[10].
I had an old Dodge[11] and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast.
I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold.
I lived at West Egg[12]. My house was between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was Gatsby’s mansion.
Across the 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 Buchanans[13]. Daisy[14] was my second cousin[15]. Her husband’s family was enormously wealthy – even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach[16]. 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.
