Write your own The Great Gatsby story

Nick Carraway

Nick Carraway is a Yale-educated Midwesterner from a prominent family who moves to West Egg, Long Island in the spring of 1922 to work in the bond business. He is the narrator of the story and prides himself on a habit of reserving judgement, which draws confessions and confidences from those around him. He is second cousin once removed to Daisy Buchanan and knew Tom Buchanan in college. He is the next-door neighbor of Jay Gatsby.

Jay Gatsby

Jay Gatsby is a fabulously wealthy and mysterious man who inhabits a colossal Normandy-style mansion in West Egg, adjacent to Nick Carraway's modest bungalow. He is known for throwing lavish summer parties and is rumored by some to be a relative of Kaiser Wilhelm, hinting at shadowy origins of his fortune. Nick describes him as possessing an extraordinary gift for hope and a romantic readiness unlike anyone else he has ever met. At the end of the summer evenings he is seen reaching toward a distant green light across the bay.

Tom Buchanan

Tom Buchanan is a former Yale football star turned enormously wealthy East Egg socialite, now about thirty years old, physically imposing with a cruel, arrogant bearing. He married Daisy and maintains a secret mistress, Myrtle Wilson, in New York City. He espouses crude white-supremacist pseudo-scientific views and is prone to casual violence, at one point breaking Myrtle's nose. Despite his bluster, he seems haunted by a sense of anticlimax after his peak athletic glory days.

Daisy Buchanan

Daisy Buchanan is Nick's beautiful second cousin once removed, married to Tom Buchanan and living in a grand Georgian Colonial mansion in East Egg. She has a famously thrilling, musical voice that compels those around her, though Nick senses a fundamental insincerity beneath her charm. She is cynical about her life and marriage, confessing she hoped her newborn daughter would grow up to be 'a beautiful little fool.' She is acquainted with Gatsby, whose name surprises her when first mentioned.

Jordan Baker

Jordan Baker is a slender, self-possessed young professional golfer from Louisville who is a close friend of Daisy's, sharing a 'white girlhood' in that city. She carries a pleasing but contemptuous expression familiar from rotogravure sports photographs. She is hinted to have an unpleasant scandal attached to her name. She is cool, athletic, and sharply observant, and she is the first to inform Nick that Tom has a mistress in New York.

Myrtle Wilson

Myrtle Wilson is the wife of garage owner George B. Wilson and Tom Buchanan's secret mistress, a faintly stout woman in her mid-thirties with an intense, smoldering vitality. She affects airs of superiority and class when away from the Valley of Ashes, maintaining a small apartment on 158th Street in Manhattan at Tom's arrangement. She resents her husband and considers her marriage a mistake, having believed George was a gentleman of breeding. Her shouting of Daisy's name at a party leads Tom to break her nose.

George B. Wilson

George B. Wilson is a blond, spiritless, and anaemic garage owner living and working in the Valley of Ashes, described as dull and unaware of his wife's affair with Tom Buchanan. He operates a struggling auto repair shop and is eager to buy a car from Tom to resell. He is a ghostly, passive figure ground down by poverty and circumstance.

Catherine

Catherine is Myrtle Wilson's sister, a slender worldly woman of about thirty with a sticky red bob and an over-powdered complexion, festooned with pottery bracelets. She frequents Myrtle's Manhattan apartment and is socially ambitious, having recently returned from a trip to Monte Carlo. She confides to Nick that both Tom and Myrtle hate their respective spouses and ought to simply marry each other, while covering for Tom by falsely claiming Daisy is Catholic and therefore cannot grant a divorce.

West Egg

West Egg is the less fashionable of two peninsula communities on Long Island, about twenty miles east of New York City, separated from East Egg by a 'courtesy bay' off Long Island Sound. It is home to the newly rich, including Jay Gatsby in his enormous Normandy-imitation mansion. Nick Carraway rents a small weather-beaten bungalow at the tip of West Egg for eighty dollars a month, squeezed between two vast estates.

East Egg

East Egg is the more fashionable and prestigious peninsula across the bay from West Egg, its white palaces glittering along the waterfront. It is the enclave of old-money families such as the Buchanans, whose elaborate red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooks the bay with a sweeping lawn. The social distinction between East Egg and West Egg represents the gulf between inherited aristocracy and nouveau-riche aspiration.

The Valley of Ashes

The Valley of Ashes is a desolate, grey industrial wasteland located roughly halfway between West Egg and New York City, where the motor road runs beside the railroad. It is a fantastical ash-heap where grey men toil amid powdery dust, representing the underside of the Jazz Age's prosperity. The area is presided over symbolically by the faded billboard eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. George and Myrtle Wilson live and work here at their garage.

Gatsby's Mansion

Gatsby's mansion is a colossal Normandy Hôtel de Ville imitation in West Egg, featuring a tower, a marble swimming pool, and over forty acres of lawn and garden. It is newly built, still bearing a thin beard of raw ivy. During summer it blazes with lavish parties where guests come and go like moths through blue gardens filled with champagne, music, and two motorboats on the Sound.

The Buchanan Estate (East Egg)

The Buchanan home is an elaborate red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion in East Egg with a lawn stretching a quarter mile from beach to front door, French windows, an Italian garden, a half-acre of roses, and a motorboat offshore. It formerly belonged to Demaine the oil man. The interior features a breezy rose-coloured sitting room with a wine-coloured rug and billowing curtains.

Myrtle's Apartment (158th Street, Manhattan)

Tom Buchanan maintains a small top-floor apartment at 158th Street in New York City for his mistress Myrtle Wilson, furnished with oversized tapestried furniture depicting scenes of Versailles. It serves as a venue for illicit gatherings involving Myrtle, her sister Catherine, and neighbors the McKees. The apartment represents Myrtle's aspirations toward a grander social life than the Valley of Ashes provides.

Old Money East Egg Society

The established wealthy families of East Egg represent inherited American aristocracy—educated at Yale and similar institutions, possessed of vast family fortunes, and defined by their casual contempt for those who have merely earned their wealth. Tom and Daisy Buchanan are the novel's primary representatives of this class. Their carelessness and moral irresponsibility are presented as the defining traits of this elite.

The New Rich of West Egg

West Egg is populated by those who have made sudden fortunes—often through obscure or possibly illicit means—and who attempt to replicate the grandeur of old money through spectacular displays of wealth. Gatsby is the supreme exemplar: his mansion, parties, and wardrobe are magnificent but somehow off, marked by excess rather than ease. This class is looked down upon by East Eggers despite often surpassing them in raw wealth.

Gatsby's Motorboats and Parties

Gatsby maintains two motorboats on Long Island Sound and hosts enormous summer parties in his blue gardens, drawing crowds of guests who arrive uninvited from all over and consume champagne, food, and entertainment through the night. The parties are a spectacle of Jazz Age excess and serve as Gatsby's primary means of projecting wealth and drawing the attention of his desired social circle. Guests speculate wildly about Gatsby's origins and the source of his fortune.

The Green Light

At the end of a dock across the bay from West Egg, a single small green light is visible in the darkness. Nick observes Gatsby standing alone on his lawn at night, trembling as he stretches his arms out toward this distant green light. The light carries deep symbolic weight as an emblem of longing, aspiration, and the elusive object of Gatsby's desire—widely understood to represent Daisy Buchanan across the water in East Egg.

The Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg

A faded roadside billboard near the Valley of Ashes depicts the enormous blue eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg behind giant yellow spectacles, the remnant of a forgotten oculist's advertisement. Standing over the grey wasteland, the eyes seem to brood in silent judgment over the moral decay and squalor below. They function as one of the novel's central symbols, often interpreted as representing a god-like but indifferent gaze over a morally bankrupt world.

The American Dream and Class Division

The novel's world is structured around a rigid but hypocritical class hierarchy: old-money East Egg looks down on new-money West Egg, which in turn is utterly separate from the working poor of the Valley of Ashes. Characters from lower classes such as Myrtle Wilson desperately attempt to perform the manners and status of the rich. The American Dream of self-reinvention is embodied by Gatsby but shown to be ultimately fragile and corrupted by the 'foul dust' that floats in the wake of great wealth.

The Jazz Age (1922 Setting)

The story takes place in the summer of 1922, the height of the Jazz Age: a period of post-WWI restlessness, Prohibition-era drinking, booming financial markets, and glittering social excess. Characters like Nick enter the bond business as Wall Street booms; the wealthy drift between Europe and polo grounds; lavish parties replace older Victorian proprieties. Beneath the gaiety lie moral emptiness, infidelity, racism, and violence.

Nordic Supremacism (Tom's Ideology)

Tom Buchanan espouses a pseudo-scientific white supremacist ideology drawn from a book called The Rise of the Coloured Empires by 'Goddard,' warning that 'the white race will be submerged.' He presents this as serious scientific fact and uses it to assert the superiority of 'Nordics.' The novel frames this as evidence of Tom's intellectual shallowness, moral corruption, and desperate need to assert dominance as his sense of self-importance crumbles.