• American Literature
• Novels

• Type: Book
• Length: 200 pages

F Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' turned out to be the most nourishing novel I read ... a miracle of talent ... a triumph of technique Richard Yates

The Great Gatsby takes place from spring to autumn in 1922, mostly on Long Island and Manhattan. Gatsby throws lavish parties at his West Egg estate. The Oheka Castle, also known as the Otto Kahn Estate, is a mansion from that era located on the 'Gold Coast' of Long Island, Huntington, New York. In the Sands Point Preserve, the Gould-Guggenheim Estate offers two other Quintessential Gold Coast Mansions.

In the novel, the "valley of ashes" lies between East Egg and Manhattan. Today, check out Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens. The park was created from the former Corona Ash Dumps. The dump, filled with garbage, horse manure and ashes from coal-burning furnaces, was cleared under the direction of New York Parks Commissioner Robert Moses for the 1939-1940 World's Fair. - AsNotedIn

• Theme Group: Literary New York, NY
• Theme Group: The Jazz Age

People

• Ginevra King Pirie, Inspiration for Daisy Buchanan
• Tommy Hitchcock Jr, F Scott Fitzgerald modeled Tom Buchanan on Tommy Hitchcock Jr.

Places

• 1939 New York World's Fair Grounds, New York City About half-way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is the valley of ashes -
• Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, New York City The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
• Great Neck, NY, West I lived at West Egg, the - well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them.
• Manhattan NYC, New York City In the early morning the sun threw my shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to the Probity Trust.
• Mansfield Hotel, New York City During the 1950s, the Mansfield was home to Maz von Gurach.
• Midtown Center, I took dinner usually at the Yale Club (50 Vanderbilt Ave) -- for some reason it was the gloomiest event of my day -- and then I went upstairs to the library and studied investments and securities for a conscientious hour.
• Oheka, Huntington The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard - it was a factual imitation of some Hotel 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
• Plaza Hotel, NYC, New York City And we all took the less explicable step of engaging the parlor of a suite in the Plaza Hotel.
• Port Washington, NY, 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.
• Sands Point Preserve, North Hempstead 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.
• Sands Point, NY, 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.

Food

• Champagne
• Mint Julep Cocktail