THE GREAT GATSBY

First Edition, First Impression: original green cloth, title stamped in blind on the upper cover and in gilt on the spine, the cloth is bright and unmarked, the front hinge is a parting between the title page and the list of Fitzgerald's novels on the verso of the half-title (a common fault with this edition), contained in a solander case titled gilt on the back and with the iconic "Celestial Eyes" impressed on the upper cover, a very good copy.

With the issue points:  'chatter' for 'echolalia' on page 60, 'northern' for 'Southern' on page 119, and 'Union Station' for 'Pennsylvania Station' on page 211. The so-called 'Celestial Eyes' — floating above the illuminated skyline of Coney Island, is after a painting by Francis Cugat commissioned specially for this edition.

'Scribners published The Great Gatsby, the novel that secured Fitzgerald's enduring fame. He had reached his full maturity as a writer. The work is often described in terms of a meditation or vision of America because of its judicious use of myth, metaphor, and history. When Fitzgerald was first thinking about his third novel in July 1922, he wrote Perkins that he wanted 'to write something new - something extraordinary and beautiful and simple (and) intricately patterned'.  Bruccoli (Matthew J.) Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, page 170.

‘I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.’ This well-known passage is from page 217 spoken by the narrator, Nick Carraway, as he lies on the beach near Gatsby's house one last time before moving back to the Midwest.