了不起的盖茨比THE GREAT GATSBY（精美双封面 英文原版）

　　《了不起的盖茨比》属“壹力文库？百灵鸟英文经典”系列丛书，是美国二十世纪杰出小说家F. S. 菲茨杰拉德所著的小说。故事发生在二十世纪二十年代，穷小子尼克来到纽约，结识了富豪盖茨比，目睹了纸醉金迷的上流社会以及盖茨比与意中人黛西一段被世俗与物欲摧毁的爱情。全书以尼克的口吻娓娓道来，细心的读者会发现，书中有盖茨比的场景，尼克大多都会如影随形地出现。

　　作者F. S. 菲茨杰拉德（Francis Scott Fitzgerald，1896—1940）是二十世纪美国杰出的作家之一。一八九六年九月二十四日生于明尼苏达州圣保罗市一个商人家庭。后考入普林斯顿大学，但中途辍学。一九二O年出版长篇小说《人间天堂》，一举成名，之后寄居巴黎，结识了安德森、海明威等多位美国作家。一九二五年《了不起的盖茨比》的问世，奠定了他在现代美国文学界杰出的地位，成为二十年代“爵士乐时代”的代言人和“迷惘的一代”的代表作家之一。

 

                                                                                                               Chapter 1

      In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

      “Whenever you feel like criticising anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

 

      He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation or a hostile levity when I realised by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

      And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. 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. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.