Which Great Gatsby should you experience?

A young man from the Midwest rents a house on Long Island for the summer of 1922. His neighbour throws enormous parties and stares across the bay at a green light on the dock where the woman he lost now lives with her husband. By the end of the summer three people are dead. The novel is short, and it has been retold many times since 1925.

It was a Broadway play and a film by 1926. Since then it has been filmed again in 1949, 1974, 2000 and 2013, set to hip-hop, sung on Broadway, drawn three times, retold by Jordan, by Daisy, by Nick before the war, and moved to the Hamptons of now. Its earlier draft has been published under the title Fitzgerald first gave it. None of them is the definitive one. Which one is right for you depends on what you want tonight.

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If quizzes aren’t your thing, browse instead: 29 versions across reading, watching and listening.

• The Scribner paperback (“The Only Authorized Edition”)

  The novel from its first publisher, with an introduction by Jesmyn Ward.

• The Penguin Classics edition, introduction by Min Jin Lee

  The novel with notes by Philip McGowan and an introduction by Min Jin Lee.

• The Norton Critical Edition, ed. David Alworth

  The 1925 text with Fitzgerald’s letters, his sources and a century of critics bound in.

• The Cambridge Edition, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli

  The text rebuilt from the manuscript and the surviving proofs.

• The Cambridge Centennial Edition

  A hardcover for the novel’s hundredth year, with illustrations and the history around it.

• Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby

  The complete draft Fitzgerald sent his editor, before he rewrote it in proof.

• The Everyman’s Library hardcover

  A cloth hardcover with a ribbon marker and an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury.

• The audiobook read by Jake Gyllenhaal

  The novel read aloud by Jake Gyllenhaal.

• So We Read On by Maureen Corrigan (2014)

  A critic’s book about how the novel came to be and why people keep reading it.

• Careless People by Sarah Churchwell (2014)

  The autumn of 1922, a double murder in New Jersey, and the novel that came out of that year.

• The Great Gatsby (1949), with Alan Ladd

  Alan Ladd as Gatsby, in the earliest film of the novel that survives.

• The Great Gatsby (1974), with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow

  Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, from a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola.

• The Great Gatsby (2000 television film)

  Toby Stephens, Mira Sorvino and Paul Rudd, in a ninety-minute film for the BBC and A&E.

• The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann, 2013)

  Leonardo DiCaprio, the parties at full volume, and songs executive-produced by Jay-Z.

• G (2002)

  The story moved to the Hamptons, with a hip-hop star in Gatsby’s place.

• Gatsby in Connecticut: The Untold Story (2020)

  A documentary about the summer the Fitzgeralds spent in Westport, Connecticut.

• The Great Gatsby: The 1926 Broadway Script

  Owen Davis’s stage version, which ran on Broadway the year after the novel came out, printed for the first time.

• The Great Gatsby: A New Musical — Original Broadway Cast Recording (2024)

  Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada as Gatsby and Daisy, on the Broadway musical’s cast album.

• John Harbison: The Great Gatsby Suite (Albany Symphony Orchestra)

  Orchestral music from John Harbison’s opera of the novel.

• Music from Baz Luhrmann’s Film The Great Gatsby (2013)

  The songs from the 2013 film, on one album.

• The Great Gatsby: The Graphic Novel (Fred Fordham and Aya Morton, 2020)

  The novel as a graphic novel, adapted by Fred Fordham and drawn by Aya Morton.

• The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Novel Adaptation (K. Woodman-Maynard, 2021)

  The novel painted in watercolour by K. Woodman-Maynard.

• The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Adaptation (Nicki Greenberg)

  The novel played out by a cast of fantastical creatures in 1920s New York.

• The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo (2021)

  Jordan Baker tells it: queer, Vietnamese, adopted, and able to do magic.

• Nick by Michael Farris Smith (2021)

  Nick Carraway before West Egg: the trenches, Paris and New Orleans.

• Beautiful Little Fools by Jillian Cantor (2022)

  Daisy, Jordan and Myrtle’s sister, in the years before the summer of 1922, and a detective asking who shot Gatsby.

• Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix by Anna-Marie McLemore (2022)

  Nick is a seventeen-year-old trans boy, Daisy is passing as white, and Gatsby shares Nick’s secret.

• Gatsby by Jane Crowther (2026)

  A gender-flipped Gatsby now: Nic is a woman, Gatsby is an it-girl, and the old flame is Danny Buchanan.

• Great by Sara Benincasa (2014)

  A teenage girl spends a summer in the Hamptons and gets caught up in a scandal.

Start with the novel itself

Which edition should you read? compares Scribner, Penguin, the Norton, the two Cambridge editions, Everyman’s Library, the Jake Gyllenhaal audiobook and Trimalchio.
Every version is the full list.