The Norton Critical Edition, ed. David Alworth
The 1925 text with Fitzgerald’s letters, his sources and a century of critics bound in.
The novel is short and the argument about it is long. Read both in one book.
You read the back matter, and you want Fitzgerald’s letters and the first reviews in the same book as the novel.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: the 1925 first American edition text, with a note on the text and annotations by David Alworth.
Changes: the size of the book around it: Fitzgerald’s sources, extracts from his ledger and notebooks, three related short stories, twenty-two letters about the novel, writing on the Jazz Age, then the first reviews, the revival and later readings.
Whose story is it?
Nick’s, then Fitzgerald’s, then the critics’.
How much time does it ask?
584 pages, most of them after the novel ends.
W. W. Norton: A Norton Critical Edition, edited by David Alworth, 584 pages, with a chronology and a selected bibliography.
Where to find it
Buy the paperback — Bookshop.org
Other ways to get it: Paperback — Amazon · Ebook — Kobo · Kindle — Amazon
Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby · Find at your library — WorldCat
More ways into West Egg: The Scribner paperback (“The Only Authorized Edition”) · The Penguin Classics edition, introduction by Min Jin Lee · The Cambridge Edition, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli