04/09/2025, 10:52 THE GREAT GATSBY - F.

Scott Fitzgerald | PDFBooksWorld

twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm
season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly
trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a
house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea.
He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty
a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington,
and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog — at least I had him
for a few days until he ran away — and an old Dodge and a Finnish
woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered
Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more
recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide,
a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the
freedom of the neighborhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on
the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar
conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health
to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a
dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and
they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the

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mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and
Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of
reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college —
one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for
the “Yale News.”— and now I was going to bring back all such
things into my life and become again that most limited of all
specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram —
life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after
all.
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of
the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender
riotous island which extends itself due east of New York — and
where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual
formations of land. 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. They are
not perfect ovals — like the egg in the Columbus story, they are
both crushed flat at the contact end — but their physical
resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls
that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is
their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.
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. My house was at the very tip of
the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two

f H t l d Vill i N
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huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The
one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard — it was a
f t l i it ti d ith t
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