The narrator, Nick Carraway, is a young Princeton man who works as a bond broker in Manhattan. His neighbor at West Egg, Long Island, is Jay Gatsby, a Midwesterner of considerable self-made wealth whose mysterious origin turns out to be bootlegging.
For many years Gatsby has been in love with Nick's cousin Daisy, who is married to the wealthy but coarse Tom Buchanan. Daisy and Gatsby begin an affair. Tom's own mistress, Myrtle, is the wife of a garbage-man. When a distraught Myrtle is hit and killed by Daisy's car on the highway, Daisy drives away from the scene. The jealous Tom tells Myrtle's husband that it was Gatsby who killed Myrtle, and the husband shoots Gatsby and then himself.
With its sharp depiction of the consequences of the "American dream" and of a man betrayed by the ambitions nurtured by a meretricious society, The Great Gatsby is widely regarded as one of the greatest English-language novels of the 20th century.
~Facts on File Dictionary of Historical and Cultural Allusions
