One of my favorite authors

Here are a few excerpts from F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." I first read this story in high school and since then have been gripped by Fitzgerald's use of vivid imagery, foreshadowing and his tireless depiction of promising, yet doomed characters.

"No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock-until long after there was any one to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through shriveled, frightening leaves as found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees..."

"She was the first "nice" girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people, but always with barbed wire between. He found her excitingly desirable. He went to her house, first with other officers from Camp Taylor, then alone It amazed him-he had never been in such a beautiful house before. But what gave it an air of breathless intensity was that Daisy lived there-it was as casual a thing to her as his tent out at camp was to him. There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking through its corridors, and romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender, but fresh and breathing, and redolent of this years shining motor-cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. It excited him, too, that many had already loved Daisy-it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions."