Great Gatsby

• Nicholas "Nick" Carraway (narrator) — a man from the Midwest, a Yale graduate, a World War I veteran, and a resident of West Egg. He is Gatsby's next-door neighbor and a bond salesman. Easygoing, sarcastic and optimistic, this latter quality fades as the novel progresses. • Jay Gatsby (originally James Gatz) — a young, mysterious millionaire with shady business connections (later revealed to be a bootlegger), originally from North Dakota. He is obsessed with Daisy Buchanan, whom he had met when he was a young officer stationed in the south during World War I. The character is based on the bootlegger and former World War I officer Max Gerlach, according to Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, Matthew J Bruccoli's biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Gatsby is said to have briefly studied at Trinity College, Oxford in England after the end of World War I. • Daisy Buchanan née Fay — an attractive and effervescent, if shallow and self-absorbed, young woman, identified as a flapper. She is Nick's second cousin, once removed; and the wife of Tom Buchanan. Daisy is believed to have been inspired by Fitzgerald's own youthful romances with Ginevra King. Daisy once had a romantic relationship with Gatsby, before she married Tom. Her choice between Gatsby and Tom is one of the central conflicts in the novel. • Tom Buchanan — a millionaire who lives on East Egg, and Daisy's husband. Buchanan has parallels with William Mitchell, the Chicagoan who married Ginevra King. Buchanan and Mitchell were both Chicagoans with an interest in polo. Like Ginevra's father, whom Fitzgerald resented, Buchanan attended Yale and is a white supremacist.[15] • Jordan Baker — Daisy Buchanan's long-time friend, Nick Carraway's girlfriend for most of the novel and a professional golfer with a slightly shady reputation and a penchant for untruthfulness. Fitzgerald told Maxwell Perkins that Jordan was based on the golfer Edith Cummings, a friend of Ginevra King. Her name is a play on the two