Meaning of Gatsbyesque | Babel Free

Definitions

Suggestive of Jay Gatsby, the titular character of the novel The Great Gatsby (1925): enigmatic; extravagant; nouveau riche, etc.

Examples

“And meanwhile there was in him [Carter Burden] a theatrical hunger; the Gatsbyesque demand: "I was very conscious of stars."”

“During the first half of the century, Princeton and Cornell joined forces every third and fourth years for home-and-away dual meets with the two English schools [Oxford University and Cambridge University]. It was a sort of Gatsbyesque ideal, featuring a long trip on a luxury liner, and a classic mile matchup between Jack Lovelock of Cambridge and Bill Bonthron '34 even produced a world mile record by the former.”

“There was a Gatsbyesque quality to this relatively poor Midwestern boy [George Frost Kennan] who recreated himself as an aristocratic, European-oriented, conservative member of America's leadership class yet never lost a sense of belonging.”

“A perpetual bachelor, his named popped up with some frequency in the society pages of the New York papers. Effortlessly, it seemed, Peter Gordon Mackenzie had propelled himself from a jute trader on a gloomy island in the Outer Hebrides to a life of Gatsbyesque splendor at the height of the Gilded Age.”

CEFR level