50 free The Great Gatsby trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
45 free The Great Gatsby trivia questions with answers. The Great Gatsby is the American novel more people have read (or been assigned) than any other, and this quiz covers it from every angle. Forty-five questions run through the plot and characters, the symbols teachers love (the green light, the eyes of Doctor Eckleburg, the valley of ashes), the real people who inspired Gatsby and Daisy, the titles Fitzgerald nearly chose, the book's flop-then-classic history, and the film, opera, stage and musical adaptations from 1926 to Broadway in 2024. It works as Great Gatsby trivia for a book club, a class review, or a themed party night. Difficulty ratings are shown, so you can pick the easy openers or the genuinely obscure ones. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the novel, its author, its characters and its adaptations, and each question carries its source.
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Q 01Who wrote The Great Gatsby?
F. Scott Fitzgerald
His full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, after the distant cousin who wrote the words to The Star-Spangled Banner.
Q 02In which year was The Great Gatsby first published?
1925
Charles Scribner's Sons released it on April 10; the story itself is set three years earlier, in the summer of 1922.
Q 03Who narrates The Great Gatsby?
Nick Carraway
He is 29 when the story begins and turns 30 during it, a birthday he only remembers in the middle of the Plaza Hotel row.
Q 04Which fictional Long Island community does Gatsby live in?
West Egg
The 'new money' peninsula was modelled on Great Neck, where Fitzgerald himself lived; the Buchanans' 'old money' side was Port Washington.
Q 05What colour is the light at the end of Daisy's dock that Gatsby stares at across the bay?
Green
Nick first sees Gatsby alone on his lawn reaching toward it, and it closes the book as the symbol of everything he cannot reach.
Q 06Where is Daisy Buchanan originally from?
Louisville, Kentucky
Gatsby met her there in 1917 while training as a young officer at Camp Taylor, and never let go.
Q 07How is Nick related to Daisy?
Her second cousin once removed
The distant kinship is what gets him invited to dinner in East Egg in the first chapter and later lets him arrange the reunion over tea.
Q 08Which sport did Tom Buchanan star in at Yale?
Football
Nick describes him as one of those men who reach such an acute excellence at 21 that everything afterwards is anticlimax.
Q 09What is Jordan Baker's sporting occupation?
Golfer
Nick recalls a rumour that she once moved her ball in a tournament, one of the novel's many small dishonesties.
Q 10What does George Wilson do for a living?
Runs a garage
His business sits in the valley of ashes beneath the billboard eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which he takes for the eyes of God.
Q 11Whose eyes stare out from the faded billboard over the valley of ashes?
Doctor T. J. Eckleburg
The optometrist's advertisement is echoed by Francis Cugat's cover painting Celestial Eyes, which impressed Fitzgerald so much he wrote it into the book.
Q 12What was Gatsby's name at birth?
James Gatz
The son of unsuccessful farmers reinvented himself at 17 when he rowed out to a millionaire's yacht on Lake Superior.
Q 13In which state was Gatsby born?
North Dakota
He briefly attended St. Olaf College in Minnesota, lasting only two weeks before quitting the janitorial work that paid for it.
Q 21Who is Henry Gatz, who arrives several days after the murder?
Gatsby's father
He shows Nick a boyhood schedule his son wrote in the back of a Hopalong Cassidy book; almost nobody else comes to the funeral.
Q 22Which title had Fitzgerald settled on in November 1924, before being talked out of it?
Trimalchio in West Egg
Trimalchio is the vulgar, party-throwing freedman of Petronius's Satyricon; other candidates included Gold-Hatted Gatsby and The High-Bouncing Lover.
Q 23Which patriotic-sounding title did Fitzgerald push weeks before Gatsby was published in 1925?
Under the Red, White, and Blue
Q 14Which copper magnate took the teenage Gatsby aboard his yacht?
Dan Cody
The old man's mistress cheated Gatsby out of the $25,000 he was left, but five years at sea gave him his manners and his ambitions.
Q 15At which Oxford college did Gatsby briefly study after the war?
Trinity
He was there for five months in 1919 under an officers' scheme, which is why his claim to be 'an Oxford man' is both true and misleading.
Q 16Which small European kingdom awarded Gatsby a medal for wartime valour?
Montenegro
He carries the Order of Danilo in his pocket to prove his stories, along with a photograph of himself at Oxford.
Q 17What make of car does Gatsby drive?
A Rolls-Royce
The big yellow machine, which Tom sneers at as a 'circus wagon', is the car that kills Myrtle Wilson with Daisy at the wheel.
Q 18Which real-life gangster inspired Meyer Wolfsheim, the man Gatsby says fixed the 1919 World Series?
Arnold Rothstein
Wolfsheim wears cufflinks made of human molars and declines to attend Gatsby's funeral, preferring not to 'get mixed up in it'.
Q 19Where does the climactic confrontation between Gatsby and Tom take place?
A suite at the Plaza Hotel
On the hottest day of the summer, Tom exposes Gatsby's bootlegging and Daisy admits she once loved her husband too.
Q 20Where is Gatsby when George Wilson shoots him?
In his swimming pool
It is the first time he has used the pool all summer; Wilson then turns the gun on himself.
The book had already gone to press, so the request came too late; Fitzgerald went on grumbling that Gatsby was the wrong title.
Q 24Which legendary Scribner's editor persuaded Fitzgerald to revise the manuscript?
Maxwell Perkins
The same editor later shepherded Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe; Fitzgerald rewrote heavily on the galley proofs.
Q 25What is the name of Francis Cugat's cover painting for the first edition?
Celestial Eyes
The disembodied face over a carnival skyline was finished before the novel, and Fitzgerald claimed to have written it into the book.
Q 26Roughly how many copies had The Great Gatsby sold by October 1925?
Fewer than 20,000
According to his ledger Fitzgerald earned only $2,000 from the book, and he died in 1940 believing it forgotten.
Q 27Which wartime programme sent 155,000 free copies of Gatsby to US soldiers and revived its fortunes?
The Armed Services Editions
The pocket-sized paperbacks from the Council on Books in Wartime turned a forgotten flop into a classic within a decade.
Q 28On what date did The Great Gatsby enter the US public domain?
January 1, 2021
The flood of new editions, prequels and a Muppet parody followed almost immediately.
Q 29Roughly how many copies had The Great Gatsby sold worldwide by early 2020?
30 million
It still shifts around 500,000 copies a year and has been translated into 42 languages.
Q 30Under what pen name did Fitzgerald write the novel's epigraph himself?
Thomas Parke D'Invilliers
The name belongs to a poet character in his first novel, This Side of Paradise; the other options are also his fictional creations.