The Great Gatsby Trivia
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100 free The Great Gatsby trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 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.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who wrote The Great Gatsby?
F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it; 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
The Great Gatsby was first published in 1925, released by Charles Scribner's Sons on April 10 of that year; the story itself is set in the summer of 1922.
Q 03Who narrates The Great Gatsby?
Nick Carraway
Nick Carraway narrates; he is 29 when the story begins and turns 30 during it, a birthday he only remembers in the middle of the Chapter 7 quarrel.
Q 04Which fictional Long Island community does Gatsby live in?
West Egg
Gatsby lives in West Egg, the 'new money' peninsula across the bay from the Buchanans' 'old money' East Egg; Fitzgerald modelled it on the North Shore village where he rented a house in 1922.
Q 05What colour is the light at the end of Daisy's dock that Gatsby stares at across the bay?
Green
Green is the colour of the light at the end of Daisy's dock; 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
Daisy is from Louisville, Kentucky, where Gatsby met her in October 1917 while stationed as a young officer at Camp Taylor, and never let go.
Q 07How is Nick related to Daisy?
Her second cousin once removed
Her second cousin once removed is how Nick describes Daisy in the first chapter; that distant kinship gets him invited to dinner in East Egg and later lets him arrange the reunion over tea.
Q 08Which sport did Tom Buchanan star in at Yale?
Football
Football: Nick calls Tom one of the most powerful ends ever to play at New Haven, a man who reached such acute excellence at 21 that everything afterward savours of anticlimax.
Q 09What is Jordan Baker's sporting occupation?
Golfer
Golfer: Jordan Baker is a tournament golf champion, and Nick recalls a rumour that she once moved her ball from a bad lie in a semi-final, one of the novel's many small dishonesties.
Q 10What does George Wilson do for a living?
Runs a garage
Runs a garage: George Wilson's garage and filling station sits in the valley of ashes, where Tom stops for petrol and where Myrtle is later struck down on the road outside.
Q 11Whose eyes stare out from the faded billboard over the valley of ashes?
Doctor T. J. Eckleburg
Doctor T. J. Eckleburg is the optometrist whose giant spectacled eyes, blue and a yard high, look down on the valley of ashes from a faded billboard; George Wilson later takes them for the eyes of God.
Q 12What was Gatsby's name at birth?
James Gatz
James Gatz was his name at birth; the son of shiftless farm people renamed himself at 17, the day he rowed out to a millionaire's yacht on Lake Superior.
Q 13In which state was Gatsby born?
North Dakota
North Dakota is where Gatsby was born to shiftless farm people; he later lasted only two weeks at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, dismayed by the janitor's work that paid his way.
Q 21Who is Henry Gatz, who arrives several days after the murder?
Gatsby's father
Gatsby's father, Henry C. Gatz, arrives for the funeral; he shows Nick a boyhood schedule his son wrote in the back of a Hopalong Cassidy book, and almost nobody else attends.
Q 22Which title had Fitzgerald settled on in November 1924, before being talked out of it?
Trimalchio in West Egg
Trimalchio in West Egg was the title he settled on; Trimalchio is the vulgar, party-throwing freedman of Petronius's Satyricon, and 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?
Q 14Which copper magnate took the teenage Gatsby aboard his yacht?
Dan Cody
Dan Cody, a product of the Montana copper booms, kept Gatsby aboard his yacht for five years; Cody's mistress Ella Kaye then cheated him out of the $25,000 he was left.
Q 15At which Oxford college did Gatsby briefly study after the war?
Trinity
Trinity is the college in whose quad Gatsby's Oxford photograph was taken; he stayed only five months in 1919 under a scheme for officers, which makes 'an Oxford man' both true and misleading.
Q 16Which small European kingdom awarded Gatsby a medal for wartime valour?
Montenegro
Montenegro awarded it; Gatsby carries the Order of Danilo, inscribed 'Montenegro, Nicolas Rex', in his pocket to prove his stories, alongside a photograph of himself at Oxford.
Q 17What make of car does Gatsby drive?
A Rolls-Royce
A Rolls-Royce: Nick calls it a rich cream colour, Tom sneers at it as a 'circus wagon', and it is the big yellow 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
Arnold Rothstein, the New York gambler accused of fixing the 1919 World Series, was Fitzgerald's model; Wolfsheim wears cufflinks of human molars and declines to attend Gatsby's funeral.
Q 19Where does the climactic confrontation between Gatsby and Tom take place?
A suite at the Plaza Hotel
A suite at the Plaza Hotel: on the hottest day of the summer the party takes a parlour there, where 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
In his swimming pool: it is the first time Gatsby has used the pool all summer; after shooting him, Wilson turns the gun on himself.
Under the Red, White, and Blue
Under the Red, White, and Blue was the title Fitzgerald cabled from Capri that March, weeks before publication; the book had already gone to press, so it was too late.
Q 24Which legendary Scribner's editor persuaded Fitzgerald to revise the manuscript?
Maxwell Perkins
Maxwell Perkins, the Scribner's editor who later shepherded Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, urged the revisions; Fitzgerald rewrote heavily on the galley proofs in the winter before publication.
Q 25What is the name of Francis Cugat's cover painting for the first edition?
Celestial Eyes
Celestial Eyes shows a disembodied face over a carnival skyline; Cugat finished it before the novel was done, and Fitzgerald told his editor he had taken the jacket into the book.
Q 26Roughly how many copies had The Great Gatsby sold by October 1925?
Fewer than 20,000
Fewer than 20,000 copies had sold by that October; the first printing of 20,870 moved so slowly that Fitzgerald died in 1940 with copies of the second printing unsold, believing the book forgotten.
Q 27Which wartime programme sent 155,000 free copies of Gatsby to US soldiers and revived its fortunes?
The Armed Services Editions
The Armed Services Editions, pocket-sized paperbacks produced by the Council on Books in Wartime, shipped 155,000 copies of Gatsby to servicemen during and after the Second World War and turned a forgotten flop into a classic.
Q 28On what date did The Great Gatsby enter the US public domain?
January 1, 2021
January 1, 2021 is when the novel entered the US public domain, 95 years after its first publication; a flood of new editions and prequels such as Michael Farris Smith's Nick followed almost immediately.
Q 29Roughly how many copies had The Great Gatsby sold worldwide by early 2020?
30 million
30 million copies had sold worldwide by early 2020; through the 2010s it sold around 500,000 copies a year, and it has been translated into 42 languages.
Q 30Under what pen name did Fitzgerald write the novel's epigraph himself?
Thomas Parke D'Invilliers
Thomas Parke D'Invilliers is a poet character from Fitzgerald's first novel; the other three options are likewise his own creations, from that same novel, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Last Tycoon.