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
West Egg is the 'new money' side of the bay; Jordan Baker later reveals that Gatsby bought his mansion there so that Daisy would be just across the water.
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
Louisville, Kentucky is where Gatsby, a young officer from Camp Taylor, courted Daisy in 1917; she went on to marry Tom Buchanan there with more pomp than the city had ever seen.
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 oculist 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 12Which line of work brings Nick Carraway East at the start of The Great Gatsby?
Selling bonds
Selling bonds: Nick comes East to learn the bond business and rents a weather-beaten bungalow at eighty dollars a month, which is how he ends up next door to a stranger's mansion.
Q 13In which state was Gatsby born?
North Dakota
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, after the party-throwing freedman of Petronius's Satyricon; the title went, but chapter 7 still says that Gatsby's 'career as Trimalchio was over'.
Q 23Which patriotic-sounding title did Fitzgerald push weeks before The Great Gatsby went on sale?
North Dakota is where Gatsby was born to shiftless farm people; he later lasted only two weeks at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, despising the janitor's work that paid his way.
Q 14Which copper magnate took the teenage Gatsby aboard his yacht?
Dan Cody
Dan Cody, made a millionaire many times over by Montana copper, kept Gatsby aboard for five years; when he died, Gatsby never saw the $25,000 he was left, and the fortune went to Ella Kaye.
Q 15Gatsby calls himself a man of which university, where he spent five months after the war?
Oxford
Oxford: Gatsby really was sent there for five months in 1919 under a scheme for army officers, so 'an Oxford man' is both true and misleading, and Tom jeers 'Oxford, New Mexico'.
Q 16Which small European kingdom awarded Gatsby a medal for wartime valour?
Montenegro
Montenegro awarded it; Gatsby pulls the Order of Danilo, inscribed 'Montenegro, Nicolas Rex', from his pocket to back up his war stories, and to Nick's astonishment it looks authentic.
Q 17In Fitzgerald's novel, what 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 three weeks before publication, asking what the delay would be; it was judged too late to change.
Q 24Which legendary Scribner's editor persuaded Fitzgerald to revise The Great Gatsby before publication?
Maxwell Perkins
Maxwell Perkins, who later shepherded Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, wrote that Gatsby himself was too vague and his wealth unexplained; Fitzgerald spent the winter sharpening him.
Q 25What is the name of Francis Cugat's cover painting for the first edition of The Great Gatsby?
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 did The Great Gatsby sell in its first six months, to Fitzgerald's dismay?
About 20,000
About 20,000: by October 1925 sales were still just short of that mark, well behind his earlier novels, and Fitzgerald died in 1940 believing the book a failure.
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 were paperbacks sized to fit a uniform pocket; Gatsby joined the series only after Fitzgerald had died in 1940 believing the book forgotten.
Q 28What happened to The Great Gatsby on January 1, 2021?
Its US copyright expired
Its US copyright expired 95 years after publication, so anyone could reprint or rework the story; a prequel about the narrator's earlier life was in the shops within five days.
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, yet in 1937 Fitzgerald went from bookstore to bookstore trying to buy his own books as a gift and found none in stock.
Q 30Under what pen name did Fitzgerald write The Great Gatsby's epigraph himself?
Thomas Parke D'Invilliers
Thomas Parke D'Invilliers is a poet in Fitzgerald's first novel; the 'gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover' of his invented verse also supplied two of the titles Fitzgerald tried out for the book.