title: North Carolina

text: While North Carolina has no Major League Baseball team, it does have numerous Minor League Baseball teams, with the highest level of play coming from the Triple-A Charlotte Knights and Durham Bulls. Additionally, North Carolina has minor league teams in other team sports including soccer and ice hockey, most notably North Carolina FC and the Charlotte Checkers, both of which play in the second tier of their respective sports.


title: North Carolina

text: In addition to professional team sports, North Carolina has a strong affiliation with NASCAR and stock-car racing, with Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord hosting two Cup Series races every year. Charlotte also hosts the NASCAR Hall of Fame, while Concord is the home of several top-flight racing teams, including Hendrick Motorsports, Roush Fenway Racing, Petty GMS Motorsports, Stewart-Haas Racing, and Chip Ganassi Racing. Numerous other tracks around North Carolina host races from low-tier NASCAR circuits as well.


title: North Carolina

text: Golf is a popular summertime leisure activity, and North Carolina has hosted several important professional golf tournaments. Pinehurst Resort in Pinehurst has hosted a PGA Championship, Ryder Cup, two U.S. Opens, and one U.S. Women's Open. The Wells Fargo Championship is a regular stop on the PGA Tour and is held at Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte, and Quail Hollow has also played host to the PGA Championship. The Wyndham Championship is played annually in Greensboro at Sedgefield Country Club.


title: North Carolina

text: College sports are also popular in North Carolina, with 18 schools competing at the Division I level. The Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) is headquartered in Greensboro, and both the ACC Football Championship Game (Charlotte) and the ACC men's basketball tournament (Greensboro) were most recently held in North Carolina. Additionally, the city of Charlotte is home to the National Junior College Athletics Association's (NJCAA) headquarters. College basketball is very popular in North Carolina, buoyed by the Tobacco Road rivalries between ACC members North Carolina, Duke, North Carolina State, and Wake Forest. The ACC Championship Game and the Duke's Mayo Bowl are held annually in Charlotte's Bank of America Stadium, featuring teams from the ACC and the Southeastern Conference. Additionally, the state has hosted the NCAA Men's Basketball Final Four on two occasions, in Greensboro in 1974 and in Charlotte in 1994.


title: Nas

text: Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones (; born September 14, 1973), better known by his stage name Nas (), is an American rapper. Rooted in East Coast hip hop, he is regarded as one of the greatest rappers of all time. The son of jazz musician Olu Dara, Jones's musical career began in 1989 as he adopted the moniker of "Nasty Nas" and recorded demos for Large Professor. He was later featured on the 1991 song "Live at the Barbeque" by Main Source.


title: Nas

text: Nas's debut album, "Illmatic" (1994), received universal acclaim upon release, and is considered to be one of the greatest hip hop albums of all time; in 2021, the album was inducted into the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry. His second album "It Was Written" (1996) debuted atop the "Billboard" 200 and charted for four consecutive weeks; the album, along with its single "If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)" (featuring Lauryn Hill), catapulted Nas into international success. Both released in 1999, Nas's albums "I Am" and "Nastradamus" were criticized as inconsistent and too commercially oriented, and critics and fans feared that his output was declining in quality.


title: Nas

text: From 2001 to 2005, Nas was involved in a highly publicized feud with Jay-Z, popularized by the diss track "Ether". It was this feud, along with Nas's albums "Stillmatic" (2001), "God's Son" (2002), and the double album "Street's Disciple" (2004), that helped restore his critical standing. After squashing the feud, Nas signed to Jay-Z's Def Jam Recordings in 2006 and went in a more provocative, politicized direction with the albums "Hip Hop Is Dead" (2006) and his untitled 9th studio album (2008). In 2010, Nas released "Distant Relatives", a collaboration album with Damian Marley, donating all royalties to charities active in Africa. His 10th studio album, "Life Is Good" (2012), was nominated for Best Rap Album at the 55th Annual Grammy Awards. After receiving thirteen nominations, his 12th studio album, "King's Disease" (2020), won him his first Grammy for Best Rap Album at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards; he then followed it by releasing his 13th studio album, "King's Disease II" (2021), as the album's sequel. In the same year, his 14th studio album, "Magic", was released on Christmas Eve. "King's Disease III" (2022) is his fourth consecutive album with producer Hit-Boy.


title: Nas

text: In 2012, "The Source" ranked him second on their list of the "Top 50 Lyricists of All Time". In 2013, Nas was ranked 4th on MTV's "Hottest MCs in the Game" list. About.com ranked him first on their list of the "50 Greatest MCs of All Time" in 2014, and a year later, Nas was featured on the "10 Best Rappers of All Time" list by "Billboard". He is also an entrepreneur through his own record label; he serves as associate publisher of "Mass Appeal" magazine and the co-founder of Mass Appeal Records.


title: Nas

text: Nas has released fifteen studio albums since 1994, ten of which are certified gold, platinum or multi-platinum in the U.S.


title: Nas

text: Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones was born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn on September 14, 1973, to African American parents. His father, Olu Dara (born Charles Jones III), is a jazz and blues musician from Mississippi. His mother, Fannie Ann (née Little; 1941–2002) was a U.S. Postal Service worker from North Carolina. He has a brother, Jabari Fret, who raps under the name Jungle and is a member of hip hop group Bravehearts. His father adopted the name "Olu Dara" from the Yoruba people. "Nasir" is an Arabic name meaning "helper and protector", while "bin" means "son of" in Arabic. He is a cousin of actors Yara Shahidi and Sayeed Shahidi.


title: Nas

text: As a young child, Nas and his family relocated to the Queensbridge Houses in the borough of Queens. His neighbor, Willy "Ill Will" Graham, influenced his interest in hip hop by playing him records. His parents divorced in 1985, and he dropped out of school after the eighth grade. He educated himself about African culture through the Five-Percent Nation (a splinter group of the Nation of Islam) and the Nuwaubian Nation. In his early years, he played the trumpet and began writing his own rhymes.


title: Nas

text: As a teenager, Nas enlisted his best friend and upstairs neighbor Willie "Ill Will" Graham as his DJ. Nas initially went by the nickname "Kid Wave" before adopting his more commonly known alias of "Nasty Nas". In 1989, then-16-year-old Nas met up with producer Large Professor and went to the studio where Rakim and Kool G Rap were recording their albums. When they were not in the recording studio, Nas would go into the booth and record his own material. However, none of it was ever released.


title: Nas

text: In 1991, Nas performed on Main Source's "Live at the Barbeque", also produced by Large Professor. In mid-1992, Nas was approached by MC Serch of 3rd Bass, who became his manager and secured Nas a record deal with Columbia Records during the same year. Nas made his solo debut under the name of "Nasty Nas" on the single "Halftime" from MC Serch's soundtrack for the film "Zebrahead". Called the new Rakim, his rhyming skills attracted a significant amount of attention within the hip hop community.


title: Nas

text: In 1994, Nas's debut album, "Illmatic", was released. It featured production from Large Professor, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, LES and DJ Premier, as well as guest appearances from Nas's friend AZ and his father Olu Dara. The album spawned several singles, including "The World Is Yours", "It Ain't Hard to Tell", and "One Love". Shaheem Reid of MTV News called "Illmatic" "the first classic LP" of 1994. In 1994, Nas also recorded the song "One on One" for the soundtrack to the film "Street Fighter". In his book "To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic", William Jelani Cobb writes of Nas's impact at the time:


title: Nas

text: "Illmatic" was awarded best album of 1994 by "The Source". Steve Huey of AllMusic described Nas's lyrics on "Illmatic" as "highly literate" and his raps "superbly fluid regardless of the size of his vocabulary", adding that Nas is "able to evoke the bleak reality of ghetto life without losing hope or forgetting the good times". About.com ranked "Illmatic" as the greatest hip hop album of all time, and "Prefix" magazine praised it as "the best hip hop record ever made".


title: Nas

text: In 1995, Nas did guest performances on the albums "Doe or Die" by AZ, "The Infamous" by The Infamous Mobb Deep, "Only Built 4 Cuban Linx" by Raekwon and "4,5,6" by Kool G Rap. Nas also parted ways with manager MC Serch, enlisted Steve Stoute, and began preparation for his second album, "It Was Written". The album was chiefly produced by Tone and Poke of the Trackmasters, as Nas consciously worked towards a crossover-oriented sound. Columbia Records had begun to pressure Nas to work towards more commercial topics, such as that of The Notorious B.I.G., who had become successful by releasing street singles that still retained radio-friendly appeal. The album also expanded on Nas's Escobar persona, who lived a "Scarface"/"Casino"-esque lifestyle. On the other hand, references to "Scarface" protagonist Tony Montana notwithstanding, "Illmatic" was more about his early life growing up in the projects.


title: Nas

text: "It Was Written" was released in mid-1996. Two singles, "If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)" (featuring Lauryn Hill of The Fugees) and "Street Dreams" (including a remix with R. Kelly), were instant hits. These songs were promoted by big-budget music videos directed by Hype Williams, making Nas a common name among mainstream hip-hop. Reviewing "It Was Written", Leo Stanley of Allmusic believed the album's rhymes were not as complex as those of "Illmatic", but still thought Nas had "deepened his talents, creating a complex series of rhymes that not only flow, but manage to tell coherent stories as well." "It Was Written" featured the debut of the Firm, a supergroup consisting of Nas, AZ, Foxy Brown, and Cormega.


title: Nas

text: Signed to Dr. Dre's Aftermath Entertainment label, the Firm began working on their debut album. Halfway through the production of the album, Cormega was fired from the group by Steve Stoute, who had unsuccessfully attempted to force Cormega to sign a deal with his management company. Cormega subsequently became one of Nas's most vocal opponents and released a number of underground hip hop singles "dissing" Nas, Stoute, and Nature, who replaced Cormega as the fourth member of the Firm. "Nas, Foxy Brown, AZ, and Nature Present The Firm: The Album" was finally released in 1997 to mixed reviews. The album failed to live up to its expected sales, despite being certified platinum, and the members of the group disbanded to go their separate ways.


title: Nas

text: During this period, Nas was one of four rappers (the others being B-Real, KRS-One and RBX) in the hip-hop supergroup Group Therapy, who appeared on the song "East Coast/West Coast Killas" from "Dr. Dre Presents the Aftermath".


title: Nas

text: In late 1998, Nas began working on a double album, to be entitled "I Am... The Autobiography"; he intended it as the middle ground between "Illmatic" and "It Was Written", with each track detailing a part of his life. In 1998, Nas co-wrote and starred in Hype Williams's feature film "Belly". "I Am... The Autobiography" was completed in early 1999, and a music video was shot for its lead single, "Nas Is Like". It was produced by DJ Premier and contained vocal samples from "It Ain't Hard to Tell". Music critic M.F. DiBella noticed that Nas also covered "politics, the state of hip-hop, Y2K, race, and religion with his own unique perspective" in the album besides autobiographical lyrics. Much of the LP was leaked into MP3 format onto the Internet, and Nas and Stoute quickly recorded enough substitute material to constitute a single-disc release.


title: Nas

text: The second single on "I Am..." was "Hate Me Now", featuring Sean "Puffy" Combs, which was used as an example by Nas's critics accusing him of moving towards more commercial themes. The video featured Nas and Combs being crucified in a manner similar to Jesus Christ; after the video was completed, Combs requested his crucifixion scene be edited out of the video. However, the unedited copy of the "Hate Me Now" video made its way to MTV. Within minutes of the broadcast, Combs and his bodyguards allegedly made their way into Steve Stoute's office and assaulted him, at one point apparently hitting Stoute over the head with a champagne bottle. Stoute pressed charges, but he and Combs settled out-of-court that June. Columbia had scheduled to release the infringed material from "I Am..." under the title "Nastradamus" during the later half of 1999, but, at the last minute, Nas decided to record an entire new album for the 1999 release of "Nastradamus". "Nastradamus" was therefore rushed to meet a November release date. Though critical reviews were unfavorable, it did result in a minor hit, "You Owe Me". Fans and critics feared that Nas's career was declining, artistically and commercially, as both "I Am..." and "Nastradamus" were criticized as inconsistent and overtly-commercialized.


title: Nas

text: In 2000, "Nas & Ill Will Records Presents QB's Finest", which is popularly known as simply "QB's Finest", was released on Nas's Ill Will Records. "QB's Finest" is a compilation album that featured Nas and a number of other rappers from Queensbridge projects, including Mobb Deep, Nature, Capone, the Bravehearts, Tragedy Khadafi, Millennium Thug and Cormega, who had briefly reconciled with Nas. The album also featured guest appearances from Queensbridge hip-hop legends Roxanne Shanté, MC Shan, and Marley Marl. Shan and Marley Marl both appeared on the lead single "Da Bridge 2001", which was based on Shan & Marl's 1986 recording "The Bridge".


title: Nas

text: After trading veiled criticisms on various songs, freestyles and mixtape appearances, the highly publicised dispute between Nas and Jay-Z became widely known to the public in 2001. Jay-Z, in his song "Takeover", criticised Nas by calling him "fake" and his career "lame". Nas responded with "Ether", in which he compared Jay-Z to such characters as J.J. Evans from the sitcom "Good Times" and cigarette company mascot Joe Camel. The song was included on Nas's fifth studio album, "Stillmatic", released in December 2001. His daughter, Destiny, is listed as an executive producer on " Stillmatic" so she could receive royalty checks from the album. "Stillmatic" peaked at No. 5 on the U.S. "Billboard" 200 chart and featured the singles "Got Ur Self A..." and "One Mic".


title: Nas

text: In response to "Ether", Jay-Z released the song "Supa Ugly", which Hot 97 radio host Angie Martinez premiered on December 11, 2001. In the song, Jay-Z explicitly boasts about having an affair with Nas's girlfriend, Carmen Bryan. New York City hip-hop radio station Hot 97 issued a poll asking listeners which rapper made the better diss song; Nas won with 58% while Jay-Z got 42% of the votes. In 2002, in the midst of the dispute between the two New York rappers, Eminem cited both Nas and Jay-Z as being two of the best MCs in the industry, in his song 'Till I Collapse. Both the dispute and "Stillmatic" signalled an artistic comeback for Nas after a string of inconsistent albums. "The Lost Tapes", a compilation of previously unreleased or bootlegged songs from 1998 to 2001, was released by Columbia in September 2002. The collection attained respectable sales and received rave reviews from critics.


title: Nas

text: In December 2002, Nas released the "God's Son" album including its lead single, "Made You Look" which used a pitched down sample of the Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache". The album peaked at No. 12 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts despite widespread Internet bootlegging. Time Magazine named his album best hip-hop album of the year. Vibe gave it four stars and The Source gave it four mics. The second single, "I Can", which reworked elements from Beethoven's "Für Elise", became Nas's biggest hit to date in 2003, garnering substantial radio airplay on urban, rhythmic, and top 40 radio stations, as well as on the MTV and VH1 music video networks. "God's Son" also includes several songs dedicated to Nas's mother, who died of cancer in April 2002, including "Dance". In 2003, Nas was featured on the Korn song "Play Me", from Korn's "Take a Look in the Mirror" LP. Also in 2003, a live performance in New York City, featuring Ludacris, Jadakiss, and Darryl McDaniels (of Run-D.M.C. fame), was released on DVD as "Made You Look: God's Son Live".


title: Nas

text: "God's Son" was critical in the power struggle between Nas and Jay-Z in the hip-hop industry at the time. In an article at the time, Joseph Jones of PopMatters stated, "Whether you like it or not, "Ether" did this. With "God's Son", Nas has the opportunity to cement his status as the King of NY, at least for another 3-4-year term, or he could prove that he is not the savior that hip-hop fans should be pinning their hopes on." After the album's release, he began helping the Bravehearts, an act including his younger brother Jungle and friend Wiz (Wizard), put together their debut album, "Bravehearted". The album featured guest appearances from Nas, Nashawn (Millennium Thug), Lil Jon, and Jully Black.


title: Nas

text: Nas released his seventh album "Street's Disciple", a sprawling double album, on November 30, 2004. It addressed subject matter both political and personal, including his impending marriage to recording artist Kelis. The double-sided single "Thief's Theme"/"You Know My Style" was released months before the album's release, followed by the single "Bridging the Gap" upon the album's release. Although "Street's Disciple" went platinum, it served as a drop-off from Nas's previous commercial successes.


title: Nas

text: In 2005, New York-based rapper 50 Cent dissed Nas on his song "Piggy Bank", which brought his reputation into question in hip-hop circles. In October, Nas made a surprise appearance at Jay-Z's "I Declare War" concert, where they reconciled their beef. At the show, Jay-Z announced to the crowd, "It's bigger than 'I Declare War'. Let's go, Esco!" and Nas then joined him onstage, and the two performed Jay-Z's "Dead Presidents" (1996) together, a song that featured a prominent sample of Nas's 1994 track, "The World Is Yours" (1994).


title: Nas

text: The reconciliation between Nas and Jay-Z created the opportunity for Nas to sign a deal with Def Jam Recordings, of which Jay-Z was president at the time. Jay-Z signed Nas on January 23, 2006; the signing included an agreement that Nas was to be paid about $3,000,000, including a recording budget, for each of his first two albums with Def Jam.


title: Nas

text: Tentatively called "Hip Hop Is Dead...The N", "Hip Hop Is Dead" was a commentary on the state of hip-hop and featured "Black Republican", a hyped collaboration with Jay-Z. The album debuted on Def Jam and Nas new imprint at that label, The Jones Experience, at No. 1 on the "Billboard" 200 charts, selling 355,000 copies—Nas's third number one album, along with "It Was Written" and "I Am...". It also inspired reactions about the state of hip-hop, particularly controversy with Southern hip hop artists who felt the album's title was a criticism aimed at them. Nas's 2004 song, "Thief's Theme", was featured in the 2006 film, "The Departed". Nas's former label, Columbia Records, released the compilation "Greatest Hits" in November.


title: Nas

text: On October 12, 2007, Nas announced that his next album would be called "Nigger". Both progressive commentators, such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, and the conservative-aligned news channel Fox News were outraged; Jackson called on entertainers to stop using the epithet after comedian Michael Richards used it onstage in late 2006. Controversy escalated as the album's impending release date drew nearer, going as far as to spark rumors that Def Jam was planning to drop Nas unless he changed the title. Additionally, then-Fort Greene, Brooklyn assemblyman (later United States Representative) Hakeem Jeffries requested that New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli withdraw $84,000,000 from the state pension fund that had been invested into Universal and its parent company, Vivendi, if the album's title was not changed. On the opposite side of the spectrum, many of the most famous names in the entertainment industry supported Nas for using the racial epithet as the title of his full-length LP. Nas's management worried the album would not be sold by chain stores such as Wal-Mart, thus limiting its distribution.


title: Nas

text: On May 19, 2008, Nas decided to forgo an album title. Responding to Jesse Jackson's remarks and use of the word "nigger", Nas called him "the biggest player hater", stating "His time is up. All you old niggas' time is up. We heard your voice, we saw your marching, we heard your sermons. We don't want to hear that shit no more. It's a new day. It's a new voice. I'm here now. We don't need Jesse; I'm here. I got this. We the voice now. It's no more Jesse. Sorry. Goodbye. You ain't helping nobody in the 'hood and that's the bottom line." He also said of the album's title: "It's important to me that this album gets to the fans. It's been a long time coming. I want my fans to know that creatively and lyrically, they can expect the same content and the same messages. The people will always know what the real title of this album is and what to call it."


title: Nas

text: The album was ultimately released on July 15, 2008, untitled. It featured production from Polow da Don, stic.man of Dead Prez, Sons of Light and J. Myers, "Hero", the album's lead single released on June 23, 2008, reached No. 97 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 and No. 87 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles & Tracks. In July, Nas attained a shoe deal with Fila. In an interview with MTV News in July, Nas speculated that he might release two albums: one produced by DJ Premier and another by Dr. Dre—simultaneously the same day. Nas worked on Dr. Dre's studio album "Detox". Nas was also awarded 'Emcee of the Year' in the HipHopDX 2008 Awards for his latest solo effort, the quality of his appearances on other albums and was described as having "become an artist who thrives off of reinvention and going against the system."


title: Nas

text: At the 2009 Grammy Awards, Nas confirmed he was collaborating on an album with reggae singer Damian Marley which was expected to be released in late 2009. Nas said of the collaboration in an interview "I was a big fan of his father and of course all the children, all the offspring, and Damian, I kind of looked at Damian as a rap guy. His stuff is not really singing, or if he does, it comes off more hard, like on some street shit. I always liked how reggae and hip-hop have always been intertwined and always kind of pushed each other, I always liked the connection. I'd worked with people before from the reggae world but when I worked with Damian, the whole workout was perfect". A portion of the profit was planned to go towards building a school in Africa. He went on to say that it was "too early to tell the title or anything like that". "The Los Angeles Times" reported that the album would be titled "Distant Relatives".


title: Nas

text: Nas also revealed that he would begin working on his tenth studio album following the release of "Distant Relatives". During late 2009, Nas used his live band Mulatto with music director Dustin Moore for concerts in Europe and Australia.


title: Nas

text: After announcing a possible release in 2010, a follow-up compilation to "The Lost Tapes" (2002) was delayed indefinitely due to issues between him and Def Jam. His eleventh studio album, "Life Is Good" (2012) was produced primarily by Salaam Remi and No I.D, and released on July 13, 2012. Nas called the album a "magic moment" in his rap career.


title: Nas

text: In 2011, Nas announced that he would release collaboration albums with Mobb Deep, Common, and a third with DJ Premier. Common said of the project in a 2011 interview, "At some point, we will do that. We'd talked about it and we had a good idea to call it "Nas.Com". That was actually going to be a mixtape at one point. But we decided that we should make it an album." "Life is Good" would be nominated for Best Rap Album at the 2013 Grammy Awards.


title: Nas

text: In January 2013, Nas announced he had begun working on his twelfth studio album, which would be his final album for Def Jam. The album was supposed to be released during 2015. In October 2013, DJ Premier said that his collaboration album with Nas, would be released following his twelfth studio album. In October 2013, Nas confirmed that a rumored song "Sinatra in the Sands" featuring Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, and Timbaland would be featured on the album.


title: Nas

text: On April 16, 2014, on the twentieth anniversary of "Illmatic", the documentary "" was premiered which recounted circumstances leading up to Nas's debut album. It was reported on September 10, that Nas has finished his last album with Def Jam. On October 30, Nas released a song which might have been the first single on his new album, titled "The Season", produced by J Dilla. Nas has also collaborated with the Australian hip-hop group, Bliss n Eso, in 2014. They released the track "I Am Somebody" in May 2014. Nas was featured on the song "We Are" from Justin Bieber's fourth studio album, "Purpose", released in November 2015.


title: Nas

text: Nas was announced as one of the executive producers of the Netflix original series, "The Get Down", prior to its release in August 2016. He narrated the series and rapped as adult Ezekiel of 1996.


title: Nas

text: On October 16, 2016, he received the Jimmy Iovine Icon Award at 2016 REVOLT Music Conference for having a lasting impact and unique influence on music, numerous years in the rap business, his partnership with Hennessy, and Mass Appeal imprint by Puff Daddy. In November 2016, Nas collaborated with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Dave East and Aloe Blacc on a song called "Wrote My Way Out", which appears on "The Hamilton Mixtape". On April 12, 2017, Nas released the song "Angel Dust" as soundtrack for TV series "The Getdown". It contains a sample of the Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson song "Angel Dust".


title: Nas

text: In June 2017, Nas appeared in the award-winning 2017 documentary "The American Epic Sessions" directed by Bernard MacMahon, where he recorded live direct-to-disc on the restored first electrical sound recording system from the 1920s. He performed "On the Road Again", a 1928 song by the Memphis Jug Band, which received universal acclaim with "The Hollywood Reporter" describing his performance as "fantastic" and the "Financial Times" praising his "superb cover of the Memphis Jug Band's "On the Road Again", exposing the hip-hop blueprint within the 1928 stomper." "On the Road Again", and a performance of "One Mic", were released on "" on June 9, 2017.


title: Nas

text: In April 2018, Kanye West announced on Twitter that Nas's twelfth studio album will be released on June 15, also serving as executive producer for the album. The album was announced the day before release, titled "Nasir".


title: Nas

text: Following the release of "Nasir", Nas confirmed he would return to completing a previous album, including production from Swizz Beatz and RZA. This project was released as "The Lost Tapes 2" on July 19, 2019, which included production from Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, Swizz Beatz, The Alchemist, and RZA. This album was a sequel to Nas's 2002 release, "The Lost Tapes".


title: Nas

text: In August 2020, Nas announced that he would be releasing his 13th album. On August 13, he revealed the album's title, "King's Disease". The album, executive-produced by Hit-Boy, was preceded by the lead single, "Ultra Black", a song detailing perseverance and pride "despite the system". The album won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards, becoming Nas' first Grammy. The sequel album, "King's Disease II", was released on August 6, 2021, and included the song "Nobody" featuring Lauryn Hill. "King's Disease II" debuted at number-three on the US "Billboard" 200, becoming Nas's highest-charting album since 2012. On December 24, Nas released the album "Magic". It is his third album executively produced by Hit-Boy, and includes guest appearances from ASAP Rocky and DJ Premier.


title: Nas

text: Nas has been praised for his ability to create a "devastating match between lyrics and production" by journalist Peter Shapiro, as well as creating a "potent evocation of life on the street", and he has even been compared to Rakim for his lyrical technique. In his book "Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop" (2009), writer Adam Bradley states, "Nas is perhaps contemporary rap's greatest innovator in storytelling. His catalog includes songs narrated before birth ('Fetus') and after death ('Amongst Kings'), biographies ('UBR [Unauthorized Biography of Rakim]') and autobiographies ('Doo Rags'), allegorical tales ('Money Is My Bitch') and epistolary ones ('One Love'), he's rapped in the voice of a woman ('Sekou Story') and even of a gun ('I Gave You Power')." Robert Christgau writes that "Nas has been transfiguring <nowiki>[</nowiki>gangsta rap<nowiki>]</nowiki> since "Illmatic"". Kool Moe Dee notes that Nas has an "off-beat conversational flow" in his book "There's a God on the Mic" – he says: "before Nas, every MC focused on rhyming with a cadence that ultimately put the words that rhymed on beat with the snare drum. Nas created a style of rapping that was more conversational than ever before".


title: Nas

text: OC of D.I.T.C. comments in the book "How to Rap": "Nas did the song backwards ['Rewind']... that was a brilliant idea". Also in "How to Rap", 2Mex of The Visionaries describes Nas's flow as "effervescent", Rah Digga says Nas's lyrics have "intricacy", Bootie Brown of The Pharcyde explains that Nas does not always have to make words rhyme as he is "charismatic", and Nas is also described as having a "densely packed" flow, with compound rhymes that "run over from one beat into the next or even into another bar".


title: Nas

text: About.com ranked him 1st on their list of the "50 Greatest MCs of All Time" in 2014, and a year later, Nas was featured on the "10 Best Rappers of All Time" list by Billboard. "The Source" ranked him No. 2 on their list of the "Top 50 Lyricists of All Time". In 2013, Nas was ranked fourth on MTV's "Hottest MCs in the Game" list.<ref name="03/12/2013 10:30:00"></ref> His debut, "Illmatic", is widely considered among the greatest hip hop albums of all time.


title: Nas

text: Initially friends, Nas and Jay-Z had met a number of times in the 1990s with no animosity between the two. Jay-Z requested that Nas appear on his 1996 album "Reasonable Doubt" on the track "Bring it On"; however, Nas never showed up to the studio and was not included on the album. In response to this, Jay-Z asked producer Ski Beatz to sample a line from Nas's song "The World is Yours", with the sample featured heavily in what went on to be "Dead Presidents II". The two traded subliminal responses for the next couple of years, until the beef was escalated further in 2001 after Jay-Z publicly addressed Nas at the Summer Jam, performing what would go on to be known as "Takeover", ending the performance by saying "ask Nas, he don't want it with Hov". After Jay-Z eventually released the song on his 2001 album The Blueprint, Nas responded with the song "Ether", from his album "Stillmatic", with both fans and critics saying that the song had effectively saved Nas's career and marked his return to prominence, and almost unanimously agreeing Nas had won their feud. Jay-Z responded with a freestyle over the instrumental to Nas's "Got Ur Self a Gun", known as "Supa Ugly". In the song, Jay-Z makes reference to Nas's girlfriend and daughter, going into graphic detail about having an affair with his girlfriend. Jay-Z's mother was personally disgusted by the song, and demanded he apologise to Nas and his family, which he did in December 2001 on Hot 97. Supa Ugly marked the last direct diss song between Jay-Z and Nas, however, the two continued to trade subliminals on their subsequent releases. The feud was officially brought to an end in 2005, when Jay-Z and Nas performed on stage together in a surprise concert also featuring P Diddy, Kanye West and Beanie Sigel. The following year, Nas signed with Def Jam Recordings, of which Jay-Z then served as president.


title: Nas

text: After Nas was removed from the 2002 Summer Jam lineup due to allegedly planning to perform the song "Ether" while a mock lynching of a Jay-Z effigy took place behind him, Cam'ron was announced as a last minute replacement and headlined the show instead. Nas appeared on Power 105.1 days later and addressed a number of fellow artists, including Nelly, Noreaga and Cam'ron himself. Nas praised Cam'ron as a good lyricist, but branded his album "Come Home With Me" as "wack". After Cam'ron heard of Nas's words, he appeared on Funkmaster Flex's Hot 97 and performed a freestyle diss over the beat to Nas's "Hate Me Now", making reference to Nas's mother, baby mother and daughter. Nas did not respond directly but appeared on the radio days later, calling Cam'ron a "dummy" for supposedly being used by Hot 97 to generate ratings. Nas eventually responded on his 2002 album "God's Son" on the song "Zone Out", claiming Cam'ron had HIV. Cam'ron and the rest of The Diplomats, specifically Jim Jones continued to attack Nas throughout 2003, on numerous mixtapes, albums and radio freestyles, however, the feud between the two slowly died down and they eventually reconciled in 2014.


title: Nas

text: After 2Pac interpreted lines directed to the Notorious B.I.G. on Nas's 1996 album "It Was Written" to be aimed towards him, he attacked Nas on the track "Against All Odds" from "". Nas himself later admitted he was brought to tears when he heard the diss because he idolized 2Pac. The two later met in Central Park before the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards and ended their feud, with 2Pac promising to remove any disses aimed at Nas from the official album release; however, 2Pac was shot four times in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada three days later on September 7, dying of his wounds on September 13, before any edits to could be made.


title: Nas

text: After Nas blamed Southern hip hop as the cause of the perceived artistic decline of the genre on his 2006 single "Hip Hop Is Dead", from the album of the same name, his then-Def Jam labelmate Young Jeezy took offense by claiming that Nas had "no street credibility" and vowing his album "The Inspiration" would outsell "Hip Hop is Dead", which were released one week apart from each other in December 2006. After failing to do so, Young Jeezy took back his disses towards Nas, and the two later collaborated on the 2008 hit single "My President".


title: Nas

text: On September 6, 2007, Nas performed at a free concert for the Virginia Tech student body and faculty, following the school shooting there. He was joined by John Mayer, Alan Jackson, Phil Vassar, and Dave Matthews Band. When announced that Nas was to perform, political commentator Bill O'Reilly and Fox News denounced the concert and called for Nas's removal, citing "violent" lyrics on songs such as "Shoot 'Em Up", "Got Urself a Gun", and "Made You Look". During his "Talking Points Memo" segment for August 15, 2007, an argument erupted in which O'Reilly claimed that it was not only Nas's lyrical content that made him inappropriate for the event, citing the gun conviction on Nas's criminal record.


title: Nas

text: On September 6, 2007, during his set at "A Concert for Virginia Tech", Nas twice referred to Bill O'Reilly as "a chump", prompting loud cheers by members of the crowd. About two weeks later, Nas was interviewed by Shaheem Reid of MTV News, where he criticised O'Reilly, calling him uncivilized and willing to go to extremes for publicity. Responding to O'Reilly, Nas, in an interview with MTV News, said:


title: Nas

text: On July 23, 2008, Nas appeared on "The Colbert Report" to discuss his opinion of O'Reilly and Fox News, which he accused of bias against the African-American community and re-challenged O'Reilly to a debate. During the appearance, Nas sat on boxes of more than 625,000 signatures gathered by online advocacy organisation Color of Change in support of a petition accusing Fox of race-baiting and fear-mongering.


title: Nas

text: In 2020, after Doja Cat faced accusations of participating in racist conversations on the internet, Nas referenced her in his song "Ultra Black", calling her "the opposite of ultra black". The response to the lyric was mixed, with some defending his right to criticize her, and others resurfacing allegations that he verbally abused his ex-wife, Kelis. Doja Cat shrugged off the namedrop, jokingly referencing the lyric in a TikTok video. In an interview with Fat Joe, Doja Cat said that she has no interest in "beefing" with Nas saying "I fucking love Nas, thank fucking god he noticed me. I love Nas. So I don't give a shit. He can say whatever he wants. I really don't care". Nas later claimed that the line was not meant to be perceived as a "diss", and that he was "just trying to find another word that worked with the scheme of the song."


title: Nas

text: On April 10, 2013, Nas invested an undisclosed six-figure sum into Mass Appeal Magazine, where he went on to serve as the publication's associate publisher, joined by creative firm Decon and White Owl Capital Partners. In June 2013, he opened his own sneaker store.


title: Nas

text: In September 2013, he invested in a technology startup company, a job search appmaker called Proven. In 2014, Nas invested as part of a $2.8M round in viral video startup ViralGains another addition to Queens-bridge venture partners portfolio.


title: Nas

text: In May 2014, Nas partnered with job placement startup Koru to fund a scholarship for 10 college graduates to go through Koru's training program. Nas will also be joining the startup as a guest coach. Nas is a co-owner of a Cloud-based service LANDR, an automated, drag-and-drop digital audio postproduction tool which automates "mastering", the final stage in audio production. In June 2015, Nas joined forces with New York City soul food restaurant Sweet Chick. He plans to expand the restaurant brand nationally. The Los Angeles location opened in April 2017. He owns his own clothing line called HSTRY.


title: Nas

text: In June 2018, Nas was paid $40 million after Amazon acquired the doorbell company Ring Inc. as well as PillPack - the latter of which he invested in via his investment firm, Queensbridge Venture Partners.


title: Nas

text: Nas is a spokesperson and mentor for P'Tones Records, a non-profit after-school music program with the mission "to create constructive opportunities for urban youth through no-cost music programs."


title: Nas

text: On June 15, 1994, Nas's ex-fiancée Carmen Bryan gave birth to their daughter, Destiny. She later confessed to Nas that she had a relationship with his then-rival rapper and nemesis Jay-Z, also accusing Jay-Z of putting subliminal messages in his lyrics about their relationship together, causing an even bigger rift in the feud between the two men.


title: Nas

text: Nas also briefly dated Mary J. Blige and Nicki Minaj respectively. In 2005, Nas married R&B singer Kelis in Atlanta after a two-year relationship. On April 30, 2009, a spokesperson confirmed that Kelis filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. Kelis gave birth to Nas's first son on July 21, 2009, although the event was soured by a disagreement which ended in Nas announcing the birth of his son, Knight, at a gig in Queens, New York, against Kelis's wishes. The birth was also announced by Nas via an online video. The couple's divorce was finalized on May 21, 2010. In 2018, Kelis accused Nas of being physically and mentally abusive during their marriage. Nas replied to the accusations on social media, accusing Kelis of attempting to slander him in the time of a custody battle and accusing Kelis of abusing his daughter, Destiny.


title: Nas

text: In January 2012, Nas was involved in a dispute with a concert promoter in Angola, having accepted $300,000 for a concert in Luanda, Angola's capital for New Year's Eve and then not showing up. American promoter Patrick Allocco and his son, who arranged for Nas's concert, were detained at gunpoint and taken to an Angolan jail by the local promoter who fronted the $300,000 for the concert. Only after the U.S. Embassy intervened were the promoter and his son allowed to leave jail—but were placed under house arrest at their hotel. By the end of the month Nas had returned all $300,000, and, after 49 days of travel ban, Allocco and his son were both released.


title: Nas

text: On March 15, 2012, Nas became the first rapper to have a personal verified account on Genius, where he explains his own lyrics and occasionally comments on lyrics from other rappers he admires.


title: Nas

text: In September 2009 the U.S. Internal Revenue Service filed a federal tax lien against Nas for over $2.5 million, seeking unpaid taxes dating back to 2006. By early 2011 this figure had ballooned to over $6.4 million. Early in 2012 reports emerged that the IRS had filed papers in Georgia to garnish a portion of Nas's earnings from material published under BMI and ASCAP, until his delinquent tax bill is settled.


title: Nas

text: In May 2013, it was announced that Nas would open a sneaker store in Las Vegas called 12 am RUN (pronounced Midnight Run) as part of The LINQ retail development.


title: Nas

text: In July 2013, Harvard University established the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship, to fund scholars and artists who show potential and creativity in the arts in connection to hip hop.


title: Nas

text: In an October 2014 episode of PBS's "Finding Your Roots", Nas learned about five generations of his ancestry. His great-great-great-grandmother, Pocahontas Little, was an enslaved woman who was sold for $830. When host Henry Louis Gates showed Nas her bill of sale and told him more about the man who bought her, Nas remarked that he is considering buying the land where the slave owner lived. Nas was also shown the marriage certificate of his great-great-great-grandmother, Pocahontas, and great-great-great-grandfather, Calvin.


title: Nas

text: On November 12, 2019, Nas was honored by "Haute Living", along with Watches of Switzerland and Hennessy, in a celebratory affair that included a violin rendition of iconic Nas songs performed by Edward W. Hardy.


title: Nas

text: The Grammy Awards are held annually by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Nas has won 1 Grammy out of 15 nominations altogether.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922. Following a move to the French Riviera, Fitzgerald completed a rough draft of the novel in 1924. He submitted it to editor Maxwell Perkins, who persuaded Fitzgerald to revise the work over the following winter. After making revisions, Fitzgerald was satisfied with the text, but remained ambivalent about the book's title and considered several alternatives. Painter Francis Cugat's cover art greatly impressed Fitzgerald, and he incorporated aspects of it into the novel.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: After its publication by Scribner's in April 1925, "The Great Gatsby" received generally favorable reviews, though some literary critics believed it did not equal Fitzgerald's previous efforts. Compared to his earlier novels, "Gatsby" was a commercial disappointment, selling fewer than 20,000 copies by October, and Fitzgerald's hopes of a monetary windfall from the novel were unrealized. When the author died in 1940, he believed himself to be a failure and his work forgotten.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: During World War II, the novel experienced an abrupt surge in popularity when the Council on Books in Wartime distributed free copies to American soldiers serving overseas. This new-found popularity launched a critical and scholarly re-examination, and the work soon became a core part of most American high school curricula and a part of American popular culture. Numerous stage and film adaptations followed in the subsequent decades.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: "Gatsby" continues to attract popular and scholarly attention. Contemporary scholars emphasize the novel's treatment of social class, inherited versus self-made wealth, gender, race, and environmentalism, and its cynical attitude towards the American Dream. One persistent item of criticism is an allegation of antisemitic stereotyping. "The Great Gatsby" is widely considered to be a literary masterwork and a contender for the title of the Great American Novel.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Set on the prosperous Long Island of 1922, "The Great Gatsby" provides a critical social history of Prohibition-era America during the Jazz Age. F. Scott Fitzgerald's fictional narrative fully renders that period—known for its jazz music, economic prosperity, flapper culture, libertine mores, rebellious youth, and ubiquitous speakeasies. Fitzgerald uses many of these 1920s societal developments to tell his story, from simple details like petting in automobiles to broader themes such as bootlegging as the illicit source of Gatsby's fortune.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Fitzgerald conveys the hedonism of Jazz Age society by placing a relatable plotline within the historical context of the most raucous and flashiest era in American history. In Fitzgerald's eyes, the era represented a morally permissive time when Americans of all ages became disillusioned with prevailing social norms and obsessed with pleasure-seeking. Fitzgerald himself had a certain ambivalence towards the Jazz Age, an era whose themes he would later regard as reflective of events in his own life.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: "The Great Gatsby" reflects various events in Fitzgerald's youth. He was a young Midwesterner from Minnesota. Like the novel's narrator who went to Yale, he was educated at an Ivy League school, Princeton. There the 18-year-old Fitzgerald met Ginevra King, a 16-year-old socialite with whom he fell deeply in love. Although Ginevra was madly in love with him, her upper-class family openly discouraged his courtship of their daughter because of his lower-class status, and her father purportedly told him that "poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls".


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Rejected by Ginevra's family as a suitor because of his lack of financial prospects, a suicidal Fitzgerald enlisted in the United States Army amid World War I and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. While awaiting deployment to the Western front where he hoped to die in combat, he was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama, where he met Zelda Sayre, a vivacious 17-year-old Southern belle. After learning that Ginevra had married wealthy Chicago businessman William "Bill" Mitchell, Fitzgerald asked Zelda to marry him. Zelda agreed but postponed their marriage until he became financially successful. Fitzgerald is thus similar to Jay Gatsby in that he became engaged while a military officer stationed far from home and then sought immense wealth in order to provide for the lifestyle to which his fiancée had become accustomed.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: After his success as a short-story writer and as a novelist, Fitzgerald married Zelda in New York City, and the newly-wed couple soon relocated to Long Island. Despite enjoying the exclusive Long Island milieu, Fitzgerald quietly disapproved of the extravagant parties, and the wealthy persons he encountered often disappointed him. While striving to emulate the rich, he found their privileged lifestyle to be morally disquieting. Although Fitzgerald—like Gatsby—had always admired the rich, he nonetheless possessed a smoldering resentment towards them.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: In spring 1922, Nick Carraway—a Yale alumnus from the Midwest and a World War I veteran—journeys to New York City to obtain employment as a bond salesman. He rents a bungalow in the Long Island village of West Egg, next to a luxurious estate inhabited by Jay Gatsby, an enigmatic multi-millionaire who hosts dazzling soirées yet doesn't partake in them.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: One evening, Nick dines with a distant cousin, Daisy Buchanan, in the fashionable town of East Egg. Daisy is married to Tom Buchanan, formerly a Yale football star whom Nick knew during his college days. The couple has recently relocated from Chicago to a mansion directly across the bay from Gatsby's estate. There, Nick encounters Jordan Baker, an insolent flapper and golf champion who is a childhood friend of Daisy's. Jordan confides to Nick that Tom keeps a mistress, Myrtle Wilson, who brazenly telephones him at his home and who lives in the "valley of ashes", a sprawling refuse dump. That evening, Nick sees Gatsby standing alone on his lawn, staring at a green light across the bay.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Days later, Nick reluctantly accompanies a drunken and agitated Tom to New York City by train. En route, they stop at a garage inhabited by mechanic George Wilson and his wife Myrtle. Myrtle joins them, and the trio proceed to a small New York apartment that Tom has rented for trysts with her. Guests arrive and a party ensues, which ends with Tom slapping Myrtle and breaking her nose after she mentions Daisy.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: One morning, Nick receives a formal invitation to a party at Gatsby's mansion. Once there, Nick is embarrassed that he recognizes no one and begins drinking heavily until he encounters Jordan. While chatting with her, he is approached by a man who introduces himself as Jay Gatsby and insists that both he and Nick served in the 3rd Infantry Division during the war. Gatsby attempts to ingratiate himself with Nick and when Nick leaves the party, he notices Gatsby watching him.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: In late July, Nick and Gatsby have lunch at a speakeasy. Gatsby tries impressing Nick with tales of his war heroism and his Oxford days. Afterward, Nick meets Jordan again, this time at the Plaza Hotel. Jordan reveals that Gatsby and Daisy met around 1917 when Gatsby was an officer in the American Expeditionary Forces. They fell in love, but when Gatsby was deployed overseas, Daisy reluctantly married Tom. Gatsby hopes that his newfound wealth and dazzling parties will make Daisy reconsider. Gatsby uses Nick to stage a reunion with Daisy, and the two embark upon a sexual affair.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: In September, Tom discovers the affair when Daisy carelessly addresses Gatsby with unabashed intimacy in front of him. Later, at a Plaza Hotel suite, Gatsby and Tom argue about the affair. Gatsby insists Daisy declare that she never loved Tom. Daisy claims she loves Tom and Gatsby, upsetting both. Tom reveals Gatsby is a swindler whose money comes from bootlegging alcohol. Upon hearing this, Daisy chooses to stay with Tom. Tom scornfully tells Gatsby to drive her home, knowing that Daisy will never leave him.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: While returning to East Egg, Gatsby and Daisy drive by Wilson's garage and their car accidentally strikes Myrtle, killing her instantly. Later Gatsby reveals to Nick that Daisy was driving the car, but that he intends to take the blame for the accident to protect her. Nick urges Gatsby to flee to avoid prosecution, but he refuses. After Tom tells George that Gatsby owns the car that struck Myrtle, a distraught George assumes the owner of the vehicle must be Myrtle's lover. George fatally shoots Gatsby in his mansion's swimming pool, then commits suicide.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Several days after Gatsby's murder, his father Henry Gatz arrives for the sparsely attended funeral. After Gatsby's death, Nick comes to hate New York and decides that Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, and he were all Midwesterners unsuited to Eastern life.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Nick encounters Tom and initially refuses to shake his hand. Tom admits he was the one who told George that Gatsby owned the vehicle that killed Myrtle. Before returning to the Midwest, Nick returns to Gatsby's mansion and stares across the bay at the green light emanating from the end of Daisy's dock.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Fitzgerald began outlining his third novel in June 1922. He longed to produce an exquisite work that was beautiful and intricately patterned, but the troubled production of his stage play "The Vegetable" repeatedly interrupted his progress. The play flopped, and Fitzgerald wrote magazine stories that winter to pay debts incurred by its production. He viewed these stories as all worthless, although included among them was "Winter Dreams", which Fitzgerald described as his first attempt at the Gatsby idea. "The whole idea of Gatsby", he later explained to a friend, "is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it".


title: The Great Gatsby

text: In October 1922, after the birth of their only child, Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald, the Fitzgeralds moved to Great Neck, New York, on Long Island. Their neighbors in Great Neck included such newly wealthy personages as writer Ring Lardner, actor Lew Fields and comedian Ed Wynn. These figures were all considered to be "nouveau riche" (new rich), unlike those who came from Manhasset Neck, which sat across the bay from Great Neck—places that were home to many of New York's wealthiest established families. This real-life juxtaposition gave Fitzgerald his idea for "West Egg" and "East Egg". In the novel, Great Neck (Kings Point) became the "new money" peninsula of West Egg and Port Washington (Sands Point) became the "old money" East Egg. Several Gold Coast mansions in the area served as inspiration for Gatsby's estate including Land's End, Oheka Castle, and the since-demolished Beacon Towers.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: While living on Long Island, the Fitzgeralds' enigmatic neighbor was Max Gerlach. Purportedly born in America to a German immigrant family, Gerlach had been a major in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I, and he later became a gentleman bootlegger who lived like a millionaire in New York. Flaunting his new wealth, Gerlach threw lavish parties, never wore the same shirt twice, used the phrase "old sport", and fostered myths about himself including that he was a relation of the German Kaiser. These details about Gerlach inspired Fitzgerald in his creation of Jay Gatsby.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: During this same time period, the daily newspapers sensationalized the Hall–Mills murder case over many months, and the highly publicized case likely influenced the plot of Fitzgerald's novel. The case involved the double-murder of a man and his lover on September 14, 1922, mere weeks before Fitzgerald arrived in Great Neck. Scholars have speculated that Fitzgerald based certain aspects of the ending of "The Great Gatsby" and various characterizations on this factual incident.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Inspired by the Halls–Mills case, the mysterious persona of Gerlach and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island, Fitzgerald had written 18,000 words for his novel by mid-1923 but discarded most of his new story as a false start. Some of this early draft resurfaced in the 1924 short story "Absolution". In earlier drafts, Daisy was originally named Ada and Nick was Dud, and the two characters had shared a previous romance prior to their reunion on Long Island. These earlier drafts were written from the viewpoint of an omniscient narrator as opposed to Nick's perspective. A key difference in earlier drafts is a less complete failure of Gatsby's dream. Another difference is that the argument between Tom Buchanan and Gatsby is more balanced, although Daisy still returns to Tom.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Work on "The Great Gatsby" resumed in earnest in April 1924. Fitzgerald decided to depart from the writing process of his previous novels and told Perkins that he was intent on creating an artistic achievement. He wished to eschew the realism of his previous two novels and to compose a creative work of sustained imagination. To this end, he consciously imitated the literary styles of Joseph Conrad and Willa Cather. He was particularly influenced by Cather's 1923 work, "A Lost Lady," which features a wealthy married socialite pursued by a variety of romantic suitors and who symbolically embodies the American dream. He later wrote a letter to Cather apologizing for any unintentional plagiarism. During this period of revisions, Scott saw and was influenced by early sketches for the book's cover art. Soon after this burst of effort, work slowed while the Fitzgeralds moved to the French Riviera, where a marital crisis soon developed.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Despite his ongoing marital tension, Fitzgerald continued to write steadily and submitted a near-final version of the manuscript to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, on October 27. Perkins informed him in a November letter that Gatsby was too vague as a character and that his wealth and business, respectively, needed a convincing explanation. Fitzgerald thanked Perkins for his detailed criticisms and claimed that such feedback would enable him to perfect the manuscript. Having relocated with his wife to Rome, Fitzgerald made revisions to the manuscript throughout the winter.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Content after a few rounds of revision, Fitzgerald submitted the final version in February 1925. Fitzgerald's alterations included extensive revisions of the sixth and eighth chapters. He declined an offer of $10,000 for the serial rights to the book so that it could be published sooner. He received a $3,939 advance in 1923 and would receive $1,981.25 upon publication.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Fitzgerald had difficulty choosing a title for his novel and entertained many choices before reluctantly deciding on "The Great Gatsby", a title inspired by Alain-Fournier's "Le Grand Meaulnes". Previously he had shifted between "Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires", "Trimalchio", "Trimalchio in West Egg", "On the Road to West Egg", "Under the Red, White, and Blue", "The Gold-Hatted Gatsby", and "The High-Bouncing Lover". The titles "The Gold-Hatted Gatsby" and "The High-Bouncing Lover" came from Fitzgerald's epigraph for the novel, one which he wrote himself under the pen name of Thomas Parke D'Invilliers.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Fitzgerald initially preferred titles referencing Trimalchio, the crude upstart in Petronius's "Satyricon", and even refers to Gatsby as Trimalchio once in the novel.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Unlike Gatsby's spectacular parties, Trimalchio participated in the orgies he hosted but, according to literary critic Tony Tanner, there are subtle similarities between the two characters. By November 1924, Fitzgerald wrote to Perkins that he had settled upon the title of "Trimalchio in West Egg".


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Disliking Fitzgerald's chosen title of "Trimalchio in West Egg", editor Max Perkins persuaded him that the reference was too obscure and that people would be unable to pronounce it. Zelda and Perkins both expressed their preference for "The Great Gatsby", and the next month Fitzgerald agreed. A month before publication, after a final review of the proofs, he asked if it would be possible to re-title it "Trimalchio" or "Gold-Hatted Gatsby", but Perkins advised against it. On March 19, 1925, Fitzgerald expressed enthusiasm for the title "Under the Red, White, and Blue", but it was too late to change it at that stage. The novel was published as "The Great Gatsby" on April 10, 1925. Fitzgerald believed the book's final title to be merely acceptable and often expressed his ambivalence with the name.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: The artwork for the first edition of "The Great Gatsby" is among the most celebrated in American literature and represents a unique instance in literary history in which a novel's commissioned artwork directly influenced the composition of the text. Rendered in the contemporary Art Deco visual style, the artwork depicts the disembodied face of a Jazz Age flapper with celestial eyes and rouged mouth over a dark blue skyline. A little-known Barcelonan painter named Francis Cugat—born Francisco Coradal-Cougat—was commissioned by an unknown individual in Scribner's art department to illustrate the cover while Fitzgerald was composing the novel.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: In a preliminary sketch, Cugat drew a concept of a dismal gray landscape inspired by Fitzgerald's original title for the novel, "Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires". Discarding this gloomy concept, Cugat next drew a divergent study which became the prefiguration to the final cover: A pencil and crayon drawing of a flapper's half-hidden visage over Long Island Sound with scarlet lips, one celestial eye, and a single diagonal tear. Expanding upon this study, his subsequent drawing featured two bright eyes looming over a shadowy New York cityscape. In later iterations, Cugat replaced the shadowy cityscape with dazzling carnival lights evoking a Ferris wheel and likely referencing the glittering amusement park at New York's Coney Island. Cugat affixed reclining nudes within the flapper's irises and added a green tint to the streaming tear. Cugat's final cover, which Max Perkins hailed as a masterpiece, was the only work he completed for Scribner's and the only book cover he ever designed.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Although Fitzgerald likely never saw the final gouache painting prior to the novel's publication, Cugat's preparatory drafts influenced his writing. Upon viewing Cugat's drafts before sailing for France in April–May 1924, Fitzgerald was so enamored that he later told editor Max Perkins that he had incorporated Cugat's imagery into the novel. This statement has led many to analyze interrelations between Cugat's art and Fitzgerald's text. One popular interpretation is that the celestial eyes are reminiscent of those of fictional optometrist T. J. Eckleburg depicted on a faded commercial billboard near George Wilson's auto repair shop. Author Ernest Hemingway supported this latter interpretation and claimed that Fitzgerald had told him the cover referred to a billboard in the valley of the ashes. Although this passage has some resemblance to the imagery, a closer explanation can be found in Fitzgerald's explicit description of Daisy Buchanan as the "girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs".


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Charles Scribner's Sons published "The Great Gatsby" on April 10, 1925. Fitzgerald cabled Perkins the day after publication to monitor reviews: "Any news?" "Sales situation doubtful [but] excellent reviews", read a telegram from Perkins on April 20. Fitzgerald responded on April 24, saying the cable dispirited him, closing the letter with "Yours in great depression". Fitzgerald soon received letters from contemporaries Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and poet T. S. Eliot praising the novel. Although gratified by such correspondence, Fitzgerald sought public acclaim from professional critics.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: "The Great Gatsby" received generally favorable reviews from literary critics of the day. Edwin Clark of "The New York Times" felt the novel was a mystical and glamorous tale of the Jazz Age. Similarly, Lillian C. Ford of the "Los Angeles Times" hailed the novel as a revelatory work of art that "leaves the reader in a mood of chastened wonder". "The New York Post" described Fitzgerald's prose style as scintillating and genuinely brilliant. The "New York Herald Tribune" was less impressed, referring to "The Great Gatsby" as "a literary lemon meringue" that nonetheless "contains some of the nicest little touches of contemporary observation you could imagine—so light, so delicate, so sharp". In "The Chicago Daily Tribune", H. L. Mencken judged the work's plot to be highly improbable, although he praised the writing as elegant and the "careful and brilliant finish".


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Several reviewers felt the novel left much to be desired following Fitzgerald's previous works and criticized him accordingly. Harvey Eagleton of "The Dallas Morning News" predicted that the novel signaled the end of Fitzgerald's artistic success. Ralph Coghlan of the "St. Louis Post-Dispatch" dismissed the work as an inconsequential performance by a once-promising author who had grown bored and cynical. Ruth Snyder of "New York Evening World" lambasted the book's style as painfully forced and declared the editors of her newspaper were "quite convinced after reading "The Great Gatsby" that Mr. Fitzgerald is not one of the great American writers of today". John McClure of "The Times-Picayune" insisted the plot was implausible and the book itself seemed raw in its construction.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: After reading these reviews, Fitzgerald believed that many critics misunderstood the novel. He despaired that "of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about". In particular, Fitzgerald resented criticisms of the novel's plot as implausible since he had never intended for the story to be realistic. Instead, he crafted the work to be a romanticized depiction that was largely scenic and symbolic. According to his friend John Peale Bishop, Fitzgerald further resented the fact that critics failed to perceive the many parallels between the author's life and the character of Jay Gatsby; in particular, that both created a mythical version of themselves and attempted to live up to this legend. Dispirited by critics failing to understand the novel, Fitzgerald remained hopeful that the novel would at least be a commercial success, perhaps selling as many as 75,000 copies.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: To Fitzgerald's great disappointment, "Gatsby" was a commercial failure in comparison with his previous efforts, "This Side of Paradise" (1920) and "The Beautiful and Damned" (1922). By October, the book had sold fewer than 20,000 copies.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Although the novel went through two initial printings, many copies remained unsold years later. Fitzgerald attributed the poor sales to the fact that women tended to be the primary audience for novels during this time, and "Gatsby" did not contain an admirable female character. According to his ledger, he earned only $2,000 from the book. Although Owen Davis' 1926 stage adaptation and the Paramount-issued silent film version brought in money for the author, Fitzgerald lamented that the novel fell far short of the success he had hoped for and would not bring him recognition as a serious novelist in the public eye. With the onset of the Great Depression, "The Great Gatsby" was regarded as little more than a nostalgic period piece. By the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, the novel had fallen into near obscurity.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: In 1940, Fitzgerald suffered a third and fatal heart attack and died believing his work forgotten. His obituary in "The New York Times" hailed him as a brilliant novelist and cited "Gatsby" as his greatest work. In the wake of Fitzgerald's death, a strong appreciation for the book gradually developed in writers' circles. Future authors Budd Schulberg and Edward Newhouse were deeply affected by it, and John O'Hara acknowledged its influence on his work. By the time that "Gatsby" was republished in Edmund Wilson's edition of "The Last Tycoon" in 1941, the prevailing opinion in writers' circles deemed the novel to be an enduring work of fiction.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: In the spring of 1942, mere months after the United States' entrance into World War II, an association of publishing executives created the Council on Books in Wartime with the stated purpose of distributing paperback Armed Services Editions books to combat troops. "The Great Gatsby" was one of them. Within the next several years, 155,000 copies of "Gatsby" were distributed to U.S. soldiers overseas, and the book proved popular among beleaguered troops, according to the "Saturday Evening Post"s contemporary report.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: By 1944, a full-scale Fitzgerald revival had occurred. Full-length scholarly articles on Fitzgerald's works were being published in periodicals and, by the following year, the earlier consensus among professional critics that "The Great Gatsby" was merely a sensational story or a nostalgic period piece had effectively vanished. The tireless promotional efforts of literary critic Edmund Wilson, who was Fitzgerald's Princeton classmate and his close friend, led this Fitzgerald revival. In 1951, three years after Zelda's death in a hospital fire, Professor Arthur Mizener of Cornell University published "The Far Side of Paradise", the first biography of Fitzgerald. Mizener's best-selling biography emphasized "The Great Gatsby"s positive reception by literary critics, which may have further influenced public opinion and renewed interest in it.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: By 1960—thirty-five years after the novel's original publication—the book was steadily selling 100,000 copies per year. Renewed interest in it led "The New York Times" editorialist Mizener to proclaim the novel was a masterwork of 20th-century American literature. By 1974, "The Great Gatsby" had attained its status as a literary masterwork and was deemed a contender for the title of the "Great American Novel". By the mid-2000s, many literary critics considered "The Great Gatsby" to be one of the greatest novels ever written, and the work was part of the assigned curricula in the near majority of U.S. high schools. As of early 2020, "The Great Gatsby" had sold almost 30 million copies worldwide and continues to sell an additional 500,000 copies annually. Numerous foreign editions of the novel have been published, and the text has been translated into 42 different languages. The work is Scribner's most popular title; in 2013, the e-book alone sold 185,000 copies. The novel's U.S. copyright expired on January 1, 2021, when all works published in 1925 entered the public domain.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Following the novel's revival, later critical writings on "The Great Gatsby" focused on Fitzgerald's disillusionment with the American Dream in the hedonistic Jazz Age, a name for the era which Fitzgerald claimed to have coined. In 1970, scholar Roger L. Pearson asserted that Fitzgerald's work—more so than other twentieth century novels—is especially linked with this conceptualization of the American dream. Pearson traced the literary origins of this dream to Colonial America. The dream is the belief that every individual, regardless of their origins, may seek and achieve their desired goals, "be they political, monetary, or social. It is the literary expression of the concept of America: The land of opportunity".


title: The Great Gatsby

text: However, Pearson noted that Fitzgerald's particular treatment of this theme is devoid of the discernible optimism in the writings of earlier American authors. He suggests Gatsby serves as a false prophet of the American dream, and pursuing the dream only results in dissatisfaction for those who chase it, owing to its unattainability. In this analytical context, the green light on the Buchanans' dock (visible across Long Island Sound from Gatsby's house) is frequently interpreted as a symbol of Gatsby's unrealizable goal to win Daisy and, consequently, to achieve the American Dream.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Scholars and writers commonly ascribe Gatsby's inability to achieve the American dream to entrenched class disparities in American society. The novel underscores the limits of the American lower class to transcend their station of birth. Scholar Sarah Churchwell contends that Fitzgerald's novel is a tale of class warfare in a status-obsessed country that refuses to acknowledge publicly it even has a class system.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Although scholars posit different explanations for the continuation of class differences in the United States, there is a consensus regarding the novel's message in conveying its underlying permanence. Although "Gatsby"s fundamental conflict occurs between entrenched sources of socio-economic power and upstarts like Gatsby who threaten their interests, Fitzgerald's novel shows that a class permanence persists despite the country's capitalist economy that prizes innovation and adaptability. Dianne Bechtel argues Fitzgerald plotted the novel to illustrate that class transcends wealth in America. Even if the poorer Americans become rich, they remain inferior to those Americans with "old money". Consequently, Gatsby and other characters in the novel are trapped in a rigid American class system.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Besides exploring the difficulties of achieving the American dream, "The Great Gatsby" explores societal gender expectations during the Jazz Age. The character of Daisy Buchanan has been identified specifically as personifying the emerging cultural archetype of the flapper. Flappers were typically young, modern women who bobbed their hair and wore short skirts. They also drank alcohol and had premarital sex.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Despite the newfound societal freedoms attained by flappers in the 1920s, Fitzgerald's work critically examines the continued limitations upon women's agency during this period. In this context, although early critics viewed the character of Daisy to be a "monster of bitchery", later scholars such as Leland S. Person Jr. asserted that Daisy's character exemplifies the marginalization of women in the elite social environment that Fitzgerald depicts.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Writing in 1978, Person noted Daisy is more of a hapless victim than a manipulative victimizer. She is the target first of Tom's callous domination and next of Gatsby's dehumanizing adoration. She involuntarily becomes the holy grail at the center of Gatsby's unrealistic quest to be steadfast to a youthful concept of himself. The ensuing contest of wills between Tom and Gatsby reduces Daisy to a trophy wife whose sole existence is to augment her possessor's socio-economic success.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: As an upper-class white woman living in East Egg during this time period, Daisy must adhere to societal expectations and gender norms such as actively fulfilling the roles of dutiful wife, nurturing mother, and charming socialite. Many of Daisy's choices—ultimately culminating in the fatal car crash and misery for all those involved—can be partly attributed to her prescribed role as a "beautiful little fool" who is reliant on her husband for financial and societal security. Her decision to remain with her husband, despite her feelings for Gatsby, is because of the security that her marriage to Tom Buchanan provides.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Many scholars have analyzed the novel's treatment of race and displacement; in particular, a perceived threat posed by newer immigrants to older Americans, triggering concerns over a loss of socio-economic status. In one instance, Tom Buchanan—the novel's antagonist—claims that he, Nick, and Jordan are racially superior Nordics. Tom decries immigration and advocates white supremacy. A fictional book alluded to by Tom is Goddard's "The Rise of the Colored Empires", which is a parody by Fitzgerald of Lothrop Stoddard's "The Rising Tide of Color," a 1920s bestseller. Stoddard warned that immigration would alter America's racial composition and destroy the country.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Analyzing these elements, literary theorist Walter Benn Michaels contends that Fitzgerald's novel reflects a historical period in American literature characterized by fears over the influx of Southern and Eastern European immigrants whose "otherness" challenged Americans' sense of national identity. Such anxieties were more salient in national discourse than the societal consequences of World War I, and the defining question of the period was who constituted "a real American".


title: The Great Gatsby

text: In this context of immigration and displacement, Tom's hostility towards Gatsby, who is the embodiment of "latest America", has been interpreted as partly embodying status anxieties of the time involving anti-immigrant sentiment. Gatsby—whom Tom belittles as "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere"—functions as a cipher because of his obscure origins, his unclear ethno-religious identity and his indeterminate class status. Although his ethnicity is vague, his last name Gatz and his father's adherence to the Lutheran religion indicate his family are recent German immigrants. This would preclude them from the coveted status of Old Stock Americans. Consequently, Gatsby's socio-economic ascent is deemed a threat not only due to his status as "nouveau riche", but because he is perceived as an outsider.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Because of such themes, "The Great Gatsby" captures the perennial American experience as it is a story about change and those who resist it—whether such change comes in the form of a new wave of immigrants, the "nouveau riche", or successful minorities. Since Americans living in the 1920s to the present are largely defined by their fluctuating socio-economic circumstances and must navigate a society with entrenched racial and ethnic prejudices, Fitzgerald's depiction of resultant status anxieties and social conflict has been highlighted by scholars as still enduringly relevant nearly a hundred years after the novel's publication.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Questions regarding the sexuality of various characters in the novel have been raised for decades and—augmented by biographical details about the author—have given rise to queer readings. During his lifetime, Fitzgerald's sexuality became a subject of debate among his friends and acquaintances. As a youth, Fitzgerald had a close relationship with Father Sigourney Fay, a possibly gay Catholic priest, and Fitzgerald later used his last name for the idealized romantic character of Daisy Fay. After college, Fitzgerald cross-dressed during outings in Minnesota. Years later, while drafting "The Great Gatsby", rumors dogged Fitzgerald among the American expat community in Paris that he was gay. Soon after, Fitzgerald's wife Zelda Fitzgerald likewise doubted his heterosexuality and asserted that he was a closeted homosexual. She publicly belittled him with homophobic slurs, and she alleged that Fitzgerald and fellow writer Ernest Hemingway engaged in homosexual relations. These incidents strained the Fitzgeralds' marriage at the time of the novel's publication.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Although Fitzgerald's sexuality is a subject of scholarly debate, such biographical details lent credence to critical interpretations that his fictional characters are either gay or bisexual surrogates. As early as 1945, critics such as Lionel Trilling noted that characters in "The Great Gatsby", such as Jordan Baker, were implied to be "vaguely homosexual", and, in 1960, writer Otto Friedrich commented upon the ease of examining the thwarted relations depicted in Fitzgerald's fiction through a queer lens. In recent decades, scholarship has focused sharply on the sexuality of Nick Carraway. In one instance in the novel, Carraway departs a drunken orgy with a "pale, feminine" man named Mr. McKee and—following suggestive ellipses—Nick next finds himself standing beside a bed while McKee sits between the sheets clad only in his underwear. Such scenes have led scholars to describe Nick as possessing an overt queerness and prompted analyses about his emotional attachment to Jay Gatsby. For these reasons, the novel has been described as an exploration of sexual identity during a historical era typified by the societal transition towards modernity.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Technological and environmental criticisms of "Gatsby" seek to place the novel and its characters in a broader historical context. In 1964, Leo Marx argued in "The Machine in the Garden" that Fitzgerald's work evinces a tension between a complex pastoral ideal of a bygone America and the societal transformations caused by industrialization and machine technology. Specifically, the valley of the ashes represents a man-made wasteland which is a byproduct of the industrialization that has made Gatsby's booming lifestyle, including his automobile, possible. Marx argues that Fitzgerald, via Nick, expresses a pastoral longing typical of other 1920s American writers like William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Although such writers cherish the pastoral ideal, they accept that technological progress has deprived this ideal of nearly all meaning. In this context, Nick's repudiation of the eastern United States represents a futile attempt to withdraw into nature. Yet, as Fitzgerald's work shows, any technological demarcation between the eastern and western United States has vanished, and one cannot escape into a pastoral past.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: In more recent years, scholars have argued that the voracious pursuit of wealth as criticized in Fitzgerald's novel offers a warning about the perils of environmental destruction in pursuit of self-interest. According to Kyle Keeler, Gatsby's quest for greater status manifests as self-centered, anthropocentric resource acquisition. Inspired by the predatory mining practices of his fictional mentor Dan Cody, Gatsby participates in extensive deforestation amid World War I and then undertakes bootlegging activities reliant upon exploiting South American agriculture. Gatsby conveniently ignores the wasteful devastation of the valley of ashes to pursue a consumerist lifestyle and exacerbates the wealth gap that became increasingly salient in 1920s America. For these reasons, Keeler argues that—while Gatsby's socioeconomic ascent and self-transformation depend upon these very factors—each one is nonetheless partially responsible for the ongoing ecological crisis.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: "The Great Gatsby" has been accused of antisemitism because of its use of Jewish stereotypes. One of the novel's supporting characters is Meyer Wolfsheim, a Jewish friend and mentor of Gatsby's. A corrupt profiteer who assists Gatsby's bootlegging operations and who fixed the 1919 World Series, he appears only twice in the novel, the second time refusing to attend Gatsby's funeral. Fitzgerald describes Wolfsheim as "a small, flat-nosed Jew", with "tiny eyes" and "two fine growths of hair" in his nostrils. Evoking ethnic stereotypes regarding the Jewish nose, he describes Wolfsheim's nose as "expressive", "tragic", and able to "flash... indignantly". The fictional character of Wolfsheim is an allusion to real-life Jewish gambler Arnold Rothstein, a notorious New York crime kingpin whom Fitzgerald met once in undetermined circumstances. Rothstein was blamed for match fixing in the Black Sox Scandal that tainted the 1919 World Series.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Wolfsheim has been interpreted as representing the Jewish miser stereotype. Richard Levy, author of "Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution", claims that Wolfsheim serves to link Jewishness with corruption. In a 1947 article for "Commentary", Milton Hindus, an assistant professor of humanities at the University of Chicago, stated that while he believed the book was a superb literary achievement, Wolfsheim was its most abrasive character, and the work contains an antisemitic undertone. However, Hindus argued the Jewish stereotypes displayed by Wolfsheim were typical of the time when the novel was written and set and that its antisemitism was of the "habitual, customary, 'harmless,' unpolitical variety". A 2015 article by essayist Arthur Krystal agreed with Hindus' assessment that Fitzgerald's use of Jewish caricatures was not driven by malice and merely reflected commonly held beliefs of his time. He notes the accounts of Frances Kroll, a Jewish woman and secretary to Fitzgerald, who claimed that Fitzgerald was hurt by accusations of antisemitism and responded to critiques of Wolfsheim by claiming he merely "fulfilled a function in the story and had nothing to do with race or religion".


title: The Great Gatsby

text: "Gatsby" has been adapted for the stage multiple times since its publication. The first known stage adaptation was by American dramatist Owen Davis, which became the 1926 film version. The play, directed by George Cukor, opened on Broadway on February 2, 1926, and had 112 curtain calls. A successful tour later in the year included performances in Chicago, August 1 through October 2. More recently, The New York Metropolitan Opera commissioned John Harbison to compose an operatic treatment of the novel to commemorate the 25th anniversary of James Levine's debut. The work, called "The Great Gatsby", premiered on December 20, 1999. In July 2006, Simon Levy's stage adaptation, directed by David Esbjornson, premiered at the Guthrie Theater to commemorate the opening of its new theater. In 2010, critic Ben Brantley of "The New York Times" highly praised the debut of "Gatz", an Off-Broadway production by Elevator Repair Service. The novel has also been adapted for ballet performances. In 2009, BalletMet premiered a version at the Capitol Theatre in Columbus, Ohio. In 2010, The Washington Ballet premiered a version at the Kennedy Center. The show received an encore run the following year.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: The first movie version of the novel debuted in 1926. Itself a version of Owen Davis's Broadway play, it was directed by Herbert Brenon and starred Warner Baxter, Lois Wilson and William Powell. It is a famous example of a lost film. Reviews suggest it may have been the most faithful adaptation of the novel, but a trailer of the film at the National Archives is all that is known to exist. Reportedly, Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda loathed the silent version. Zelda wrote to an acquaintance that the film was "rotten". She and Scott left the cinema midway through the film.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Following the 1926 movie was 1949's "The Great Gatsby", directed by Elliott Nugent and starring Alan Ladd, Betty Field and Macdonald Carey. Twenty-five years later in 1974, "The Great Gatsby" appeared onscreen again. It was directed by Jack Clayton and starred Robert Redford as Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy, and Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway. Most recently, "The Great Gatsby" was directed by Baz Luhrmann in 2013 and starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, Carey Mulligan as Daisy, and Tobey Maguire as Nick.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: In 2021, visual effects company DNEG announced they would be producing an animated film adaptation of the novel directed by William Joyce and written by Brian Selznick.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: In 2021, a fan-written screenplay for a Muppet adaptation titled "Muppets Present The Great Gatsby" went viral.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: "Gatsby" has been recast multiple times as a short-form television movie. The first was in 1955 as an NBC episode for "Robert Montgomery Presents" starring Robert Montgomery, Phyllis Kirk, and Lee Bowman. The episode was directed by Alvin Sapinsley. In 1958, CBS filmed another adaptation as an episode of "Playhouse 90", also titled "The Great Gatsby," which was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and starred Robert Ryan, Jeanne Crain and Rod Taylor. Most recently, the novel was adapted as an A&E movie in 2000. "The Great Gatsby" was directed by Robert Markowitz and starred Toby Stephens as Gatsby, Mira Sorvino as Daisy, and Paul Rudd as Nick.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: Since entering the public domain in 2021, retellings and expansions of "The Great Gatsby" have become legal to publish. The first of these was "Nick" by Michael Farris Smith in 2021, a prequel revolving around the backstory of Nick Carraway. That same year saw the publication of "The Chosen and the Beautiful" by Nghi Vo, a retelling with elements of the fantasy genre while tackling issues of race and sexuality, and "The Pursued and the Pursuing" by AJ Odasso, a queer partial retelling and sequel in which Jay Gatsby survives. Anna-Marie McLemore's own queer retelling, "Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix", was released in 2022 and was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: "The Great Gatsby" has been adapted into three graphic novels. The first was in 2007 by Nicki Greenberg, who published "The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Adaptation" in Australia. Because the original novel was still protected by United States copyright laws, this version was never published in the United States. The second version, "The Great Gatsby: The Graphic Novel," was adapted by Fred Fordham and illustrated by Aya Morton in 2020. Finally, in 2021, K. Woodman-Maynard adapted and illustrated "The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Novel Adaptation," which was published by Candlewick Press. This was the first graphic novel adaptation of the original novel to be published after it entered the public domain in 2021. In June 2021, Clover Press debuted the first of seven periodical comic books, faithfully adapting THE GREAT GATSBY.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: The novel has been adapted into series of radio episodes. The first radio episode was a 1950 half-hour-long adaptation for CBS' "Family Hour of Stars" starring Kirk Douglas as Gatsby. The novel was read aloud by the BBC World Service in ten parts in 2008. In a 2012 BBC Radio 4 broadcast, "The Great Gatsby" took the form of a Classic Serial dramatization. It was created by dramatist Robert Forrest.


title: The Great Gatsby

text: In 2010, Oberon Media released a casual hidden object game called "Classic Adventures: The Great Gatsby". In 2011, developer Charlie Hoey and editor Pete Smith created an 8-bit-style online game of "The Great Gatsby" called "The Great Gatsby for NES"; in 2022, after the Adobe Flash end of life they adapted this game to an actual NES ROM file, which can also be played on their website. In 2013, "Slate" released a short symbolic adaptation called "The Great Gatsby: The Video Game".


title: Billions (TV series)

text: Billions is an American drama television series created by Brian Koppelman, David Levien, and Andrew Ross Sorkin. The series premiered on Showtime on January 17, 2016, and has produced six complete seasons to date. The series is often set in large financial centers, most notably New York and Connecticut. The series tells the story of hedge fund manager Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis), as he accumulates wealth and power in the world of high finance. Axelrod's aggressive tactics to secure high returns frequently cross over into the illegal—acts that United States Attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) attempts to prosecute. A large ensemble secondary cast supports the series' story arcs.


title: Billions (TV series)

text: Some plotlines mirror real-life prosecutions of financial crime by federal authorities. The series was inspired by the investigations undertaken by Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan from 2009 to 2017, on whom Rhoades is based. Bharara's 2013 prosecution of hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen of S.A.C. Capital Advisors loosely influenced the first season, while Salomon Brothers' 1991 manipulation of U.S. Treasury bonds inspired the second. The series also interweaves subplots with Wendy Rhoades (Maggie Siff), a psychiatrist turned performance coach, Taylor Mason (Asia Kate Dillon), a market analyst, and Mike "Wags" Wagner (David Costabile), Axelrod's right-hand man.


title: Billions (TV series)

text: The series has received generally positive reviews. "Billions" is considered the first American TV series to have a non-binary character (Taylor Mason). As such, it was nominated for Outstanding Drama Series in the 29th, 30th, 31st GLAAD Media Awards for its representation of the LGBTQ community. The series has been nominated for multiple Satellite Awards, a Critics' Choice Television Award and an Artios Award for Outstanding Achievement in Comedy Pilot Casting, the latter for its pilot episode. The show's coverage of the hedge fund industry has been recognized as realistic. The fifth season premiered on May 3, 2020; however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, only 7 of the 12 episodes in that season aired that year. The fifth season resumed airing on September 5, 2021. In October 2020, the series was renewed for a sixth season which premiered on January 23, 2022. From the sixth season onwards, Damian Lewis as the iconic character Bobby "Axe" Axelrod was replaced with Corey Stoll as Mike Prince. In February 2022, the series was renewed for a seventh season.


title: Billions (TV series)

text: U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Chuck Roades (Giamatti) goes after hedge fund king and popular philanthropist Bobby "Axe" Axelrod (Lewis). A collision course, with each using all of their considerable smarts and influence to outmaneuver the other, looms.


title: Billions (TV series)

text: The series was ordered by Showtime in March 2015, and the first season premiered on January 17, 2016. On January 26, 2016, the series was renewed for the second season, which premiered on February 19, 2017. Showtime confirmed in April 2017 that Asia Kate Dillon, who is non-binary, would be a series regular in the third season. "Billions" is considered to be the first American TV series to have a non-binary character.


title: Billions (TV series)

text: Preet Bharara, the inspiration for U.S. Attorney Chuck Rhodes who was portrayed by Paul Giamatti, was somewhat critical of Giamatti's casting - jokingly referring to the Italian American actor as "noted Indian American actor Paul Giamatti".


title: Billions (TV series)

text: On May 8, 2019, the series was renewed for a fifth season by Showtime, which premiered on May 3, 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, only 7 episodes from Season 5 have aired as of February 2021. On October 1, 2020, Showtime renewed the series for a sixth season and Corey Stoll was promoted to series regular, with remaining episodes of Season 5 set to air in 2021. On February 15, 2022, Showtime renewed the series for a seventh season.


title: Billions (TV series)

text: The first episode was made available on January 1, 2016, via video on demand services in the U.S. and via CraveTV in Canada. It premiered on Stan in Australia on January 27, 2016 and in Canada on The Movie Network on January 17, 2016, simultaneous with the American broadcast.


title: Billions (TV series)

text: The show captured the attention of the BDSM community, as it features numerous depictions of BDSM activitiy, and the two main characters of Charles "Chuck" Rhoades, Jr and his wife Wendy Rhoades engage in BDSM scenes numerous times in the early seasons of the show. In addition, season 4 of the show depicts the character of Chuck Rhoades coming out as a practitioner of BDSM in a public political speech. The show's producers retained the services of noted BDSM lifestyle expert Olivia Troy as a consultant to help ensure the activities are portrayed both accurately and safely.


title: Billions (TV series)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the series holds an overall approval rating of 88%, with a rating of 77% for season 1, 89% for season 2, 93% for season 3, 97% for season 4, and 86% for season 5. The site's critical consensus for the first season reads: "Despite a lack of likable characters, "Billions" soapy melodrama and larger-than-life canvas offer plenty of repeat viewing potential." For season 2 it reads: "An influx of new characters and a fresh narrative twist give "Billions" an added boost during its thoroughly entertaining second season." The site's critical consensus for the third season states: "Anchored by the performances of Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis, the third season of "Billions" continues a convincing fable of greed, power and competition." On Rotten Tomatoes, the fourth season reads, "With tables turned and alliances formed, "Billions" fourth season goes full throttle with sharp dialogue, better rivalries, and bigger stakes." On Metacritic, the show has an overall score of 72. The first season has a weighted average score of 69 out of 100, based on reviews from 37 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews", while the second season has a score of 67 out of 100, based on reviews from 6 critics, also indicating "generally favorable reviews". Praise for the series has steadily grown over time—also on Metacritic, its third season scored a 77 out of 100, while its fourth holds a score of 87 out 100 based on reviews from 4 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". The show's coverage of the hedge fund industry has been widely recognized as realistic.


title: Billions (TV series)

text: In 2017, after introducing Taylor Mason (played by Asia Kate Dillon) in season 2, "Billions" became the first American TV series to have a non-binary character and actor. The series has received positive comments because of its representation of non-binary gender, with praise for its depiction of inclusion of gender-neutral singular "they" pronouns in the workplace.


title: Billions (TV series)

text: The first, brought by Denise Shull and the ReThink group in 2019 (Shull v Sorkin), alleged (among other things) that "Billions" ripped off Shull's book and based character "Wendy Rhoades" on her likeness. She also argues that "Billions" engaged her as a consultant on the show, but did not compensate or credit her for her time, as Shull claims is illustrated in a recently released video. The case was dismissed, but has since been appealed.