the great gatsby

The Great Gatsby
Author
F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up in Minnesota, attended a few private schools (where his
performance was mediocre), and went to Princeton University. In 1917, Princeton put Fitzgerald
on academic probation. He enlisted in the Army. On base in Alabama in 1918, he met and fell in
love with Zelda Sayre, who refused to marry him unless he could support her. He returned to New
York to pursue fame and fortune. The publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920,
made Fitzgerald a literary star. He married Zelda one week later. In 1924, the couple moved to
Paris, where Fitzgerald began work on The Great Gatsby. Though now considered his masterpiece,
the novel sold only modestly. The Fitzgeralds returned to the United States in 1927. Fitzgerald
published several more novels, including Tender is the Night (1933), but none matched the success
of his first. Deep in debt because of their ritzy lifestyle, the Fitzgeralds began to spiral into
alcoholism and mental illness. Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940. Zelda died
eight years later in a fire.
Historical Context:
{Fitzgerald coined the term "Jazz Age" to refer to the period more commonly known as the
Roaring Twenties. Jazz is an American style of music marked by its complex and exuberant mix of
rhythms and tonalities. The Great Gatsby portrays a similarly complex mix of emotions and themes
that reflect the turbulence of the times. Fresh off the nightmare of World War I, Americans were
enjoying the fruits of an economic boom and a renewed sense of possibility. But in The Great
Gatsby, Fitzgerald's stresses the darker side of the Roaring Twenties, its undercurrent of
corruption and its desperate, empty decadence.}
Set in what was called the Jazz Age (a term popularized by Fitzgerald), or the Roaring Twenties,
The Great Gatsby vividly captures its historical moment: the economic boom of postwar America,
the new jazz music, the free-flowing illegal liquor. As Fitzgerald later remarked in an essay about
the era, it was “a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure.” The brazenly lavish culture of
West Egg is a reflection of the new prosperity that was possible during Prohibition, when illegal
schemes involving the black-market selling of liquor abounded. Such criminal enterprises are the
source of Gatsby’s income and finance his incredible parties, which are probably based on parties
Fitzgerald himself attended when he lived on Long Island in the early 1920s. Even the racial
anxieties of the period are evident in the novel; Tom’s diatribe on The Rise of the Colored Empires
—a reference to a real book published in 1920 by the American political scientist Lothrop Stoddard
—points to the burgeoning eugenics movement in the United States during the early 20th century.
Setting:
The action of The Great Gatsby takes place along a corridor stretching from New York City to the
suburbs known as West and East Egg. West and East Egg serve as stand-ins for the real-life
locations of two peninsulas along the northern shore of Long Island. Midway between the Eggs
and Manhattan lies the “valley of ashes,” where Myrtle and George Wilson have a run-down
garage. This corridor between New York and the suburbs encompasses the full range of social
class. Whereas the valley of ashes is a place of evident poverty, both the city and the two suburbs
represent bastions of affluence. Nick describes the profound optimism he feels when arriving in
the city by train: “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first
time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” He goes on to assert,
“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge.” Yet for all that New York appears full
of possibility, Nick often finds his actual experience there sad, as when, in Chapter 3, he observes
“young clerks . . . wasting the most poignant moments of the night and life.”
While both East and West Egg are wealthy communities, families with inherited wealth, or “old
money,” live in the more fashionable East Egg. In West Egg, by contrast, residents whose wealth is
new, like Gatsby, conspicuously mimic European aristocracy to appear established. Gatsby’s house
is modeled on the Hotel de Ville (French for city hall) in Normandy, France, and was built by a
brewer who offered to pay the neighbors to live in thatched cottages, like peasants. While many of
the descriptions of the houses in the novel seem over the top, they are in fact based on real
mansions that existed on Long Island in the 1920s. For example, an estate named Harbor Hill was
also modeled on Hotels de Ville, and included farms, a blacksmith, a casino, and Turkish baths on
its 650 acres. Despite such opulent displays of wealth, the novel suggests that the city, the
suburbs, and the valley of ashes all share a sense of spiritual desolation and psychological
desperation. In the end, then, it seems to matter little where the characters find themselves along
the corridor between New York and the twin Eggs. Nobody in The Great Gatsby is happy about
their lot in life.

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