The Great Gatsby.

The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published in 1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City from spring to autumn of 1922.
The novel takes place following the First World War. American society enjoyed prosperity during the "roaring" 1920s as the economy soared. At the same time, Prohibition, the ban on the sale and manufacture of alcohol as mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment, made millionaires out of bootleggers. After its republishing in 1945 and 1953, it quickly found a wide readership and is today widely regarded as a paragon of the Great American Novel, and a literary classic. The Modern Library named it the second best novel of the 20th Century.
 

F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel,The Great Gatsby, follows Jay Gatsby, a man who orders his life around one desire: to be reunited with Daisy Buchannan, the love he lost five years earlier. Gatsby's quest leads him from poverty to wealth, into the arms of his beloved, and eventually to death. It is a novel of triumph and tragedy, noted for the remarkable way Fitzgerald captured a cross-section of American society.

In the novel we can see a full picture of the society of that century,their values and wishes, the atmosphere of the "Jazz Age", which reigned in that time,the time after the First World War and we can see "The American dream" itself with our own eyes.

The Jazz Age.

The Jazz Age was a movement that took place during the 1920s or the Roaring Twenties from which jazz music and dance emerged. The movement came about with the introduction of mainstream radio and the end of the war. This era ended in the 1930s with the beginning of The Great Depression but has lived on in American pop culture for decades. With the introduction of jazz came an entirely new cultural movement in places like the United States, France and England. The birth of jazz music is often accredited to African Americans but expanded and modified to become socially acceptable to middle-class white Americans. White performers were used as a vehicle for the popularization of jazz music in America. Even though the jazz movement was taken over by the middle class white population, it facilitated the mesh of African American traditions and ideals with the white middle class society. Cities like New York and Chicago were cultural centers for jazz, and especially for African American artists. In urban areas, African American jazz was played on the radio more often than in the suburbs. 1920s youth used the influence of jazz to rebel against the traditional culture of previous generations. This youth rebellion of the 1920s went hand-in-hand with fads like bold fashion statements (flappers) and new radio concerts. As jazz flourished, American elites who preferred classical music sought to expand the listenership of their favored genre, hoping that jazz wouldn't become mainstream.
As the 1920s wore on, jazz, despite competition from classical music, rose in popularity and helped to generate a cultural shift. Dances like the Charleston, developed by African Americans, suddenly became popular among younger demographics. With the beginning of large-scale radio broadcasts in 1922, Americans were able to experience different styles of music without physically visiting a jazz club. The radio provided Americans with a trendy new avenue for exploring the world through broadcasts and concerts from the comfort of their living room. The most popular type of radio show was a "potter palm": amateur concerts and big-band jazz performances broadcasted from cities like New York and Chicago. Jazz artists like Louis Armstrong originally received very little airtime because most stations preferred to play the music of white American jazz singers. Big-band jazz, like that of James Reese Europe and Fletcher Henderson in New York, was also popular on the radio. This style represented African Americans in the cultural scene predominately controlled by white Americans.

The American Dream

The book 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald was an icon of 

its time.The book discusses topics that were important, controversial 

and interesting back in 1920's America. The novel is 'an exploration

of the American Dream as it exists in a corrupt period of history. 

The main themes in the book are the decay of morals and values and the
frustration of a 'modern' society. The Great Gatsby describes the decay
of the American Dream and the want for money and materialism. This
novel also describes the gap between the rich and the poor (Gatsby and
the Wilsons, West Egg and the Valley of the Ashes) by comparing the
differences between the Western United States (traditional western
culture) and the Eastern United States (money obsessed values). On a
smaller scale this could be seen as the difference between the West Egg
(the 'new, money) and the East egg (the 'old' money). The 1920's were
a time of corruption and the degradation of moral values for the United
States and many other countries.

Fitzgerald depicts the 1920’s as a time of decay social and moral values, evidence of this is the greed and the pursuit of pleasure. Jay Gatsby’s constant parties epitomized the corruption of the American Dream as the desire for money and worldly pleasures overshadowed the true values of the American Dream. After WWI ended in 1918, veterans found that life was not as rosy as it had been before. The war led to an economic boom as more and more people were buying materialistic items that they would have never bought. With this economic boom it became apparent that any person of any social status could become wealthy. This created the social rift between the families that had just found new money and the old wealthy industrialists. 1919, the women’s suffrage movement, running strong, were quick to establish prohibition in the United states with their influence. This consequently led to an increase in crime and illegal smuggling of alcohol; Al Capone is the prime example of what came out of that era of prohibition.

Fitzgerald intricately places characters in these social trends. Meyer Wolfshiem, a man that is the epitome of the underground mafia. WWI vets Nick and Gatsby’s new found cynicism. Also, Jay Gatsby’s need to climb the “social ladder” shows the need of wealth of the individuals in this era. If one reads the passage in which Fitzgerald characterizes Gatsby’s house as an “amusement park”, it is also said that there are guests that attend without even meeting the host. This shows the need for “new money” people to socialize with others to climb this “social ladder”. Also the rift between “old money” and “new money” is quite evident with the geographical placement of the individual characters; East Egg, “old money” individuals, who have been wealthy for generations past, and West Egg, “new money” representing self-made individuals.

The original idea of the American Dream as described in chapter 9 is about moral values and the pursuit of happiness. It’s written in the American Constitution that every individual has the right to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”. This right it seems has taken a twisted turn in the early 1920’s. The pursuit of happiness soon turned into the pursuit of wealth and ultimately to greed. This led to social rifts among the different classes and eventually corrupted the true American Dream. Throughout The Great Gatsby it is shown how social rift came between the love of two individuals, Daisy and Gatsby. This led to the eventual corruption of Gatsby himself, the pursuit of wealth, greed, and illegal deeds. T.J Eckleburg, the greatest symbol in the novel, represents more then just an advertisement, but like the onion, inside he represents everything that is corrupt in the new American Dream. After renouncing his parents, James Gatsby was said to be the “son of God”, the only thing Gatsby believes in is money. Wilson in chapter 8, mistakes the advertisement as an advertisement for God, this in turn means that the advertisement portrays money.

On the last page of the novel Nick compares the “green breast of the new world” to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. The “green breast of the world” represents the dreams of the immigrants that came to the new world seeking religious freedom, opportunity, love, and democracy, along the way instilling universal family values. As they settled with these goals in mind, they strived and created what is America today. Fitzgerald describes the corruption as being the modernization of the beauties of what the settlers had seen before. Remember that accident which involved Daisy and Myrtle, Myrtle’s left breast had been torn off, this was regarded as Myrtle’s “greatest achievement”. This achievement was the realization of American society which has torn off the green breast of the new world and replaced it with a corrupted rendition of what the settlers brought along with them. Along with this, Fitzgerald adds in the Valley of Ashes, which is the opposite of the green breast; a valley in general is different in that the green breast of the new world represents a hill, opposite to this is a valley which is a concave piece of land. The green breast represents the true American Dream and the Valley of Ashes represents corruption, like that of Myrtle and her adultery or Wilson and his killing of Gatsby.

Fitzgerald uses an abundant amount symbols to fully satisfy the most rewarding symbol, the corruption of the American Dream. Settlers first came to America with one ambition, a better life. What came of this better life? The American Dream, a life in pursuit of opportunity, freedom, love, equality, family and wealth. These dreams soon diminished as materialistic values seemed to be above all else. These materialistic values consequently led the decay of the American Dream. The new American Dream described by Fitzgerald portrays a world where greed, the pursuit of money and pleasure are above all else. Fitzgerald portrays a world that has lost its way in the corruption of the American Dream.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender is the Night and his most famous, The Great Gatsby. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age.
Novels such as The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night were made into films, and in 1958 his life from 1937–1940 was dramatized in Beloved Infidel.

Born in 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota to an upper middle class Irish Catholic family, Fitzgerald was named after his famous second cousin, three times removed, Francis Scott Key, but was referred to as "Scott." He was also named after his deceased sister, Louise Scott, one of two sisters who died shortly before his birth. His parents were Mollie (MacQuillan) and Edward Fitzgerald.
Scott spent the first decade of his childhood primarily in Buffalo, New York (1898–1901 and 1903–1908, with a short interlude in Syracuse, New York between January 1901 and September 1903). His parents, both practicing Catholics, sent Scott to two Catholic schools on the West Side of Buffalo, first Holy Angels Convent (1903–1904, now disused) and then Nardin Academy (1905–1908). His formative years in Buffalo revealed him to be a boy of unusual intelligence and drive with a keen early interest in literature, his doting mother ensuring that her son had all the advantages of an upper-middle-class upbringing. In a rather unconventional style of parenting, Scott attended Holy Angels with the peculiar arrangement that he go for only half a day—and was allowed to choose which half.

When Scott was ten years old, his father was fired from Procter & Gamble, and the family returned to Minnesota, where Fitzgerald attended St. Paul Academy in St. Paul from 1908–1911. His first literary effort, a detective story, was published in a school newspaper when he was 13. When he was 16, he was expelled from St. Paul Academy for neglecting his studies. He attended Newman School, a prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey, in 1911–1912, and entered Princeton University in 1913 as a member of the Class of 1917. There he became friends with future critics and writers Edmund Wilson (Class of 1916) and John Peale Bishop (Class of 1917), and wrote for the Princeton Triangle Club and the Princeton Tiger. His absorption in the Triangle—a kind of musical-comedy society—led to his submission of a novel to Charles Scribner's Sons where the editor praised the writing but ultimately rejected the book. He was a member of the University Cottage Club, which still displays Fitzgerald's desk and writing materials in its library. A poor student, Fitzgerald left Princeton to enlist in the US Army during World War I; however, the war ended shortly after Fitzgerald's enlistment.