Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald's

The Great GatsbyLT 357 Modern Novels

(Fitzgerald’s letter to his editor)

The Great Gatsby (1925)

• The Great American Novel

• "American Dream"

• The Jazz Age, The Roaring Twenties

• Flappers

• Prohibition era (1920-1933)

• Automobiles

American Dream

• Declaration of Independence (1776)

• "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

• America was founded upon the concept of freedom and equality of its people. In contrast to Europe, America is notable for its lack of aristocracy and equal opportunity for people from all origins.

American Dream

• America is a land of abundant natural resource. If you are willing to work hard, the land will yield you gains and profits. Material wealth is a natural reward for a hard-working man.

• "Self-made man"

American Dream, a hypocrisy?

Inequality among different races, classes,

and sexes.

The Jazz Age

• Jazz music as an identity of American youth

• Roaring, more upbeat

• Association of jazz with a rebel against traditions

• Few greatest party scenes in literature

Women suffrage

• American women won the rights to vote in 1920

• "New women"

• Equal opportunity between sexes

• Sexual freedom

• More outgoing

• Shorter hair, more revealing dress, attend parties, like to dance, drink alcohol

Flappers

Prohibition era (1920-1933)

• Temperance movement

• Teetotaler

• Alcohol beverage was banned across the nation

• Illegal bootlegging

• Alcoholic drinks were widely available even though the prohibition was still in effect. A hypocrisy?

Automobiles

• Ford Motor invented consumer-grade car and made it widely available in 1914

• Symbol of freedom, a carefree self-realization, the American dream

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. …[I]t was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

(The Great Gatsby, chapter I)

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York — every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.

(The Great Gatsby, chapter III)

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

(The Great Gatsby, chapter II)

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers.

(T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’)

(Fitzgerald’s letter to his friend when asked about the lack of any depth in the central romance of the novel)