The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The 1920’s

What do you know about the 1920’s (politically, socially, historically, etc.?) Brainstorm a list of as many facts/ideas/events as you can.

1920’s

Chaos and violence of WWI (ended 1918) left America in a state of shock, and the generation that fought the ward turned to wild and extravagant living in response. “The Lost Generation.”

American economy soared, bringing unprecedented prosperity to the nation >>> materialism

18th Amendment: Prohibition, the ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol (January, 1920), made millionaires out of bootleggers and fostered an underground culture of revelry. Speakeasies– secret clubs that sold liquor– thrived. (In 1933, the 21st amendment appealed the 18th)

The staid conservatism and values of the previous decade were turned on their ear as money, opulence, and exuberance became the order of the day.

The Jazz Age

The era is also known as the Jazz Age, when the music called jazz, promoted by such recent inventions as the phonograph and the radio, swept up from New Orleans to capture the national imagination.

Improvised and wild, jazz broke the rules of music, just as the Jazz Age thumbed its nose at the rules of the past.

The New Woman

19th Amendment on August 26, 1920: the rights of citizens to vote "shall not be denied or abridged by the U.S. or by any State on account of sex.”

Among the rules broken were the age-old conventions guiding the behavior of women. The new woman demanded the right to vote and to work outside the home.

Symbolically, she cut her hair into a boyish “bob” and bared her calves in the short skirts of the fashionable twenties “flapper.”

Statistics

Prior to World War I, 42% of all Americans lived on a farm. By the end of the twenties this percentage had dropped to 25%.

Prior to World War I only 7% of all Americans completed High School. By the end of the '20s this percentage had jumped almost six-fold to 41%.

Fitzgerald

Most famous chronicler of the 1920s America, an era that he dubbed “the Jazz Age.”

Found this new lifestyle seductive and exciting (like Nick).

Idolized the rich (like Nick).

Was driven by his love for a woman who symbolized everything he wanted, even as she led him toward everything he despised: Zelda (like Gatsby).

Saw through the glitter of the Jazz Age to the moral emptiness and hypocrisy beneath, and part of him longed for a moral center (like Nick).

The Great Gatsby represents Fitzgerald’s attempt to confront his conflicting feelings about the Jazz Age. It is a Modernist novel.

Fitzgerald’s novels

This Side of Paradise

The Beautiful and the Damned

The Great Gatsby

Tender is the Night

The Love of the Last Tycoon

Short story: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"

Entering the 1920’s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnJ4Oavs538

Jazz Age Slang

Hotel de Ville in Normandy

Nick reports that Gatsby's mansion is a replica of "some Hotel de Ville in Normandy." Here are pictures of two. The first is in Caen.  The second is in Rouen.