The Great Gatsby and the 1920’sThe dominant influences on F. Scott Fitzgerald were aspiration, literature, Princeton, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and

alcohol."Matthew J. Bruccoli, A Brief Life of

Fitzgerald

The Jazz Age or Roaring 20’s

• Published in 1925

• Set in NYC and Long Island

• During the Prohibition Era

• The novel’s star is Jay Gatsby, a young, rich man in love with a society girl from his past. A girl who is married to someone else.

Prohibition Era

• Regulation accepts that citizens will use a given drug, but imposes extra taxes and certain restrictions – such as age limits, health warnings, or special permits for sellers – on its use. The idea is to reduce use of the drug by increasing its cost and restricting its availability, without criminalizing its use.

Prohibition Era

• Prohibition, in contrast, simply makes it illegal to sell or use a particular drug. The threat of criminal punishment is intended to deter citizens from using the drug at all.

Prohibition

• Attempts to impose drug prohibition also date back to the colonial period.

• In 1632, the Massachusetts General Court issued a ban on smoking in public places.

• Even in that tightly controlled Puritan society, the ban proved largely ineffectual.

Prohibition

• England’s King Charles II believed coffeehouses had become “the great resort of idle and disaffected persons” and had them closed down throughout the British Empire.

• It took less than a week of protests from London’s popular café scene to force Charles to change his mind.

The 1920’s Economy

• Bubble stocks brought easy prosperity.

• The American Dream has always been tied to money – often as much as possible.

• More American lived in urban areas. This is where the money was.

• Rural farmers suffered terribly – poverty, crushing indebtedness, massive foreclosures.

The 1920’s Economy

• People made have lots of money, but the barriers to the upper echelon have been education and background.

• The nouveau riche were not accepted by the established elite.

Fitzgerald’s Life Parallels the Novel

• Narrator Nick Carraway is both mesmerized and disgusted by Gatsby’s extravagant lifestyle, just as Fitzgerald claimed to be about the “Jazz Age” excesses that he himself adopted.

• Fitzgerald was an Ivy League educated, middle-class Midwesterner, Fitzgerald (like Nick) saw through the shallow materialism of the era.

Fitzgerald’s Life Parallels the Novel

• Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald came back from WWI and fell in love with a wealthy southern socialite – Zelda Sayre.

• Fitzgerald’s work and life flowered in the hedonistic excesses of the 1920’s.

• Fitzgerald’s life and the lives of his characters echoed the national mood – boldly romantic before 1920, excessive and exuberant in the 1920’s, sober and reflective in the 1930’s.

At the End…

• When the Great Crash of 1929 rolled around, Fitzgerald and his wife collapsed into their own financial and mental depression.

• A lifelong alcoholic who could only write when he was NOT drinking struggled to success in a decidedly sober decade.

• He died of a heart attack at the age of 44 believing himself an utter failure; time has judged otherwise.