Great Gatsby
Context
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, and named
after his ancestor Francis Scott Key, the author of The Star-Spangled Banner.
Fitzgerald was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. Though an intelligent child, he did
poorly in school and was sent to a New Jersey boarding school in 1911.
Despite being a mediocre student there, he managed to enroll at Princeton in
1913. Academic troubles and apathy plagued him throughout his time at
college, and he never graduated, instead enlisting in the army in 1917, as
World War I neared its end.
Fitzgerald became a second lieutenant, and was stationed at Camp Sheridan,
in Montgomery, Alabama. There he met and fell in love with a wild seventeenyear-old beauty named Zelda Sayre. Zelda finally agreed to marry him, but
her overpowering desire for wealth, fun, and leisure led her to delay their
wedding until he could prove a success. With the publication of This Side of
Paradise in 1920, Fitzgerald became a literary sensation, earning enough
money and fame to convince Zelda to marry him.
Many of these events from Fitzgeralds early life appear in his most famous
novel,The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. Like Fitzgerald, Nick Carraway is a
thoughtful young man from Minnesota, educated at an Ivy League school (in
Nicks case, Yale), who moves to New York after the war. Also similar to
Fitzgerald is Jay Gatsby, a sensitive young man who idolizes wealth and luxury
and who falls in love with a beautiful young woman while stationed at a
military camp in the South.
Having become a celebrity, Fitzgerald fell into a wild, reckless life-style of
parties and decadence, while desperately trying to please Zelda by writing to
earn money. Similarly, Gatsby amasses a great deal of wealth at a relatively
young age, and devotes himself to acquiring possessions and throwing parties
that he believes will enable him to win Daisys love. As the giddiness of the
Roaring Twenties dissolved into the bleakness of the Great Depression,
however, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and Fitzgerald battled
alcoholism, which hampered his writing. He published Tender Is the Night in
1934, and sold short stories to The Saturday Evening Post to support his
lavish lifestyle. In 1937, he left for Hollywood to write screenplays, and in
1940, while working on his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon,died of a heart
attack at the age of forty-four.
Fitzgerald was the most famous chronicler of 1920s America, an era that he
dubbed the Jazz Age. Written in 1925, The Great Gatsby is one of the
greatest literary documents of this period, in which the American economy
soared, bringing unprecedented levels of prosperity to the nation. Prohibition,
the ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol mandated by the Eighteenth
Amendment to the Constitution (1919), made millionaires out of bootleggers,
and an underground culture of revelry sprang up. Sprawling private parties
managed to elude police notice, and speakeasiessecret clubs that sold
liquorthrived. The chaos and violence of World War I left America in a state
of shock, and the generation that fought the war turned to wild and
extravagant living to compensate. The staid conservatism and timeworn
values of the previous decade were turned on their ear, as money, opulence,
and exuberance became the order of the day.
Like Nick in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald found this new lifestyle seductive
and exciting, and, like Gatsby, he had always idolized the very rich. Now he
found himself in an era in which unrestrained materialism set the tone of
society, particularly in the large cities of the East. Even so, like Nick, Fitzgerald
saw through the glitter of the Jazz Age to the moral emptiness and hypocrisy
beneath, and part of him longed for this absent moral center. In many
ways, The Great Gatsbyrepresents Fitzgeralds attempt to confront his
conflicting feelings about the Jazz Age. Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald was driven by
his love for a woman who symbolized everything he wanted, even as she led
him toward everything he despised.
