The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Roaring 20s World War I ended in 1918. Disillusioned because of the war, the generation that fought and survived has come to be called “the lost generation.” While the sense of loss was readily apparent among expatriate American artists who remained in Europe after the war, back home the disillusionment took a less obvious form. America seemed to throw itself headlong into a decade of madcap behavior and materialism, a decade that has come to be called the Roaring Twenties.

Jazz 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 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.”

Prohibition Another rule often broken was the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, or Prohibition, which banned the public sale of alcoholic beverages from 1919 until its appeal in 1933. Speak-easies, nightclubs, and taverns that sold liquor were often raided, and gangsters made illegal fortunes as bootleggers, smuggling alcohol into America from abroad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PAIOy41SjQ

Gambling Another gangland activity was illegal gambling. Perhaps the worst scandal involving gambling was the so- called Black Sox Scandal of 1919, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were indicted for accepting bribes to throw baseball’s World Series.

Automobile The Jazz Age was also an era of reckless spending and consumption, and the most conspicuous status symbol of the time was a flashy new automobile. Advertising was becoming the major industry that it is today, and soon advertisers took advantage of new roadways by setting up huge billboards at their sides. Both the automobile and a bizarre billboard play important roles in The Great Gatsby.

F. Scott Fitzgerald http://www.biography.com/people/f-scott-fitzgerald-9296261

Characters in The Great Gatsby Nick Carraway: He narrates in both first and third person, presenting only what he himself observes. Nick is a young man from Minnesota who, after being educated at Yale and fighting in World War I, goes to New York City to learn the bond business. Jay Gatsby: The title character and protagonist of the novel, Gatsby is a fabulously wealthy young man living in a Gothic mansion in West Egg. He is famous for the lavish parties he throws every Saturday night, but no one knows where he comes from, what he does, or how he made his fortune.  Daisy Buchanan: Nick’s cousin, and the woman Gatsby loves. She fell in love with Gatsby before he went to war and promised to wait for him. However, when a wealthy, powerful young man named Tom Buchanan asked her to marry him, Daisy decided not to wait for Gatsby after all. Now a beautiful socialite, Daisy lives with Tom across from Gatsby in the fashionable East Egg district of Long Island.

Characters in The Great Gatsby Tom Buchanan: Daisy’s immensely wealthy husband, once a member of Nick’s social club at Yale. Powerfully built and hailing from a socially solid old family. Myrtle Wilson: Tom’s lover, whose lifeless husband George owns a run- down garage in the valley of ashes. Myrtle herself possesses a fierce vitality and desperately looks for a way to improve her situation. Unfortunately for her, she chooses Tom, who treats her like a piece of meat. George Wilson: Myrtle’s husband, the lifeless, exhausted owner of a run- down auto shop at the edge of the valley of ashes. George loves and idealizes Myrtle, and is devastated by her affair with Tom. 

Characters in The Great Gatsby Jordan Baker: Daisy’s friend, a woman with whom Nick becomes romantically involved during the course of the novel. A competitive golfer, Jordan represents one of the “new women” of the 1920s—cynical, boyish, and self-centered. Jordan is beautiful, but also dishonest: she cheated in order to win her first golf tournament and continually bends the truth. Meyer Wolfsheim: Gatsby’s friend, a prominent figure in organized crime. Before the events of the novel take place, Wolfsheim helped Gatsby to make his fortune bootlegging illegal liquor.  Doctor T. J. Eckleberg: pair of fading, bespectacled eyes painted on an old advertising billboard over the valley of ashes. 

Settings in The Great Gatsby Summer 1922 Long Island and New York City West Egg: New Money; West Egg is where the new money lives, and is not considered as classy. East Egg: Old Money; East Egg is where the "real" aristocrats live: those with older money and established credentials.  The Valley of Ashes

Themes, Symbols and Motifs The Decline of the American Dream in the 1920s The Hollowness of the Upper Class Motifs Weather Geography Symbols The Green Light The Valley of Ashes The Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg