The Great Gatsby The American Dream

The Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald Born to a once wealthy family with little money left. Father drifted from job to job until finally living on the charity of his mother’s family. Grandfather funded his schooling at Princeton University. He loved to write and was always creating something. While in the army in 1918, he met Zelda Sayre, a lively, intelligent, and ready to do anything at the drop of a hat type of girl.

Zelda wouldn’t marry him until he could support her in the lavish lifestyle she wished for. He moved to New York and published, This Side of Paradise. It was an instant success. It sold 20,000 copies in the first week. Scott and Zelda became married and were the “couple” of New York.

They rotated between living in France and living in New York. The Great Gatsby was written in France while Scott was trying to find a stable environment in which to write.

Family portraits with daughter Scottie

He and Zelda became encircled with the great writers of the time, but their drinking and party life became out of control and they were unable to fulfill their duties at work and at home with Scottie.

Zelda becomes increasingly worse—mentally--and is examined by a psychiatrist and diagnosed as schizophrenic.

Scott continued to write, but was spending money faster than he was making it. Fitzgerald spent the last years of his life in in Hollywood writing for film studios. He aged terribly from drinking and stress and ultimately turned to drugs as well.

He was living on the shreds of his income, but his contract with MGM was not renewed. He began his last novel, The Last Tycoon but died from a heart attack in 1940 before finishing it.

Zelda died seven years later in a fire in an institution, trapped in a room with 6 other patients.

The American Dream An attitude of hope and faith that looks forward to the fulfillment of human wishes and desires. Declaration of Independence, 1776, states: 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.

The Roaring 20’s During the 1920’s everything was done bigger, faster, and better than ever before. People were making money quickly with new businesses and playing the stock market. But they were also spending money. It was a time of extremes and excess. Remember, what goes up, must also come down….

Cars of the 1920’s

Inventions that made the American Dream a reality.

Fashion of the 1920’s

Money, power, fame, family, success, and material possessions were the icons of “The Dream.” America represented a new life of freedom, holding a promise of material happiness.

This belief in the future has become a national characteristic that may partly explain the speed of American advancement. In Fitzgerald’s novel, he presents the corruption of the American dream. Instead of idealizing the self-made man, he presents the pursuit of power and pleasure, and a very showy, empty form of success born of a rivalry between the classes. Success becomes its own prison.