The Great Gatsby
Time Period- Prohibition
Prohibition In January 1920 congress enacted the 18th Amendment in order to control the abuse of alcohol and limit political benefits that emerged from the liquor business. It was no longer legal to sell, manufacture or transport alcohol. However, owning it and drinking was legal. It was a time period of alcoholism, corruption and crime and this amendment was thought to help.
Prohibition and Crime In 1925 Al “Scarface” Capone was the most powerful mob boss in the nation. Prohibition enabled him to expand his Chicago crime syndicate to “bootlegging” (the illegal trafficking of alcohol). This amplified crime in cities such as Chicago where mob bosses like Capone freely murdered those who got in their way.
Spirit of Prohibition The most widely used school books advocated temperance. This included poems that decried liquor stores as sources of robbery, murder, and harming one’s neighbors. The Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction guided every state to require “anti- alcohol education.”
The End of Prohibition In 1933 the 21st Amendment repealed the Prohibition Act. Americans questioned whether Prohibition restricted individual liberty by enforcing specific moral values. The dire conditions of the Great Depression argued in favor of legalizing alcohol to collect revenues from liquor sales.
Time Period- Harlem Renaissance While the characters of The Great Gatsby have migrated to New York from the Midwest, thousands of African Americans were simultaneously migrating North. Between 1910-1920 New York’s black population increased by 66%, Chicago’s by 148%, Philadelphia by 500% and Detroit by 611%
Harlem and Art Harlem, a neighborhood in New York City, became the center for African-American artists. While society was still segregated, artistic collaborations between blacks and whites provided a foundation for improving interracial relations.
Harlem and the Jazz Age Jazz musicians from New Orleans to New York to California overcame racial differences to embrace potent musical collaborations. Literary works, plays, paintings, and political commentary provided all Americans with new, positive, and realistically complex images of the African American. The Harlem Renaissance forced artists to come to terms with new definitions of race made possible in and through a variety of art forms.
Author Background Considered today as one of the major prose stylists of the twentieth century, Francis Scott Key (F. Scott) Fitzgerald celebrates the boom of the 1920s and the crash of the 1930s. His themes combine the hollowness of the American worship of riches and the never-ending dream of love, splendor, and glory.
F. Scott and Zelda
His beginning… Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born September 24, 1896, in St. Paul Minnesota Scott’s mother Mary came from a background where money meant position, stability and security. He married Zelda on April 3, 1920 In May of 1922 they vacationed in Europe and he began his next book, The Great Gatsby. While working on his novel, his marriage to Zelda was in an awful state. Zelda had an affair with a Frenchman who only wanted a fling, while Zelda wanted more.
His end… After the affair ended, Scott won Zelda’s passion back and his book The Great Gatsby was published April, 1925. After The Great Gatsby, in 1930, Zelda was admitted to an insane asylum for schizophrenia. She was released in 1932 but readmitted herself back into the asylum. He died of a heart attack December 21, 1940. Zelda died eight years later in a fire at the Highland Hospital in Asheville.
1st person narrative The Great Gatsby is told in the first person by Nick Carraway. The novel begins from the point of view of an older Nick, reminiscing on the events of one summer. Nick’s perspective, entangled in the dramatic action, subjectively depicts a series of events.
Literary Devices employed in The Great Gatsby 1. protagonist 2. antagonist 3. characterization 4. climax 5. conflict 6. tone 7. diction 8. figurative language 9. foreshadowing 10. mood 11. theme 12. symbolism